Hen’s Teeth
I must confess I still haven’t booked my flights to Prague, but this is because I’d rather book our flights to Morocco first, as soon as possible, in fact.
This year, Eid falls on New Years Eve—and we are invited to the party!
However, I’ve got to get Dave to email me the dates! We need to travel between Christmas and New Year and there won’t be many cheap flights available. Even going via Gibraltar may be expensive, although it will offer dolphin-watching opportunities.
In other news, I’m currently working on a story concerning the fate of a mouse with a ‘humanised’ brain. A pioneer in the field has recently approached his ethics committee with the proposal to replace neurons in a strain of mice where they degenerate with human-derived neuronal stem cells. These mice would be ideal models for the study of neuronic diseases, including brain cancers which this guy is especially interested in, and also for learning and cognition.
The problem is, of course, that these mice may grow brains which are ‘too human’. The researchers will keep a close eye on their brain architecture and terminate the experiments if that should happen.
We might not get a mouse with a human brain, but we might still get a ‘clever’ mouse. I don’t know, I’m still reading up on this, but it’s possible. Enter ‘Pips’.
The recent developments in the field are fascinating. I was reminded of my travels in Portugal two years ago:
‘But while there are no cookers on the campsite, there are BBQs. For a long moment I seriously considered hauling back a sack of charcoal but at the last moment I desisted, realising what a mess that would make in my tent. I played it safe by picking up some pre-cooked meat from the chiller. But even though my receipt says ‘Frango’ it isn’t, because chickens have no teeth. It turns out to be suckling pig.’
…When I saw this little gem (‘Development of teeth in chick embryos after mouse neural crest transplantations’)
Tags: Neither here nor there, Tag Index
Denni