Sandy Becker, MA
Facts by Sandy Becker (21)
Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Human Flu
Influenza, unlike many viruses that make humans sick, can also affect birds and pigs. Generally strains of the…
Civets Lesson
Recently a Chinese television producer fell ill with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, better known as SARS.…
GM: Not For General Motors Anymore
Genetically Modified plants have been given genes from other plants or even other species, that make them…
How Does The Turtle Get Its Shell?
Many invertebrates, such as beetles and lobsters, have shells, but the turtle is the only living vertebrate…
Malaria and Sickle Cell Anemia
Sickle cell anemia is a genetic disorder in which the red blood cells collapse into a 'sickle' shape and…
Marmaduke and the Taco Bell Chihuahua Are Cousins
You would never think Marmaduke, the enormous great dane of the newspaper cartoons, and the tiny Taco Bell…
Mother Nature's Own Brand of Bioterror
We've been hearing a lot about smallpox lately, as a possible bioterror attack. But Mother Nature has her own…
Palm Trees and Prickly Pears
If you drive around Southern California you'll see a lot of palm trees and prickly pear cacti. If you drive…
Regeneration 101
So who is the greatest regeneration superhero of all? Among vertebrates the lowly salamander is the champion…
Resistance is NOT Futile!
Maybe if you are a Star Trek heroine up against the Borg, 'resistance is futile.' But if you are a germ that…
SARS: Mother Nature Strikes Again!
SARS, short for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, is big news this spring. By the middle of April 2003, over…
Smallpox, Chickenpox . . . Monkeypox?
This past summer a few people in the midwest came down with monkeypox, a viral disease related to smallpox but…
The World's Biggest Popsicle
Stored in a commercial freezer in France, along with quite a lot of frozen meat and cheese, is about 15…
What's So Bad About The Badlands?
Hundreds of square miles of South Dakota are known as 'Badlands', a dry terrain of colorful rock formations…
What's The Difference Between A Sweet Potato And A Yam?
What's in a name? Although supermarkets offer both 'yams' and 'sweet potatoes,' in fact they are all sweet…
When Did A Cat Become A Kitty?
It has long been thought that cats were first domesticated in Egypt, about 4000 years ago. Indeed, they were…
When This Lake 'Burps,' Better Watch Out!
Nearly twenty years ago, two lakes in Cameroon, a country in Africa, 'burped,' killing hundreds of people.…
Who was Typhoid Mary?
Mary Mallon lived in New York about 100 years ago, and worked as a cook. It seemed that every family she…
Why Aren't Mice More Like Us?
The sequence of the human genome was published two years ago, and recently, the sequence of the mouse genome…
Why Can't We Really Clone Dinosaurs?
You might think, if you saw the movie Jurassic Park, or read the book, that a real live cloned dinosaur would…
Why Do We Call It A 'Vaccination?'
Smallpox 'vaccinations' are in the news nowadays. What is smallpox and what is a vaccination? Smallpox is one…