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[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/09/Arachnophobia.mp3[/podcast]
“The itsy-bitsy spider went up the waterspout. Down came the rain, and washed the spider out...”
At which point a large percentage of us screamed and ran the other way, because surveys show that one fifth of men and a third of women are frightened of arachnids.
It makes sense, right? Spiders can be poisonous.
But so are stinging insects such as bees and wasps, and yet we seem to hate spiders more. At the University of Wurzburg, Germany,
psychologist Georg Alpers asked 76 students to rate photos of spiders, wasps, bees, beetles, butterflies and moths on how much fear and disgust they inspired and how dangerous they were. Spiders topped the list in all three categories—even though all bees can ...
Posted by Edward Willett at 14:17, September 3rd, 2009 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns |
Cloned, genetically altered goats producing spider silk in their milk sounds like something out of The X-Files, but it was in all the papers last week when a company called Nexia revealed it had cloned three goats (Clint, Danny and Arnold), and explained why.
The cloning of goats brings to four (sheep, mice, cows and goats) the number of species that have been cloned since Dolly the sheep made headlines a couple of years ago, using a process called nuclear transfer.
A clone is an exact genetic copy of an existing animal. Every cell in an animal's body contains the complete genetic information for the entire animal within its nucleus. In nuclear transfer cloning, cells are taken from the animal ...
Posted by Edward Willett at 22:45, May 4th, 1999 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns |