Fathoming Slavery

Slavery driven

Most historians and biologists have come to Darwin through his book, On the Origin of Species. They have been curious about his biological life before this ground-breaking book and how he developed his ideas. They have had rich pickings; Darwin was an affluent middle-class Englishman with powerful connections and he was an enthusiastic correspondent. Adrian Desmond and James Moore have publishe...

Fathoming fragile X in fruit flies.

Fragile X syndrome (FraX) is the most common inherited mental retardation disease. It is caused by mutation of the fragile X mental retardation 1 (fmr1) gene. The FMR1 protein (FMRP) is a widely expressed RNA-binding translational regulator with reportedly hundreds of potential targets. Recent work has focused on putative roles of FMRP in regulating the development and plasticity of neuronal sy...

Treponematosis and African Slavery.

The so-called unitarian (or unicist) concept of treponematosis emphasizes the evolutionary relationship of yaws, pinta, endemic syphilis, and sporadic syphilis, regarding them all as varieties or syndromes of one disease caused by one parasite, Treponema pallidum (Hudson, 1946). The unitarian view accepts the fact that there is no known test by which the parasites of these treponemal infections...

Fathoming solar effects in Neptune’s atmosphere

Long-duration observations of Neptune’s brightness in two visible wavelengths provide a disk-averaged estimate of its atmospheric aerosol. Brightness variations were previously associated with the 11-year solar cycle, through solar-modulated mechanisms linked with either ultra-violet (UV) or galactic cosmic ray (GCR) effects on atmospheric particles. Here we use a recently extended brightness d...

Slavery in Puerto Rico