Category: Uncategorized
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Perhaps the most curious thing about this story, of how mice were made to see infrared, is that it represents a collaboration amongst three Chinese universities plus the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Wait, what? So our leading universities are engineering our soldiers plus the Chinese to see each other glow in the dark? The…
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Ultraphyte welcomes you back! The past two years of my break from the blog have yielded ever more reasons to thank your hardworking gut bacteria. From brain control to jet lag, bacteria on their way to poop manage to control just about everything. Microbes invented us metazoans to house them—more on that in a future…
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Now that grades are turned in, I can take a moment off from the Indivisible site that’s occupied my blogging since November, to highlight a momentous event, long foreseen: Conversion of skin cells to eggs. For the first time, molecular biologists have converted mouse fibroblasts (a type of skin cell) into pluripotent stem cells (cells that…
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From Syria to Trump Tower, this year has not been the greatest for human beings. Yet our microbial communities have flourished. Even the White House (perhaps with prescience) announced the National Microbiome Initiative, predicting that microbes would accomplish some of the year’s most noble and memorable achievements–from CRISPR/CAS (bacterial antiviral defense applied to human gene editing)…
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While some of us up North endure elections and Brexits, down under in Australia the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) has been busy protecting one of Antarctica’s great treasures, the Ross Sea. CCAMLR is a commission of 36 nations founded in 1982 to protect Antarctica and preserve this continent for science…
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Usually we look for antibiotics in exotic places such as Antarctica, aiming to find new drugs that no human pathogen has ever seen. But what if an antibiotic could be hiding in plain sight–or nearer yet, up your nose? That’s what Alexander Zipperer and colleagues found, at the University of Tübingen. They focused on a…
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The Tasmanian Devil is today’s largest known marsupial mammal; which is not saying much, barely two feet long aside from tail. Hunted to extinction, these tiny fierce predators remain today on the island of Tasmania. They form extended social networks, fighting, mating, and eating entire carcasses down to the bone–a tidy habit that actually endears them to…
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Is a duckling capable of abstract thought? Somehow this story of true intelligence got buried beneath the convention news. According to authors in the journal Science, experiments demonstrate the ability of newly hatched duckling to distinguish the concepts “same” and “different.” Previously, the authors note, “pigeons and bees can be trained to discriminate whether novel images contain…
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For something more cheerful, here’s a return of the Peacock Spider. Apparently seven new species of peacock spider have been discovered in Australia. The discovery was reported in the journal Peckhamia–a journal devoted to the biology of jumping spiders. Clearly a sign of the growing overproliferation of specialty journal, but in this case we can’t complain…
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Beach time of year, as good a time as any to wonder how fast the ocean is rising. In the long run, we’re locked into several feet of rise in the next century, possibly more if Antarctic glaciers accelerate. This great figure from Discover Magazine shows how undersea “rivers” are undermining the ice shelves, accelerating…
Joan Slonczewski 