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 Like a spider web, the evolution of spider silk proteins looks pretty complex. New research sheds some light on the evolution of these stretchy, sticky and tough proteins. Everyone knows Spider-Man’s main (and only?) talent is shooting sticky liquid from his “web-shooters”. Often his webs take the form of a rope that is perfect for [...]  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 [...]  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 that corals themselves [...] 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… In 1929 Edwin [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] |
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