{"id":393,"date":"2012-01-12T09:01:01","date_gmt":"2012-01-12T13:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=393"},"modified":"2012-01-12T09:01:01","modified_gmt":"2012-01-12T13:01:01","slug":"thursday-12-january-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2012\/01\/12\/thursday-12-january-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday, 12 January 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

08:00 –<\/span> I finished the lab session on cell-division yesterday and sent it off to my editors. I told Barbara last night that it’s fortunate I work at home alone, or I’d probably have been locked up in a rubber room long ago. Yesterday, I was writing and just started laughing for no reason that would have been apparent to a bystander. Most people wouldn’t find meiosis all that funny.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

I’d written about mitosis and decided I’d better include at least an overview of meiosis, a life process with a similar name and similar mechanisms. The difference is that mitosis operating on a diploid cell produces genetically-identical diploid daughter cells, while meiosis produces genetically-unique haploid cells, i.e., gametes. The process by which meiosis produces this genetic uniqueness is called homologous recombination, during which homologous pairs of chromosomes exchange some of their genes.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

So, as I was sitting there writing about meiosis, I thought about that immortal phrase that by itself shows the pitiably parlous state of science reporting. A year or so ago, a CBS news story actually used the phrase “homologous recombinaltion tiniker”. (Well, technically a phrase is a group of words, and only one of those three groups of letters is actually a word.) So, for a moment, I actually considered including a graphic titled “Homologous Recombinaltion Tiniker” to illustrate that gene shuffling. That’s when I started to laugh.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

08:00 – I finished the lab session on cell-division yesterday and sent it off to my editors. I told Barbara last night that it’s fortunate I work at home alone, or I’d probably have been locked up in a rubber room long ago. Yesterday, I was writing and just started laughing for no reason that would have been apparent to a bystander. Most people wouldn’t find meiosis all that funny.\n<\/p>\n

I’d written about mitosis and decided I’d better include at least an overview of meiosis,<\/p>\n

 » Read more about: Thursday, 12 January 2012  »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}