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Category: Biology

Life deep underground and inside other worlds

Life deep underground and inside other worlds

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: Scientists poke and prod at the fringes of habitability in pursuit of life’s limits. To that end, they have tunneled kilometers below Earth’s surface, drilling outward from the bottoms of mine shafts and sinking boreholes deep into ocean sediments. To their surprise, “life was everywhere that we looked,” said Tori Hoehler, a chemist and astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. And it was present in staggering quantities: By various estimates, the inhabited subsurface realm has twice the…

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The ‘dark matter’ inside your gut

The ‘dark matter’ inside your gut

Jonathan Jarry writes: There is a kind of dark matter inside our intestinal tract. “Dark matter” is the phrase coined for the matter that is implied to be present in the universe based on physicists’ calculations but that cannot be seen yet. Scientists who study tiny living things are facing their own type of dark matter: invisible microbes that are indirectly detected. They call it “microbial dark matter.” Much has been written about the bacteria that live inside our gut….

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Sleep evolved before brains. Hydras are living proof

Sleep evolved before brains. Hydras are living proof

Veronique Greenwood writes: The hydra is a simple creature. Less than half an inch long, its tubular body has a foot at one end and a mouth at the other. The foot clings to a surface underwater — a plant or a rock, perhaps — and the mouth, ringed with tentacles, ensnares passing water fleas. It does not have a brain, or even much of a nervous system. And yet, new research shows, it sleeps. Studies by a team in…

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Deep beneath the Earth’s surface life is weird and wonderful

Deep beneath the Earth’s surface life is weird and wonderful

Gaetan Borgonie and Maggie Lau write: The living landscape all around us is just a thin veneer atop the vast, little-understood bulk of the Earth’s interior. A widespread misconception about the deep subsurface is that this realm consists of a continuous mass of uniform compressed solid rock. Few are aware that this mass of rock is heavily fractured, and water runs in many of these fractures and faults, down to depths of many kilometres. The deep Earth supports an entire…

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Microbes are a missing piece in the biodiversity puzzle

Microbes are a missing piece in the biodiversity puzzle

Ian Morse writes: Scientists are clear: the number of plant and animal species on Earth is declining. The climate crisis, habitat loss, pollution and the illegal wildlife trade are all pushing species toward extinction. Researchers especially worry that losing too much biodiversity could push the earth past a tipping point into irreversible change, and on into a new paradigm in which humanity and other life can’t survive. Which partly explains humanity’s self-interest and urgency in understanding and maintaining global biodiversity….

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Can single-cell organisms learn?

Can single-cell organisms learn?

Catherine Offord writes: Even by her own telling, Beatrice Gelber’s work was offbeat. It was October 1960, and Gelber had recently opened a facility called the Basic Health Research Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Described as an “enthusiastic psychologist” by the newspaper interviewing her about her work, Gelber explained how, several years earlier, she’d discovered an unexpected behavior in a protozoan called Paramecium aurelia. This unicellular organism, she claimed, had shown it was capable of learning, a feat generally assumed to…

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Microbial diversity is under threat — which puts the entire planet at risk

Microbial diversity is under threat — which puts the entire planet at risk

By Muhammad Saleem It’s no secret that our planet is in crisis. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 37,400 species are at risk of becoming extinct. That includes 26 percent of mammals, 36 percent of sharks and rays and 41 percent of amphibians. But the conservation posters that feature cute, fuzzy pandas and majestic elephants don’t feature other species that are no less important and probably no less under threat: microorganisms. These are the viruses, bacteria,…

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Natural GM: How plants and animals steal genes from other species to accelerate evolution

Natural GM: How plants and animals steal genes from other species to accelerate evolution

Grassland in Uganda. Luke Dunning, Author provided By Luke Dunning, University of Sheffield Little did biologist Gregor Mendel know that his experiments with sweet peas in a monastery garden in Brno, Czech Republic, would lay the foundations for our understanding of modern genetics and inheritance. His work in the 19th century helped scientists to establish that parents pass their genetic information onto their offspring, and in turn, they pass it on to theirs. Indeed, this premise forms the basis of…

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At any one time, 20,000 Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the Earth, calculation determines

At any one time, 20,000 Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the Earth, calculation determines

Nature reports: Ever wondered how many Tyrannosaurus rex ever roamed the Earth? The answer is 2.5 billion over the two million or so years for which the species existed, according to a calculation published today in Science1. The figure has allowed researchers to estimate just how exceedingly rare it is for animals to fossilize. Palaeontologists led by Charles Marshall at the University of California, Berkeley, used a method employed by ecologists studying contemporary creatures to estimate the population density of…

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Just 3% of the world’s ecosystems remain intact, study suggests

Just 3% of the world’s ecosystems remain intact, study suggests

The Guardian reports: Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat, a study suggests. These fragments of wilderness undamaged by human activities are mainly in parts of the Amazon and Congo tropical forests, east Siberian and northern Canadian forests and tundra, and the Sahara. Invasive alien species including cats, foxes, rabbits, goats and camels have had a major impact on native species in Australia, with the study finding…

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First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

By Taylor White This spring, the biotechnology company Oxitec plans to release genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec says its technology will combat dengue fever, a potentially life-threatening disease, and other mosquito-borne viruses — such as Zika — mainly transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. While there have been more than 7,300 dengue cases reported in the United States between 2010 and 2020, a majority are contracted in Asia and the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Centers…

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The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false

The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false

Emma Marris writes: It’s late afternoon, late pandemic, and I’m watching a new nature documentary in bed, after taking the daintiest of hits from a weed pen. The show is called A Perfect Planet, and it is narrated by Sir David Attenborough. I am looking at the red eye of a flamingo, a molten lake surrounding a tiny black pupil. Now I am looking at drone footage of a massive colony of flamingos, the classic sweeping overhead shot, what my…

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Many viruses can infect humans without making us sick

Many viruses can infect humans without making us sick

Sarah Zhang writes: One of the most perplexing and enduring mysteries of the pandemic is also one of the most fundamental questions about viruses. How can the same virus that kills so many go entirely unnoticed in others? The mystery is hardly unique to COVID-19. SARS, MERS, influenza, Ebola, dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, West Nile, Lassa, Japanese encephalitis, Epstein-Barr, and polio can all be deadly in one person but asymptomatic in the next. But for most of human existence, we…

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To be fully human we must also be fully embodied animal

To be fully human we must also be fully embodied animal

Melanie Challenger writes: When I visited my grandmother at the undertakers, an hour or so before her funeral, I was struck by how different death is from sleep. A sleeping individual shimmers with fractional movements. The dead seem to rest in paused animation, so still they look smaller than in life. It’s almost impossible not to feel as if something very like the soul is no longer present. Yet my grandmother had also died with Alzheimer’s. Even in life, something…

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Scientists think play is valuable, but they’re not quite sure why

Scientists think play is valuable, but they’re not quite sure why

By Chris Woolston Anyone who has ever chucked a tennis ball in the general vicinity of a border collie knows that some animals take play very seriously. The intense stare, the tremble of anticipation, the apparent joy with every bounce, all in pursuit of inedible prey that tastes like the backyard. Dogs are far from the only animals that devote considerable time and energy to play. Juvenile wasps wrestle with hive mates, otters toss rocks between their paws, and human…

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