Category: Uncategorized
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In the “couldn’t invent this” department: Scientists have built 3D glasses for a praying mantis. In their own words: “Analysing how mantises see in three dimensions could give us clues about how 3D vision evolved and lead to novel approaches in implementing 3D recognition and depth perception in computer vision and robotics. “A key component of the…
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Today Kaitlin Creamer ’16 of our Kenyon bacteria lab presented her sequence analysis for eight genomes of evolved E. coli strains adapted to acid. This project required next-generation sequencing, by Illumina MySeq, performed at Michigan State where our collaborators Rich Lenski and Zack Blount work. Kaitlin and Sean Bush ’17 installed Linux, Breseq and GATK among…
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Let’s hope this story lasts longer than the acid bath stem cells. Scientists from an American company and from South Korea claim to have cloned embryonic stem cells from the skin of an elderly man. Two out of 77 tried–still low efficiency. Full report here, in the journal Cell Stem Cell. The standard technique, for sheep…
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Out on the bike trail, my first ride of the spring: In the middle of the pavement stood this enormous turtle. Stood or sat, not sure which, but the giant thing wasn’t going anywhere–and was likely to end crushed beneath some bike tire. So I tried to pick it up. “Snap!” What a fast pair of jaws that…
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While the world hyperventilates over the future British royal starting to crawl, the largest Ebola outbreak ever has his West Africa. Over a hundred deaths, with more than two-thirds mortality from this rapid killer. The virus hit Guinea and Liberia, including Guinea’s major city of Guekedou. Usually the virus comes from “bushmeat,” local primates and…
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Studies connect cardio exercise with improved memory and brain function–but how? We’re just starting to see the molecular clues. Exercised muscles releas a hormone called irisin, which influences the brain’s memory center. Original report is here. Where does irisin come from? The exercising muscles express a particular gene (that is, make messenter RNA and protein specified…
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We hear a lot about the loss of species in the Anthropocene–the present geological era, in which human existenced has substantially altered the content of our biosphere and the geochemistry of our planet. Much is made of the loss of biodiversity–perhaps ten or a hundred-fold increased rate of extinction of species, from megafauna such as tasmanian tiger and…
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In the too-good-to-be-true category, an undergraduate researcher and her mentor report at the American Chemical Society that your intestinal bacteria digest chocolate into products that make your heart healthy. I wish the original report were available, since the press report has it garbled, but the story apparently was reported in a talk or poster at the…
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At the recent Boskone, a panel discussed why some of us are writing science fiction on Earth, rather than some distant star. My reason is that science has multiple frontiers, in many dimensions–such as the interior of living cells. Now, scientists at Albert Einstein can watch the molecules of memory move within a neuron. The Science report…
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The X-Prize Foundation is best known for the Ansari-funded prize for repeatable spaceflight for a hu/manned craft, in 2004. Now there’s a Google Xprize to be won for putting a rover on the moon by 2015. The design above is by Astrobotic. But the foundation supports other kinds of prizes–including prizes in life science. The Brain-Machine prize…
Joan Slonczewski 