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Inspiring Science

~ Casting light on great ideas

Inspiring Science

Tag Archives: biology

The Ten-legged Spider

18 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by sedeer in Arthropods

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

animals, arthropod, biology, camel spider, naturalist, Popular science, science, Science in Society

Every word in the title is a lie. The creature I’d like to introduce isn’t a spider and it doesn’t have ten legs, but that was exactly what I thought when I got a good look at it, which wasn’t the first time I saw it. The first time I saw it, I thought it might have been a plant’s root or some kind of stolon. I had just jumped in for a swim on Saturday afternoon when I saw something brown at the bottom of the pool. It wasn’t moving, and it seemed to be about the size of my thumb. Grabbing the sieve, I dived down and fished it out, then called my partner over. “Can you have a better look at this and see what it is? I think it’s some kind of root, but I can’t really see it properly.” My long, wet hair was obscuring my vision and I was trying to keep the sieve above water.

“It’s a spider,” she said. “A gigantic spider!” (It was gigantic — around 8-9cm across!) I’m lucky enough to be married to someone with a fascination for creepy-crawlies; with a smile, she deposited the dead spider in a jar for later examination and then joined me in the pool. Continue reading →

How Some Critters Evolved to Eat Poison

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by sedeer in Arthropods, Evolution, Insects, Plants

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

animals, biology, Herbivore, insects, plants, poison, Popular science, science, toxin

Since plants generally can’t move around, they have to rely on other strategies to cope with animals eager to turn them into a meal. Chemical weapons are a significant part of plants’ defensive arsenal. For example, thousands of plant species produce precursors of the deadly poison hydrogen cyanide; when an animal eats the plant, the precursors get converted into cyanide, which kills the offending animal. Continue reading →

Book review: We Are Our Brains

28 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by sedeer in Books, Development, Humans, Mind

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

biology, book, book review, brain, mind, neuroscience, Popular science, science, Science communication

'We Are Our Brains' by Dick SwaabI have mixed feelings about We Are Our Brains. The author, Dick Swaab, is a professor of neurobiology at Amsterdam University with decades of research experience and many awards to his name, so the book is full of fascinating and intriguing information. Unfortunately, I felt like the delivery was somewhat lacking, leaving me with more questions and wanting more information. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but I feel like the book could have done a much better job of handling some of the inevitable questions and challenges it raises — it could benefit from engaging in dialogue with the reader rather than simply making assertions. Continue reading →

The give-and-take between mothers and their offspring

27 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by sedeer in Development, Evolution, Genetics

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

animals, biology, Developmental biology, Education, evolution, Genetics, imprinting, nursing, offspring, Popular science, science

Image credit: Flickr user nekrumThis is a story about a gene which makes nursing mice produce more nutritious milk while also making their offspring less demanding. The gene serves to balance nutrient supply and demand between the mother and pup. If the gene is knocked out, the mother’s milk is less rich, but the pups are more demanding, evening out the impact. Things only go wrong when there’s a mismatch. If pups with a defective copy of the gene feed from a normal mother, their increased demand makes them grow larger than normal. Conversely, pups with a good copy end up smaller if they feed from a mother lacking a working copy, since her milk is less nutritious. Continue reading →

The Right Way to Fall

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by sedeer in Links, Mammals

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

animals, Behavior, biology, cat, Education, freefall, gecko, Popular science, science

My latest story on Beacon is about how cats and other animals manage to always land on their feet. It turns out to be a pretty impressive maneuver, and geckos have evolved and entirely different trick to accomplish the same thing:

There’s no need to go far afield to find wonders of the natural world; sometimes it just takes a shift of perspective to notice how they abound in our homes and neighborhoods. Cats, for example, are exquisite animals, with an uncanny ability to take a fall harmlessly by righting themselves in midair. Several years ago, my cat slipped off a sixth-storey ledge, falling something like 20 meters onto hard concrete. She was limping for a few weeks, but her knee healed and there’s no sign of the injury left. How cats manage such a feat is a question which has occupied scientists for over a century; it’s been the subject of in-depth studies in physics, physiology, and even robotics. While some of the details are still unclear, the essential picture is that cats (almost) always land on their feet thanks to an impressive spine-flexing twist maneuver which turns them upright in midair.

Head over to Beacon for the full story…

The Language of DNA

29 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by sedeer in Evolution, Genetics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

biology, codon, DNA, evolution, Genetics, language, Popular science, redundancy, science, translation

One of the striking things about the genetic code is the remarkable way it twists back on itself, combining redundancy and utility in a simple, elegant language. Many of us are introduced to the basic concept in school, but that introduction often leaves out the wrinkles — some of them newly discovered — which give the system its resilience and precision. Despite their complexity, most of these tricks are pretty easy to explain with linguistic analogies, which is precisely what I’m going to try in this post. Continue reading →

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  • I want you to hear me loud and clear – IntentionallyMonika on No secrets by the lakeside: how water affects sound
  • Melissa Beard Broshears on The Ten-legged Spider
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All text and original images by Sedeer El-Showk. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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