by Qetzal
Why are essentially all complex multicellular organisms eukaryotes?
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Talmudic Question #36
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...
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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.
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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. Earlier, you could also find them under "Categories" in the right-hand column of the Web page. Now, the "Categories" can be found in the page footer (Some posts are listed in more than one category.)
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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...
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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