No free lunch in the Land of Cockaigne

Life is hard for free-living microbes. Many of them undertake great efforts to obtain their energy, some get it directly from sunlight while others derive it from unusual compounds. To them, living inside an animal gut must be like living in some mythical land of plenty. Consider the luxuries! The lucky resident of a gut [...]

A Short History of the Oldest Tree on Earth

A tree of life showing the common ancestry of life on earth is one of the most powerful metaphors in science, one which stood the test of time remarkably well. The concept of a taxonomic tree as a means to arrange species can be attributed to the German naturalist Pallas in 1766. At his time, [...]