Category: Uncategorized
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More on the relations of trees and other plants. Everyone knows how meerkats and other animals line up to warn their kin of danger. What if plants do the same via their “wood wide web“? Agricultural scientists Yuan Yuan Song and coworkers at Guangzhou showed how tomato plants use their fungal internet to warn neighbors of attack.…
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Can it be that even trees are old friends? And perhaps mourn their departed? A German forest ranger thinks so. The appropriately named Peter Wohlleben (“live well” or “farewell”) describes how pairs of ancient trees grow with their limbs apart to share the light, while their roots entwine to share nutrients. Even for years after one tree…
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Most of us know that books get published with the guidance of editors such as David Hartwell. Relatively few are aware of how progress in science is shaped by program directors at the National Science Foundation such as Kamal Shukla, who passed away last week. While Hartwell was known for promoting “hard science” in science…
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Thirty years ago, a cotton-ribboned manuscript typed from four penciled notebooks about fish women had been rejected by several New York publishers. A Bryn Mawr classmate Mimi Panitch brought it to the attention of an editor at Tor. A brief note suggested we meet at a con, it might have been Lunacon. Formally dressed and pregnant with my…
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Does Mars have a nitrogen cycle? Another great story from last year, which microbiologists need to explain better. We here about carbon all the time–a carbohydrate (sugar) gets oxidized to CO2 (problem) or else fermented and reduced to methane, CH4 (a worse problem). That’s the carbon cycle in a nutshell. But the nitrogen cycle is…
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And here’s the kind of future from which we need to save ourselves. Clean gas–that is, 330,000 car-years worth of greenhouse emissions. Leaking since October. Say what–October? 2,000 residents displaced? Where has this news been? And there are 400 similar facilities around the country. Meanwhile, the fracking is starting earthquakes, but the drillers refuse to…
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Charlie Jane’s Io9 post reminds me how annoying it is to defend a Hollywood blockbuster by a director who can’t pass the Bechdel test. But the post’s comments trouble me. So many miss how much real biology the film shows—and what it says about saving the one real world we’ve got. Avatar is the only…
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Sorry for the long absence, thanks to writing my NSF grant –the one that keeps my lab in business. (If you drill down you’ll find my current award “Kenyon 1” in Ohio.) I had thought I could put it off for a year–but my group has grown to 20+, with three major projects (E. coli on aspirin, bacterial neurotransmitters,…
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After years of hints, NASA finally calls it: Water flows on Mars. Not anything like Niagra Falls, but enough to see signs of channels forming. In the past, evidence had accumulated for water channels a billion years ago. But now, we see signs of water “days” ago. The time-lapse animation of Palikir Crater, above, shows streaks that…
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The last place we’d expect to find life forms sharing their resources without a clear payoff is the human gut. Of course, there must be a payoff, but the relationships amongst gut bacteria are so complex that we cannot yet see them. What we see is something Tyrrell Conway in Microbe Magazine calls the “restaurant…
Joan Slonczewski 