Tag: biology

Cross-organelle response

The problem with serial repitching has beer makers and cell biologists scratching their heads. Clearly, something about the fermentation process is making new generations of yeast less able to ferment. But what? Heat shock response is a complex process because cells are capable of making 1000s of different proteins. But only a subset of these proteins are expressed at any one instant, and the subsets differ inside each organelle in the cell. So maintaining the function of these proteins—proteostasis—requires a complex signaling mechanism that switches on the relevant genes in each organelle. This switching process must be coordinated across the cell, since organelles depend on each other. The process of communication and coordination is called cross-organelle response, or CORE, and it is poorly understood. But this is an important emerging area of cell biology: biologists are beginning to realize that CORE plays a crucial role not just in heat shock response but in metabolism in general, and even in processes such as aging.

Calcifying Plankton

Then the calcifying plankton took over. Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find ocean waters less than 100 meters deep that don’t contain calcifying plankton. Despite their teeny size, they may account for 12% of the total biomass in the oceans. And they’ve completely altered the way carbon moves around the planet. 80% of the carbon-containing rocks on Earth are derived from the remains of these plankton and other marine calcifiers — even though by mass, these plankton may account for less than 0.2% of Earth’s carbon-containing life. Making the oceans more stable didn’t just benefit the calcifying critters. With so many species less likely to become extinct at the planet’s whim, all marine species were able to relax and take the time to evolve complex relationships with others. That’s why life became bigger, faster and more aggressive: What had been a struggle against the planet became a struggle between organisms.

Space Dust Ice Age

466m years ago, there was a very, very large asteroid impact. But, despite what you’re thinking, it actually helped life on Earth be fruitful and multiply. And that’s because the asteroid impact wasn’t on Earth. It was in the inner asteroid belt. A new paper points the accusatory finger at… dust. A lot of it, blasted outward when 2 big asteroids collided. This dust made its way to Earth, blocked a significant fraction of warming sunlight, started an ice age, and that put stress on marine environments which caused a burst of evolutionary diversity.

Life sciences progress

Academia has a lot of problems and it could work much better. However, these problems are not as catastrophic as an outside perspective would suggest. My (contrarian, I guess) intuition is that scientific progress in biology is not slowing down. Specific parts of academia that seem to be problematic: rigid, punishing for deviation, career progression; peer review; need to constantly fundraise for professors. Parts that seem to be less of a problem than I initially thought: short-termism; lack of funding for young scientists.

2022-06-02: A contrarian perspective

Stepping back, I’m claiming that science is getting harder, in the sense that it is increasingly challenging to make discoveries that have comparable impact to the ones in the past. Diverse groups – the Nobel nominators, contemporary surveyed scientists, academics, and inventors – all seem to have an increasing preference for the work of the past, relative to the present. And looking at growth in the number of topics covered by scientists also suggests it has become harder to make forward progress.

Modeling Evolution

Barricelli programmed some of the earliest computer algorithms that resemble real-life processes: a subdivision of what we now call “artificial life,” which seeks to simulate living systems—evolution, adaptation, ecology—in computers. Barricelli presented a bold challenge to the standard Darwinian model of evolution by competition by demonstrating that organisms evolved by symbiosis and cooperation. Until his death in 1993, Barricelli floated between biological and mathematical sciences, questioning doctrine, not quite fitting in. “He was a brilliant, eccentric genius”

Sargassum belt

Sargassum is a rust-colored seaweed that floats. In the Atlantic Ocean, the 2 dominant species have now expanded so much, likely due to agricultural runoff from the Amazon or Mississippi, that blooms practically stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to West Africa. The seaweed provides a habitat for 100s of species of fish and hatchling sea turtles, seahorses, crabs, shrimps, snails, and nudibranchs. But excessive amounts of it are washing ashore and blanketing beaches, with significant environmental and economic consequences.

change.org parody

A neural net trained on change.org tries to write its own petitions, eg “Help Bring Climate Change to the Philippines!” and “Donald Trump: Change the name of the National Anthem to be called the ‘Fiery Gator’”

stories about sexual selection (like “women are naturally attracted to dominant-looking men, because throughout evolution they were better able to provide”) are meaningless, because for most of human history women did not choose their own mates, and so women are unlikely to have strong biologically-ingrained mate preferences.