|
|||
 News sites left and right are picking up a story that “Scientists solved the chicken or egg problem”. Google News aggregated 164 news articles at the time of writing, with more being added every minute. The typical introduction runs like this: It is the age-old question that has stumped the finest minds for thousands of years. [...] 
Last week’s blog post on the ancestry of the malarial plasmid attracted several insightful comments by Psi Wavefunction. One of the issues discussed was when exactly the malarial ancestor changed his lifestyle from being a coral symbiont to a coral parasite. This week I came across a paper in PNAS that shows [...] You might not like it, but you are directly related to the bacteria in your kitchen sink and the grass that’s slowly growing in your garden. However new research suggests that even the most ancient parts we share with all life on earth are still drifting apart, with no sign of stopping…
Last week, the world learned of the first living organism that carries a synthetic genome. That that same genome contains the nucleic equivalents of both graffiti and poetry is less known… Unless you’ve been avoiding science news for over a week, you’ve been bombarded by news of the creation of the first ‘synthetic cell’ by scientists [...] I bet you never wondered why the black ghost knifefish hunts at an uncomfortable angle of -30°! Prepare to take a journey on the intersection of animal behaviour, neurobiology and biomechanics! Suppose you’re one of your animal ancestors, swimming around in one of the warm and shallow Cambrian seas 500 million years ago. You’re a small [...] Every living cell on earth carries a molecular fossil: the ribosome. In a recent paper published in PNAS, researchers from California open the drawer and dust off this ancient molecular machine. The structure of the ribosome seems to provide hints about the origin of that universal feature of life: the genetic code. The genetic code is life’s [...] |
|||
|
Copyright © 2010 Thoughtomics - All Rights Reserved |
|||
Recent Comments