Blogs / Discoblog

Here’s some bad news for sports officials in Beijing—not to mention the entire world of professional sports: Certain people may be genetically immune to urine screenings for testosterone, one of the most popular illegal performance-enhancing drugs used by professional athletes.

Jenny Jakobsson Schulze, a molecular geneticist at Karolinska University Hospital, gave urine tests to 55 men, each of whom had been injected with a single dose of testosterone. Nearly 70 percent, or 38 of the subjects, failed the test, but 17 passed with flying colors. While both groups of men had metabolized the hormone the same way, the clean-pissed 17 were missing both copies of a gene that causes testosterone to mix with glucuronide, a chemical that converts the hormone from an oil-soluble one into a water- (and pee-) soluble one.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

The microscopic bdelloid rotifer—best known as an all-females species that hasn’t had sex for 100 million years—has thwarted the attempts of Eugene Gladyshev and Matthew Meselson to mutate their genes with blasts of gamma radiation. Although the radiation shattered their genomes—it was a far higher dose than had ever been tolerated by an animal to date—the plucky, resourceful gals sewed their chromosomes back together and not only survived the blasts but continued to reproduce.

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Popularity: 23% [?]