How Tigers Get their Stripes

Alan Turing was an amazing man. London researchers have recently substantiated one of his theories regarding repeated biological patterns:

[The] study, funded by the Medical Research Council and to be published online in Nature Genetics, not only demonstrates a mechanism which is likely to be widely relevant in vertebrate development, but also provides confidence that chemicals called morphogens, which control these patterns, can be used in regenerative medicine to differentiate stem cells into tissue. The findings provide evidence to support a theory first suggested in the 1950s by famous code-breaker and mathematician Alan Turing, whose centenary falls this year. He put forward the idea that regular repeating patterns in biological systems are generated by a pair of morphogens that work together as an 'activator' and 'inhibitor'.

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The open views of western Texas

I miss the open vistas of western Texas, where I was outside for much of the past six days looking at fossil sites. It's not the same back here in Missouri. You can't allow your eyes to stretch out for 10 miles in every direction, and there aren't many spots where you can look way down and way up at mountain tops from the same spot. I took more than a few handheld HDR series in Texas and crunched them on a program called Photomatix over the past couple of days. They are a pretty good reminder of the types of things I was seeing.

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