Pavlov's Stepson

alchymista:

Coccolithophores

Tiny coccolithophores have had a big impact on the planet over time. Though they are single-celled, these photosynthesising organisms are enclosed in a mosaic, or cage, of microscopic plates that make many very beautiful to look at. The plates are made of calcium carbonate, which the coccoliths pull from the surrounding water. As these small organisms live and die in their trillions, they bequeath their tiny plates to the ocean floor where they form rocks such as chalk. Over geological time, coccoliths have removed significant amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to keep Earth cool as the sun grew hotter.

blamoscience:

Sundew plants are carnivorous, consuming insects by capturing them with small adhesive balls on the ends of their tentacles. The sundew’s adhesive has remarkable elasticity, stretching to 1 million times its normal size (most rubber bands can only stretch to six times their original size). Such elasticity would make the adhesive dew secreted from the plant an effective choice for coating replacement body parts, regenerating dying tissues, healing wounds and improving synthetic adhesives. It is also economical—it’s so sticky and elastic that less than a microliter (smaller than the period at the end of a sentence) would cover 25 millimeters squared (or the size of George Washington’s face on a dollar bill).

Is cloning an organism the same as cloning a gene?

You’ve heard about cloning animals - sheep, mice, even house pets - in the news. From time to time, you may have also heard about researchers cloning, or identifying, genes that are responsible for various medical conditions or traits.

What is the difference?

Cloning an animal, or any other organism, refers to making an exact genetic copy of that organism. The techniques used to clone organisms are described on this page.

Cloning a gene means isolating an exact copy of a single gene from the entire genome of an organism. Usually this involves copying the DNA sequence of that gene into a smaller, more accessible piece of DNA, such as a plasmid. This makes it easier to study the function of the individual gene in the laboratory.

cwnl:

Multicellular Life Evolves in Laboratory

I think It’s time people started embracing evolution as a fact. An evolutionary transition that took several billion years to occur in nature has happened in a laboratory, and it needed just 60 days.

Under artificial pressure to become larger, single-celled yeast became multicellular creatures. That crucial step is responsible for life’s progression beyond algae and bacteria, and while the latest work doesn’t duplicate prehistoric transitions, it could help reveal the principles guiding them.

“This is actually simple. It doesn’t need mystical complexity or a lot of the things that people have hypothesized — special genes, a huge genome, very unnatural conditions,” said evolutionary biologist Michael Travisano of the University of Minnesota, co-author of a study Jan. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

biocanvas:

A 630-times view of a cell infected with poxvirus, a virus from the same family as smallpox and monkeypox.

Image by Daniel Kalman, et al., Emory Univeristy.

14-billion-years-later:

Forbidden Colours

The news that there are “colours” that you cannot see should not be new news to you. The idea that mixtures of colours based off the visible spectrum that you still cannot see may be however. Certain colours, such as pink, are mixtures of different wavelengths of light, but other colours that are mixtures simply cannot be perceived and sound a bit like a real life octarine. These are colours such as red-green and blue-yellow, which are not actually what you get when you mix the two, but really a reddish variety of green or a bluish yellow colour. So why can’t we see these colours? The answer lies in what are known as “opponent neurons” in the eye’s retina. When red is seen one type of these neurons will fire, which the brain sees as red, when green is seen the neuron is silent and this lack of signaling is perceived as green. Interestingly this is also the basis of Red-Green colour blindness. So although these colours actually exist, we cannot see them because we cannot have a neuron firing and not firing at the same time.

ocelott:

cwnl:

Neon Eel

This close-up view of the Gymnothorax undulates species of moray eel shows its distinctive pattern of light, lime-green speckles on a dark olive background. Its sinister smile brings to mind the malicious twin moray eels from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.”

Credit: Cigdem Sean Cooper

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(Source: ikenbot)

brandneway:

Mating Nudibranchs

Photograph by David Doubilet