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 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. [...] 
You might not think much of sponges. Maybe you feel that they’re only good for rubbing your back and cleaning your kitchen sink. While you’re absolutely right that sponges have to be admired for their absorbing qualities, they have much more to offer this world. Like on the front of early animal evolution: [...] 
In my high school text books, bacteria were primarily defined in terms of what they were not. “Bacteria don’t have a nucleus”, “bacteria don’t have mitochondria”, “bacteria are not capable of complex membrane trafficking” and so on. But such boundaries seem to blur as more and more “eukaryote specific” properties pop up in [...]  If coral reefs are the rain forests of the tropical oceans, kelp forests are the woodlands of the Northern seas. Kelp is one of the algal species that can survive the harsh conditions of the North Sea that I know and love, together with other hardy seaweeds like bladder wrack. All these seaweeds [...] 
This is the first blogpost in a continuing series on “sensible evolution‘: how our senses evolved and shape the way we see the world. We perceive everything that we can see and feel as ‘real’, but we know that our human senses only capture a tiny part of the natural world. There are [...] 
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 [...] |
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