An amazing critter with seven sexes!

29 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by sedeer in Genetics, Microbiology

Tags

biology, Mating type, Popular science, science, sex, Tetrahymena, Unicellular organism

If you’ve never heard of Tetrahymena thermophila, your world is about to get much stranger. This little beauty, a single-celled creature that’s been at the heart of many major discoveries, has seven sexes that can mate with each other! In a paper just published in PLoS Biology, a team of scientists have described the intricate dance of DNA editing and rearrangement which determines the sex of a new T. thermophila.

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Planck looks back at the first billion, billion, billionth of a second

21 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by sedeer in Astronomy

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Big Bang, CMB, Cosmic Background Explorer, Cosmic microwave background radiation, cosmology, ESA, European Space Agency, physics, Planck, Popular science, science, universe, WMAP

This morning, the European Space Agency (ESA) released the results from the Planck mission, a satellite designed to peer back at the earliest fraction of a second of the universe. It’s not our first glimpse of those early moments, but it’s the best look we’ve had to date. While the data from the Planck mission doesn’t overturn our understanding of the universe, it’s a treasure trove for theoretical physicists and brings some exciting questions to the fore.

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Northern lights!

18 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by sedeer in Astronomy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aurora, aurora australis, aurora borealis, earth, Helsinki, Magnetic field, northern lights, Popular science, science, solar flare, southern lights, space weather, sun

Early on the morning of March 15th, there was a massive explosion on the surface of the sun. Magnetic field lines came together and reconnected, releasing immense amounts of energy in a coronal mass ejection which electrically charged particles hurtling out into space. Fortunately, the CME was on the Earthward face of the sun. Better still, it seemed to be directed straight at us.
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Skybugs: ecosystems above and below

13 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by sedeer in Bacteria

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

biology, Caribbean Sea, Cloud, ecosystem, hurricanes, microbes, Popular science, science

I’ve already written several times about the bacteria in the clouds and what they do up there; now, a new study from the Georgia Institue of Technology in Atlanta has described the communities formed by the bugs in the sky. In a paper published in the journal PNAS, the researchers detailed the communities of skybugs and how their composition is affected by storms, giving us a better understanding of life in the sky. Not only might this help us better understand atmospheric chemistry, but it may also shed further light on how microbes spread, which could impact the dynamics of everything from ecosystems to diseases.
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Rats with (not quite) telepathy

08 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by sedeer in Mammals, Mind

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

animals, biology, brain, Miguel Nicolelis, Popular science, Rat, science

Ten years ago, Professor Miguel Nicolelis and his team at Duke University made history. They implanted electrodes — sensors — into a monkey’s brain and trained her to control a robotic arm with her thoughts. That may sound like the stuff of science-fiction, but his latest work is even more incredible. In a paper recently published in Scientific Reports, Professor Nicolelis and his team used similar technology to enable a pair of rats to communicate — one brain to another — even when they were a continent apart. If you’ve read some of the news coverage of this story, you may have gotten the idea that it’s some kind of telepathy, mind control or mind meld. It’s not, but the truth, though more down-to-earth, is no less exciting. Continue reading →

Words of science: interstitial

02 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by sedeer in Language, Words of Science

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

etymology, language, Popular science, science, vocabulary, words, Words of Science

Like many other fields, science has its own style of communication full of specific jargon and guided by unwritten rules. Most of the posts on this blog focus on breaching this barrier to the public’s understanding and appreciation of science. In this series, I’d like to take another approach by highlighting scientific words which have escaped the confines of jargon to reach a broader appeal because of their sound or their evocative power as metaphors. Today’s word is interstitial. [Previous words of science were petrichor, alluvium, nychthemeron, and crepuscular .]
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