Tag: biology

Grave wax

This “grave wax” buildup has disturbed the natural cycle of decay — and created a horror scenario for burial authorities. When bodies don’t decompose, their graves can’t be reused — a common practice in Germany. This widespread problem has given rise to an entire industry that aims to save the day with new methods of rot. The latest innovation on this morbid market is the Swiss-engineered Linder reconditioning system — a severe method that involves deep incursions into cemeteries. After excavating the unusable soil, Linder fills the area with a “custom mixture of topsoil, woodchips and gravel.”

Host tolerance

Instead of focusing on how to kill specific pathogens, THoR seeks to catalyze the development of breakthrough interventions that would increase the ability of patients’ own bodies to tolerate a broad range of pathogens. The program will explore the fundamental biology of host tolerance in animal populations with the goal of expanding treatment options for humans in the future.

Parasite rex

If you can overcome the horrors in this book (aliens is nothing), this is very very interesting. It’s likely that most species are parasites, parasites can control speciation, sex, move effortlessly from dinosaurs to mammals when the former die out, etc etc.
2022-12-06: A more nuanced view

“Among all known animals, there are more species that live as parasites than are free-living.” Parasitic life styles exist in all major animal groups, with the single exception of echinoderms, the phylum containing starfish and sea urchins. Parasitism is rife, too, among plants and, as you’d expect, fungi. Many organisms are what are termed “obligate parasites,” unable to complete their life cycle in the absence of a host—and obligate parasites include viruses, which, some scientists contend, aren’t even alive until they hijack a host’s cells.

Among the parasitic infections that affect humans, a large portion are caused by various species of nematodes, a phylum of worms. Nematodes account for 80% of all animal species and are so plentiful that, the authors write, one could “line them up end to end and have nematodes in every meter across our entire galaxy.” Envisioning a “parasite Olympics,” the authors award their gold medal to the nematode Ascaris lumbricoides, which has succeeded in establishing residence in the intestines of 15% of the human population, more than 1b people. The worm causes a tropical disease, ascariasis, whose symptoms include fever, abdominal pain, cough, vomiting, and weight loss. The success of the species comes in part from the fact that, unusually for a parasite, it doesn’t require an intermediate host—the way that malaria, say, needs a mosquito in order to infect a human. Instead, Ascaris is transmitted from person to person via contaminated feces.
Humans appear to have incorporated products of beneficial parasitic infection. The endosymbiosis theory holds that we may have co-opted parasitic bacteria that are now essential to life. Early in the evolution of single-cell organisms, bacterial parasites that were not destructive entered cells. These parasites ultimately became mitochondria, the organelles within the cell which produce energy—a structure essential to animal life.

Direct Electron Transfer

“It shouldn’t be possible. Those things just keep growing on the electrode, and there’s no other source of energy there.” Growing on the electrode. It sounds incredible. “It is kind of like science fiction”. To a biologist, finding life that chugs along without a molecular energy source such as carbohydrates is about as unlikely as seeing passengers flying through the air without an airplane.

2016-06-22: Now with a mechanism

one of the most exciting possibilities is finding life-forms that might survive in extreme environments. Mars, for example, is iron-rich and has water flowing beneath its surface. If you have a system that can pick up electrons from iron and have some water, then you have all the ingredients for a conceivable metabolism. Perhaps a former mine 1600m underneath South Dakota won’t be the most surprising place that researchers find electron-eating life. The microbes’ apparent ability to ingest electrons — known as direct electron transfer — is particularly intriguing because it seems to defy the basic rules of biophysics. The fatty membranes that enclose cells act as an insulator, creating an electrically neutral zone once thought impossible for an electron to cross.

Lab-grown bacteria breakthrough

a more literate article about the recent progress in culturing the 99% of bacteria that don’t grow in lab conditions.

This idea of going after cryptic bacterial strains has been around for a long time, but getting it to work has been another thing entirely. This is the most solid example that I’m aware of, and I hope that it’s just the opening of a new platform for antibiotic drug discovery. The traditional search for natural product antibiotics has pretty well come to a shuddering halt over the years – no matter how much effort you put into increasingly exotic soil samples and the like, you keep finding the same things (if you find anything at all). Unculturable organisms are the new frontier, and the iChip is going to be nowhere near the last word in exploring it. And at the same time, you have outfits like Warp Drive Bio trying to get organisms to express unusual compounds that aren’t normally seen, so the hope is that there are a lot of useful things out there that that we have never heard of.

Free diving

Water had some powerful, unknown capacity to slow humans’ hearts, and the blood in their bodies began flooding away from their limbs and toward their vital organs. He’d seen the same thing happen in deep-diving seals decades earlier; by shunting blood away from less important areas of the body, the seals were able to keep organs like the brain and heart oxygenated longer, extending the amount of time they could stay submerged. Immersion in water triggered the same mechanism in humans.

Mother of the Sea

In 1948, with Tokyo still largely in ruins and the reins of government still in the hands of an occupying army, the nori harvest completely failed. And it kept failing. No one knew why. Years and decades and a world war passed and Kathleen discovered something that no one suspected: Porphyra and another seaweed called Conchocelis rosea weren’t actually 2 different organisms. They were actually 2 different phases of nori’s lifecycle. Conchocelis rosea was a tiny spore-like thing that clung to tiny particles of seashell adrift in the water. The shell fragments were essentially life preservers for the nori-spores, which would otherwise sink to the bottom and be swallowed by the sediments. The nori fishers didn’t know that their harvest was dependent on another harvest, that of the shellfish along the same shores, and the shoals of discarded shells. The nori fishers of Ariake Bay, the producers of over half of Japan’s nori harvest, raised their small shrine to Kathleen. This coming April, they will mark the 51st anniversary of their small festival celebrating a woman that they never met, but whom they call “the mother of the sea.”

Building Cyborgs

In 2006, DARPA studied cockroaches as a robotics platform. They soon learned that cockroaches have a mind of their own, and will ignore implanted directions (via electrical stimuli) after ~30min. this makes them unsuitable for spy missions, but it triggered interest in the neurobiology community as a new model organism.

Cockroaches have a simple body plan, and have their processing spread around the body. With some basic surgery, a cockroach can be turned into a robot by attaching the antenna to current, you can make a cockroach go left/right

The first workshop for building your own cyborg was this weekend. my specimen didn’t pass final QC because i didn’t secure the antenna cables securely enough, and the cockroach disconnected 😦