Tag: biology

Openworm

Nice overview about openworm

“This is much more difficult to do in worms so it hasn’t been done as much, and as a consequence there is not as much data present. Scientists are catching up to the last 50 years of understanding neurons in rodents.”

There’s an explosion of data on its way and they’re doing their best to collect as much insight from this work so that they can build these neural behaviors into their model.

“We can also use some clever tricks from computer science to help us fill in some of the gaps. The good news is that this will only get easier as the tools and techniques get better over time.”

Parasite-controlled shrimp

shrimp cluster in groups easily spottable by flamingos not because of safety in numbers, but because they’re forced by a parasite.

1T odors

plus ~5M colors and ~340K auditory tones.

humans are capable of discriminating at least 1T different odors — not just 10K different odors, a number first proposed decades ago and not backed by data.

Racing slime molds

new sport: racing slime molds

The first ever World Dicty Race will require cells to navigate a complex microfluidic maze to reach a pool of chemoattractant at the finish line. Diffusion of the chemoattractant will create a spatial gradient to guide cells along the shortest path to the finish line. The challenge is to engineer Dicty or HL60 cells to be both smart and fast!

Fecal Transplant Marketplace

they could call it buttcoin

A new nonprofit called OpenBiome is hoping to do for fecal transplants what blood banks have done for transfusions. It’s a kind of Brown Cross.

Nanomotors inside living cells

nanomotors were placed inside live human cells, propelled with ultrasonic waves, and steered magnetically.

Coelacanth

The long story of sequencing the coelacanth genome, the fish most closely related to us (but not our direct ancestor)

When it turned up unexpectedly, the coelacanth was the biological find of the century. And now it is showing why. Its biographer tells the best fish story in 380 ma

Next level Mimicry

Each wing of Goniurellia tridens carries a precisely detailed image of an ant-like insect, complete with 6 legs, 2 antennae, a head, thorax and tapered abdomen.

that’s the best mimicry i have ever seen.

Ants as a fluid

Fire ants use their claws to grip diverse surfaces, including each other. As a result of their mutual adhesion and large numbers, ant colonies flow like inanimate fluids. By emulating the flow of fluids, ant colonies can remain united under stressful conditions

Epigenetics

epigenetics can work on the scale of hours and 100s of genes, truly massive.

When the No. 2 cichlid saw that he was now No. 1, he responded quickly. He underwent massive surges in gene expression that immediately blinged up his pewter coloring with lurid red and blue streaks and, in a matter of hours, caused him to grow some 20%. It was as if Jason Schwartzman, coming to work 1 day to learn the big office stud had quit, morphed into Arnold Schwarzenegger by close of business.

Earth has fewer species than we think

More and more, biologists are discovering that organisms thought to be different species are, in fact, but 1. A recent example is that the formerly accepted 2 species of giant North American mammoths (the Columbian mammoth and the woolly mammoth) were genetically the same but the 2 had phenotypes determined by environment.