Become part of a research project about zombie ants!

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by sedeer in Arthropods, Disease, Hymenoptera, Insects, Microbiology

Tags

Ant, ants, biology, Coryceps, crowd funding, fungus, manipulation, microbes, Microryza, mind control, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, Parasitism, Popular science, Research, science, science and society

I’ve written about mind-controlling parasites and I’ve also written about ants a couple of times, but for some reason I still haven’t written about the famous “zombie ants“. These fascinating, macabre little wonders are ants that have been infected by a fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) which manipulates their behaviour. The fungus makes the ant climb up at plant stalk and bite into the underside of a leaf, clinging to it in a death grip. The fungus then kills the ant, consuming its innards before sending a reproductive stalk out through the corpse’s head.

I recently found out about an exciting research project looking into how the fungus manages its manipulation of the ant. Charissa de Bekker, a post-doc at Penn State University, is using Microryza to crowdfund her project, which will investigate what genes are active in the fungus’ manipulation of the ant. Since I think it’s an awesome project, I invited her to answer a few questions about herself and her work. Read on to find out what she has to say, and if you think the project sounds interesting or useful, consider backing it on Microryza — she’s got 11 days left to reach her goal! Continue reading →

One year on!

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by sedeer in Blog

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

animals, Bacteria, biology, blogging, evolution, Insecta, Research, science, Science communication

Today officially marks the first anniversary of Inspiring Science, and it’s been a great year! I think I managed to make some progress towards the goals I outlined in my first post. Over the course of the past year, I’ve learned how to make my writing more accessible and become better at engaging with non-scientists, though unfortunately I haven’t managed to write as frequently as I would have liked. I hope I can rectify that and continue to improve those skills, but I’m also going to try to do a better job of fostering discussion over the next 12 months. I have a few ideas about how to do that; we’ll see how well they pan out. (If you have a suggestion, let me know!)

If you’re one of the newer readers, why not take a romp through the archives? There’s some good stuff buried on there that doesn’t often make it onto the “What’s popular now?” list in the sidebar. I’ve also picked five posts from the past year which I wish had received more attention and listed them below; I hope you’ll enjoy them.

With that said, I look forward to another year of writing about science; thanks for reading, commenting and generally keeping me company on this adventure! If you have any suggestions about what I could do differently or better (or what I’m doing well) please leave a comment so I can learn and improve. 🙂

Petition for Open Access

27 Sunday May 2012

Posted by sedeer in Links

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Funding of science, Journals, Open Access, Petition, Research, science, science and society, Science communication, Science in Society

At the moment, many of the studies I write about on this blog are published by journals retain the copyright and charge access. (A notable exception is the PLoS family of journals.) The fee charged by these journals is significant, meaning people are unlikely to have access to this research except via an institute such as a university. This is problematic since much of the research that went into producing those articles was publicly funded: why should the taxpayer have to pay once to support the research and again to access the results? Why should the private publishing companies reap massive profits from publicly funded research? One solution, which I’ve mentioned before, is Open Access, the unrestricted publication of publicly funded research results online. The people at access2research have started a “We the People” petition to get the Obama administration to address this issue. They need to collect about 7,000 more signatures before June 19, so if you agree with the idea of open access to the results of taxpayer-funded research, please head over and sign the petition.