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Tracing the 12,000 Year Pedigree of Beer
SDSU population geneticist Arun Sethuraman and evolutionary biology Ph.D. student Alex Adame are an unlikely pair to be studying how the genetics of hops have changed throughout 12,000 years of history: neither of them drink beer. “I might have a hops allergy,” said Adame, which, in addition to her being pregnant, makes systematically sniffing (for science) dozens of pungent…
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The Sequoia of Spiders
In the cool shade of tall conifers, nestled on the faces of granite boulders strewn throughout the river and creek beds of the southern Sierran foothills, orange, beige and black spiders with bodies smaller than pencil erasers lay in wait in their lampshade-shaped webs. One of these spider species, whose earliest ancestors lived in the…
