Category: Uncategorized
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Announcing the fall adventure–yes, it’s true, Ultraphyte is going to Antarctica. The expedition will be led by experienced Antarctic explorer Rachael Morgan-Kiss, of Miami University of Ohio. And yes, I’ll be posting Youtube videos (McMurdo Station has good internet. When the 200-mile winds aren’t blowing.) Morgan-Kiss has a National Science Foundation grant to study eukaryotic…
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While we fret over childish court rulings, and homeless children dare to cross our borders, the spread of Ebola virus gets buried. For true heroism, nothing beats Doctors Without Borders–for months, the main source of care and treatment in a growing epidemic. So far the disease has struck Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Most of our Google…
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With so much strife in the world, it’s a relief to know that scientists have solved one of nature’s great mysteries: the disco clam. The disco clam, Ctenoides ales, appears to flash lightning bolts within its mouth. Young scientist Lindsey Dougherty at Berkeley has figured out the mechanism of this light display. Note that her research…
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Appropriately, this story took three years to crawl into my consciousness. The world’s slowest creature, the sloth, turns out to be the cutest. A fascinating question: What kind of selective pressure favors slowness? Avoiding energy loss? The faster you move, the less efficient you are. We all know that from everyday experience–the faster you try…
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Our bodies are machines; and one failed part can mean we never wake up. So now we try to replace a failing part with something we design. The classic case is diabetes, in which the pancreas fails to produce insulin on demand. In this case, the father of an insulin-dependent boy designed an artificial insulin…
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Sleep builds learning and memory. Many studies show this–and we keep telling students that sleep will improve their grades. But how does it work? Here’s an actual window into a mouse brain, watching what might be new memories form. At the NYU Skirball Institute (as typed, not “Screwball”) researchers Wen-Biao Gan and colleagues tested a…
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Anyone living outside a box has heard by now of the megabattle between Amazon and Hachette over who gets to pocket more of the readers’ money. As the NY Times (to which I quaintly subscribe) so aptly put it, Amazon “promises a world where books are cheap, where anyone can publish anything,” whereas Hachette “is holding…
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So what did we all learn at ASM, the American Society for Microbiology meeting 2014? Bacteria you eat may prevent osteoporosis (bone thinning). Don’t all go out and buy probiotics, because health foods are unregulated and make outrageous claims. However, Lactobacillus reuteri makes a hormone-like molecule that does prevent bone thinning in mice. We saw slides of bones…
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Saturday we depart for Boston, five microbiologists to present our year’s work at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. To get the idea of how big it is, here’s a shot from last year’s meeting, which made the iPad program cover for this year. You can see Michael Harden and myself, viewing posters.…
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Among this year’s Hugo nominees is Parasite by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire). The novel depicts a world where everyone takes on an engineered tapeworm to maintain their own health. Some readers have questioned how such a world could be–it’s impressive that such a book even made it to the Hugo. But the author herself did…
Joan Slonczewski 