StarStuff

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About Me

Hi, I'm Stuart Gary, I'm a journalist and broadcaster with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I love science, especially the majesty and wonder of space, so I put together a weekly astronomy show for the ABC called StarStuff.

In my spare time I like to fly planes, practice karate and pistol target shooting and play around with my cars, a twin Turbocharged Falcon GT Interceptor and a DeTomaso Pantera GTS.

I’m vegan, a life member of the RSPCA and a supporter of several animal welfare organisations.

My other great passion is music which is understandable when you realise that I was a radio music jock long before I became a journalist. My record library contains tens of thousands of singles, albums, videos, CD’s and DVDs. These days that’s all stored in an 8 terabyte raid enclosure linked to a desk top PC at home. My tastes range from rock and grunge through to trance and new romantics. At the moment I’m listening to heaps of MGMT, William Control, Hawthorne Heights and Short Shack, but I have lots of time for the classics like Placebo and the early stuff from Silverchair, In fact Neon Ballroom is still my favourite album, and Emotion Sickness is still one of my two favourite songs (the other being William Control’s Death Club).

StarStuff is a great name for the show, but it works on more levels than just astronomy, it’s really cool for any science program because everything in the universe after the quark gluon plasma of the big bang is star stuff even the iron which makes your blood red was manufactured in the supernova explosions of stars. Carl Sagan said it best, we are all star stuff.


This blog is designed to allow me to publish all the things which can’t fit into StarStuff. There’s heaps of really interesting stuff out there and only a half hour window for the show, so each week becomes a battle to try and squeeze it all in. This blog lets me do that.

You can check out the show at the offical ABC StarStuff website:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/starstuff/

There's also an official ABC StarStuff Twitter feed: @abcstarstuff

And an official ABC Science website: http://www.abc.net.au/science/


The legal stuff: This is my personal blog. The views expressed in this blog are those of me only and not the Australian Broadcasting Corporation or its management. I do not claim ownership of any of the media in this blog. where possible credit and or source will always be given. If one of your photos or other media is submitted in this blog and you would like it removed please let me know.

Blogs I follow:

Theme by: Miguel
  1. jtotheizzoe: A Duplicate Gene May Have Helped Our Brains Become “Human” Among the ~25,000 or so genes in our genome, we find a handful of duplicates. Some of them, like the genes that make pieces of the ribosome (your cellular protein factories) are fully-functional exact copies. This allows your cells to make a whole mess of that gene product. But other duplicates are imperfect copies put there by accidents or errors, and often those copies can be a bit wonky.  One of those imperfect gene copies may have had a strong influence on our brains becoming more advanced and “human” during evolution. A group led by Evan Eichler looked at a gene called SRGAP2 and noted that it appeared to have been duplicated to a certain form about 2.4 million years ago, which is when the Homo lineage split from Australopithecus. That duplicate, called SRGAP2C, actually overpowers the function of the original gene. Even cooler, when Franck Polleux at Scripps expressed that SRGAP2C in mice, it made their neurons look a lot more human! So perhaps when this imperfect duplicate popped up in our genome, it changed the way our neurons developed (as shown in the picture above). If those changes were significant enough, they could have helped our larger and more advanced Homo brains evolve beyond our simpler ancestors! It’s too early to make that claim just yet, but it’s a very cool idea. This also means that because our neurons develop in a way that is so different from mice, we should reconsider whether they are a good model for disorders like autism. We may be looking at a brain that’s just too different from our own at its core. For more, Ed Yong has some good coverage of this on his blog.

    jtotheizzoe:

    A Duplicate Gene May Have Helped Our Brains Become “Human”

    Among the ~25,000 or so genes in our genome, we find a handful of duplicates. Some of them, like the genes that make pieces of the ribosome (your cellular protein factories) are fully-functional exact copies. This allows your cells to make a whole mess of that gene product. But other duplicates are imperfect copies put there by accidents or errors, and often those copies can be a bit wonky. 

    One of those imperfect gene copies may have had a strong influence on our brains becoming more advanced and “human” during evolution. A group led by Evan Eichler looked at a gene called SRGAP2 and noted that it appeared to have been duplicated to a certain form about 2.4 million years ago, which is when the Homo lineage split from Australopithecus. That duplicate, called SRGAP2C, actually overpowers the function of the original gene.

    Even cooler, when Franck Polleux at Scripps expressed that SRGAP2C in mice, it made their neurons look a lot more human! So perhaps when this imperfect duplicate popped up in our genome, it changed the way our neurons developed (as shown in the picture above). If those changes were significant enough, they could have helped our larger and more advanced Homo brains evolve beyond our simpler ancestors! It’s too early to make that claim just yet, but it’s a very cool idea.

    This also means that because our neurons develop in a way that is so different from mice, we should reconsider whether they are a good model for disorders like autism. We may be looking at a brain that’s just too different from our own at its core.

    For more, Ed Yong has some good coverage of this on his blog.

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    Reblogged: jtotheizzoe