Everything about the study of life: Biology!
why extreme food allergies are on the rise – and what we can do about them
More and more youngsters are experiencing serious reactions to everyday foods – and even our pets are suffering. We meet one family who lost a son to anaphylaxis and ask what can be done
This is a long article that covers a lot of ground. But there are many important bits of info scattered through it.
For example what is the role of diet on the skin barrier and cell barriers? Does lack of freshly prepared meat lead to cells building themselves from the wrong fatty acids which leads to immune problems?
I think nobody knows yet but it is being researched now. I also don't yet understand even the pieces that are well established by science.
Lewontin and Levins's The Dialectical Biologist remains a classic. But what does it mean to be dialectical, and how does it aid our struggle?
The evolutionary marvel mates in love trains, can swim in the ocean, and even uses jazz hands as a defensive tactic.
Darwin thought that family trees could explain evolution. The hoatzin suggests otherwise.
This bizarre bubble creature is a single 10cm living cell - Valonia Ventricosa
You know what’s weird? Looking at something large enough to hold in your hand and knowing it’s made up of a single, solitary cell.
Botanists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of British Columbia have discovered a new carnivorous plant in western North America.
Tiny creatures called rotifers wake up after 24,000 years
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Imagine taking a nap at a time when woolly mammoths roamed the plains… and then waking up in the twenty-first century. That may sound like a science fiction story, but it might be the real experience of tiny aquatic animals called rotifers.
a new study indicates crows have consciousness more complicated than stimulus-response
Watching a crow eagerly eye me for a peanut, I can’t help but wonder what it’s thinking about. Is it thinking the same thing as its flock mate, or is it having its own experience? Is it…
This synthesis of the paper was sanctioned by the original author, pace Kaeli on Twitter. Even if you're pretty much willing to take that top-level conclusion on faith, it's interesting to read about the experimental design.
this sparrow is evolving four sexes
Nature is so much weirder than people give her credit for. Anyway, if you're ever looking for cuter examples than lizards for your "actually sex isn't that simple" arguments, consider these guys?
Also, I choked on air reading this (in an otherwise touching piece):
In the early 1990s, however, it was too expensive and laborious to find answers by sequencing the bird's genome. So Tuttle initially focused on collecting more detail about their behaviour, such as how they selected mates and where they built nests. The goal was to understand what might affect offspring survival. She caught and tagged birds, drew blood samples and perfected the art of collecting semen. “Elaina was the best bird masturbator I ever met,” Gonser says.
Using a Raspberry Pi to control fruit flies — affordable, accessible way to study sensorimotor behaviour
Unravelling the logic of neural circuits underlying behavior requires precise control of sensory inputs based on the animal's behavior. This article presents Raspberry Pi Virtual Reality (PiVR) as an affordable tool designed to enable both academic labs and citizen-science projects to conduct such f...
The authors describe and extensively document how a Raspberry Pi can be used to, for example, study how fruit flies react to light. Why is this interesting? It provides ways to build a system that can react to the subject’s changes in behaviour using a very accessible platform: the humble Pi.
Not only can existing reactions to light or chemicals be studied using setups like these. By inserting genes that are sensitive to, for instance, light (optogenetics) in front of a gene of interest, you can control that gene’s expression using light!
Well, I just love it when researchers create a tool that is simply easier to use, build, and of course afford. Seeing a small thing powered by a familiar, tiny circuit board sitting on a table might make a cool new field all that more accessible, in general.