Departing from the usual blog posts, I have been racking my brain hard, trying to figure out what to buy this Christmas. A grand gesture was – and is – required, you see. Finally, after rather too much eggnog and an evening in front of the TV watching the Disney version of Christmas Carol, IContinue reading “The Days of Christmas (an adventure in 12 parts)”
Category Archives: Creative Writing
Something Odd I Learned About DNA
Researching the book, I learned something new about DNA modification. Even the simplest bacteria can do it. All this time, we thought it was hard. There is a soil bacteria called Agrobacterium Tumefaciens, which sounds like a Greek playwright, but which has in fact been performing genetic modification of food for millions of years. WhatContinue reading “Something Odd I Learned About DNA”
What’s Really Happening With Wind Power
Researching the new novel, I had to look at the current state of UK’s electricity generation, because one of the main characters is building windmills. ‘Energy’ is an industry I worked in back in the Eighties and Nineties. I am well out of date, but once I’d read some of the research and the statistics, itContinue reading “What’s Really Happening With Wind Power”
More on the DNA Mystery
Another thought struck me today. It relates back to my previous post and it’s this: If evolution depends on random chance (i.e. on random mutations of genes which are preserved when they provide a positive effect), then what you need is a lot of those random trials, and the way to have a lot of those randomContinue reading “More on the DNA Mystery”
A DNA Mystery (in the context of evolution)
So, for the novel, I’ve been doing lots of research on the history of genetics and I’ve come up with an odd problem about evolution. Most of our DNA is junk. It does nothing, codes for no proteins, just sits there like a big lazy telephone cord in every cell carried by every living thingContinue reading “A DNA Mystery (in the context of evolution)”
