|
|||
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 [...]  … except in Hollywood movies. Let’s make this clear from the start, I don’t like the term “living fossils” at all. It’s as if we decided that certain species are second class organisms that should have gone extinct a long time ago. Unfortunately for me, the term regularly crops up in the popular scientific press. Especially [...]  Suppose you’re nearing the end of your life. In a strange twist of fate, you won the lottery. You decide to split the jackpot equally between your two children. While one child uses the money to fund a charity dedicated to fighting poverty, the other one uses it to start the crime syndicate he has [...] |
|||
|
Copyright © 2010 Thoughtomics - All Rights Reserved |
|||
Recent Comments