Enlarge (credit: iStock / Getty Images ) We’re currently watching—often in horror—what happens as a virus and its hosts engage in an evolutionary arms race. Measures to limit infectivity and enhance immunity are selecting for viral strains that spread more readily and avoid at least some of the immune response. All of that is easily […]
Enlarge / It sure looks like a crab, but it isn’t. Why are crab-like forms so common? (credit: David Kirkland / Design Pics ) Many organisms on planet Earth aren’t crabs. Dogs, for instance—definitely not crabs. Science also suggests that humans are not, in fact, crabs. But a surprising number of creatures either are crabs […]
Enlarge (credit: EyeEm / Getty Images) Bees manage some impressive feats. They not only remember the location of good food sources, but they’re able to communicate this information to their peers. They also care for the hive’s young and organize attacks against intruders. It’s easy to overlook that they’re brilliant at construction. Almost every honeycomb […]
Enlarge / A CT scan image of the spiral intestine of a Pacific spiny dogfish shark (Squalus suckleyi). The beginning of the intestine is on the left, and the end is on the right. (credit: Samantha Leigh/California State University, Dominguez Hills) In 1920, Serbian-born inventor Nikola Tesla designed and patented what he called a “valvular […]
Enlarge (credit: Sloan-Kettering) Just one week after Google’s DeepMind AI group finally described its biology efforts in detail, the company is releasing a paper that explains how it analyzed nearly every protein encoded in the human genome and predicted its likely three-dimensional structure—a structure that can be critical for understanding disease and designing treatments. In […]
Enlarge (credit: University of Washington ) Thanks to the development of DNA-sequencing technology, it has become trivial to obtain the sequence of bases that encode a protein and translate that to the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein. But from there, we often end up stuck. The actual function of the protein […]
Enlarge Every living thing on the planet plays host to viruses, and bacteria are no exception. Bacteriophages—or just “phages” in order to those in the know—are the viruses that attack bacteria. And we are in dire need of things that attack bacteria, since many pathogenic bacterial species have developed resistance to the antibiotics we’ve been […]
Christmas in July is now firmly enough entrenched in culture that the Hallmark Channel has an annual programming block and movie release based around it. The holiday’s sprawl is massive, claiming an entire summer month to go along with its traditional footprint of December and decades-long encroachment into November. Read more…
Enlarge / Macro-photo of green Romanesco cauliflower showcases the vegetable’s striking fractal pattern. (credit: Cathy Scola / Getty Images ) It’s long been observed that many plants produce leaves, shoots, or flowers in spiral patterns. Cauliflower provides a unique example of this phenomenon, because those spirals repeat at several different size scales—a hallmark of fractal […]
Enlarge / A brown widow spider feeding on a Brahminy blindsnake in a garden house in Zaachila, Oaxaca, Mexico. (credit: Matias Martinez) What’s the spider with a discriminating palate to do when it gets tired of chowing down on its usual insect-heavy fare? A few nibbles of fresh snake might do the trick. Yes, some […]