Small Things Considered

Talmudic Question #36

by Qetzal

Why are essentially all complex multicellular organisms eukaryotes? Read more →

Pico Who?

by Elio | You may have heard that the smallest free-living eukaryote is Ostreococcus tauri. So they say. O. tauri is indeed a tiny green alga. It is endowed with just one chloroplast, one mitochondrion, a Golgi body, and not much cytoplasm. Sometimes it is only 1.0 μm in diameter... Read more →

Ever Heard of Biomimicry?

by Elio | Recently I heard an exciting talk by biologist Dayna Baumeister, the co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild. Biomimicry, I found out, refers to the emulation of technologies used by living things for human applications. In their words: Biomimicry is the practice of developing sustainable technologies inspired by ideas from Nature. Read more →

Retrospective, July 2008

by Elio | Previous posts to this blog may be not easy to find. We present here a lightly annotated list of our "mini-essays" posted during the last year. You can also find them under "Categories" in the right-hand column of the Web page. Read more →

Summer Mirth

by Elio | A guy walks at night on a beach in California and stubs his toe against an old bottle, which breaks and releases a genie. “I’ll grant you one wish, oh Master,” says the genie... Read more →

Generation of Diversity, Phage Style

by Merry & Elio | We are proud of our adaptive immune system, and rightfully so. Splendid is its ability to recognize and respond to foreign molecules — even ones never previously encountered in our evolutionary history. Central to this is our talent for generating antibodies and T-cell antigen receptors with many, many different specificities. We do it by Read more →

Fine Reading: A New Colloquium on Fungi by the AAM

by Elio | here’s more to fungi than just mushrooms. So begins the Executive Summary of a new colloquium from the American Academy of Microbiology entitled The Fungal Kingdom. Well! Speaking as a lover of mushrooms, why then did they adorn the pages of the report with attractive images of button mushrooms, chanterelles, morels, and sulfur tufts? Read more →

Tales From Planet Fungus

by Ilham Naili | It was two years ago that I offered to my sister for her birthday the DVD set of Planet Earth, and I started to watch some episodes with her. A particular episode was memorable for both of us, as we watched an ant being literally possessed by an infecting fungus. Read more →

Talmudic Question #35

In Twisted Bacteria, César Sanchez poses the question: Why don't plants have any chlamydial symbionts? He proposes several possible answers and invites further speculation. We suggest you go to his website and post your comments there. Read more →