Browse By Topic

Biology

Articles

Do Elephants Have Souls?

Winter/Spring 2013 • Caitrin Nicol on the evidence for non-human intelligence, awareness, and emotion

What Is the Body Worth?

Spring 2012 • Ari N. Schulman on patient exploitation and the bad case for human tissue markets

Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness

Fall 2011 • Stephen L. Talbott on survival, fitness, and the purposiveness of organisms

What Do Organisms Mean?

Winter 2011 • Steve Talbott on how life speaks at every level

The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings

Fall 2010 • Steve Talbott confronts the language of organism-as-machine

Getting Over the Code Delusion

Summer 2010 • Steve Talbott on epigenetics and the demise of DNA as destiny

The Future of Cell Biology

Fall 2008

The Logic of Science; Biodiversity and the Bible

Winter 2008

Ghosts in the Evolutionary Machinery

Fall 2007 • Steve Talbott on digital organisms and disembodied science

C. S. Lewis Goes to the Laboratory

Fall 2006 • Thomas W. Merrill on the science and faith of Francis Collins

Next 

 

Blog Posts

The Human Egg Makes Its Debut

June 12, 2008 •

 

Amazing. Scientists in Belgium have just captured images of human ovulation occuring on camera--the "best ever" taken according to New Scientist--and it was all completely by accident:

"The release of the oocyte from the ovary is a crucial event in human reproduction," says Jacques Donnez at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) in Brussels, Belgium. "These pictures are clearly important to better understand the mechanism."

Observing ovulation in humans is extremely rare, and previous images have been fuzzy. Donnez captured the event by accident while preparing to carry out a partial hysterectomy on a 45-year-old woman. The release of an egg was considered a sudden, explosive event, but his pictures, to be published in Fertility and Sterility, show it taking place over a period of at least 15 minutes.

(Photo by Flickr user Darren Hester [CC])