(via Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP085YW60D8)

الشيخ عبد الباسط عبد الصمد(التكوير و سورة القدر)روعة (by theeslamcena)

Magnified Photos of Creepy Crawlies

Colorado Potato Beetle magnified 100x. ‘As you might infer from its name, this bug loves potato crops and destroys plenty of them (and sometimes eggplant and tomato crops, too).‘

A schistosome parasite magnified 256x. This parasite ‘can penetrate the skin of people who come into contact with contaminated water. After several weeks, the parasites mature into adult worms, which live and produce eggs in blood vessels.’

‘Looks kind of like a sloth, doesn’t it? A sloth that climbs through your hair (and sometimes your eyebrows and eyelashes) laying eggs. Adult lice are just 2 to 3 mm long; this one has been magnified 200 times.’

This capture of a Bed Bug ‘shows the insect’s mouthparts, which it uses to pierce skin and drink your blood while you sleep.’

The infamous Water Bear, also known as a tardigrade, is much less adorable in real life than it is in many people’s imagination. But no matter how cute you find them, they’re indisputably badasses of nature, showing the ability to survive the vacuum of space.

See more magnified creepy crawlers at Mental_Floss

No bacterium is an island.

Many people think of bacteria as tiny Lone Rangers, paddling their flagellar canoes across the desolate petri dish sea. But in “the wild”, bacteria exist as complex, interwoven, constantly competing social communities.

Every scoop of soil is a battlefield of chemical chatter. Species send out molecular messages-in-a-bottle that ride the waves of diffusion to their mates. Some even thread electrical cables between neighboring cells. Now, new research has identified elaborate shared membranes that let single cells swarm as a superorganism …

Check out my latest article for Wired all about a soil bacterium named Myxococcus xanthus. It’s under everyone’s feet right now, and it has developed one of the most elaborate physical webs ever witnessed in bacteria. That’s it up top, devouring a colony of E. coli using its patented rippling wave attack.

It’s a stealth communication network that lets them hunt like a tiny wolfpack. So cool. Plus I got to use a GIF, so double win.

Once you’re done with that, check out this great TED talk from Bonnie Bassler all about how bacteria communicate.

A Basic Demonstration of Optical Cloaking (by UniversityRochester)

JUST THE FAQS: Top Scientists Around the Nation Call for a Unified Microbiome Initiative

Writing in the journal Science this week, a group of top microbiome researchers from around the country, including UC San Diego School of Medicine’s Rob Knight, PhD, and Pieter Dorrestein, PhD, lay out a proposal for what they call a Unified Microbiome Initiative. This latest post in the JUST THE FAQS series takes a look at what that means and why it’s important.

What is the Unified Microbiome Initiative?

The proposed Unified Microbiome Initiative is a national effort to fund, coordinate and accelerate microbiome research — the study of the microbial communities (bacteria, viruses, etc.) that live in, on and around us.

Why do we need this?

According to the authors of this proposal, the microbiome field currently lacks many of the technologies and resources required to take the research from where it is today (i.e., mostly describing what microbes are living where) to the next level — understanding exactly how microbes influence our health and how we might be able to manipulate them to our benefit.

“… such knowledge could transform our understanding of the world and launch innovations in agriculture, energy, health, the environment and more,” the authors write in the proposal.

This ambitious undertaking cannot be accomplished by individual laboratories working in isolation. Developing these tools requires new collaborations between physical, life, and biomedical sciences, engineering and many other disciplines. Advancing this nascent field also depends on attracting, training and supporting multidisciplinary networks of scientists and engineers, all things that could be accomplished through a concerted national effort, Knight, Dorrestein and their co-authors say.

Wait, what is the microbiome again?

Your body contains as many as 10 times more microbial cells than human cells. Even crazier, that adds up to two to 20 million microbial genes, compared to your 20,000 or so human genes. By that measure, you could say you’re actually only about 10 percent human.

Researchers like Knight, Dorrestein and their teams are now mapping the other 90 percent — the collections of microbial genes (“microbiomes”) found in our guts, mouths, skin, and many other locations on and around the body. They’re finding that the makeup of our gut microbiomes is associated with a rapidly growing list of diseases and conditions: food allergies, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, atherosclerosis, asthma, perhaps even anxiety, depression and autism. But researchers don’t yet know why these associations occur, whether they are cause or effect, and whether or not we could use gut microbiome readouts for medical predictions, diagnoses or treatments.

And that’s just the gut microbiome. Imagine what researchers will find when they dive as deeply into the microbiomes of the rest of our bodies, as well as our homes, the ocean and other environments. That’s why Knight, Dorrestein and many other experts are today calling for a collaborative, well-supported United Microbiome Initiative.

To learn more about Knight’s and Dorrestein’s microbiome work, check out: Antibiotic Resistance in Microbiomes, Despite Isolation from Western Civilization

3D Human Skin Maps Aid Study of Relationships Between Molecules, Microbes and Environment

Pictured: Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. Source: NIAID

JUST THE FAQS: Top Scientists Around the Nation Call for a Unified Microbiome Initiative

Writing in the journal Science this week, a group of top microbiome researchers from around the country, including UC San Diego School of Medicine’s Rob Knight, PhD, and Pieter Dorrestein, PhD, lay out a proposal for what they call a Unified Microbiome Initiative. This latest post in the JUST THE FAQS series takes a look at what that means and why it’s important.

What is the Unified Microbiome Initiative?

The proposed Unified Microbiome Initiative is a national effort to fund, coordinate and accelerate microbiome research — the study of the microbial communities (bacteria, viruses, etc.) that live in, on and around us.

Why do we need this?

According to the authors of this proposal, the microbiome field currently lacks many of the technologies and resources required to take the research from where it is today (i.e., mostly describing what microbes are living where) to the next level — understanding exactly how microbes influence our health and how we might be able to manipulate them to our benefit.

“… such knowledge could transform our understanding of the world and launch innovations in agriculture, energy, health, the environment and more,” the authors write in the proposal.

This ambitious undertaking cannot be accomplished by individual laboratories working in isolation. Developing these tools requires new collaborations between physical, life, and biomedical sciences, engineering and many other disciplines. Advancing this nascent field also depends on attracting, training and supporting multidisciplinary networks of scientists and engineers, all things that could be accomplished through a concerted national effort, Knight, Dorrestein and their co-authors say.

Wait, what is the microbiome again?

Your body contains as many as 10 times more microbial cells than human cells. Even crazier, that adds up to two to 20 million microbial genes, compared to your 20,000 or so human genes. By that measure, you could say you’re actually only about 10 percent human.

Researchers like Knight, Dorrestein and their teams are now mapping the other 90 percent — the collections of microbial genes (“microbiomes”) found in our guts, mouths, skin, and many other locations on and around the body. They’re finding that the makeup of our gut microbiomes is associated with a rapidly growing list of diseases and conditions: food allergies, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, atherosclerosis, asthma, perhaps even anxiety, depression and autism. But researchers don’t yet know why these associations occur, whether they are cause or effect, and whether or not we could use gut microbiome readouts for medical predictions, diagnoses or treatments.

And that’s just the gut microbiome. Imagine what researchers will find when they dive as deeply into the microbiomes of the rest of our bodies, as well as our homes, the ocean and other environments. That’s why Knight, Dorrestein and many other experts are today calling for a collaborative, well-supported United Microbiome Initiative.

To learn more about Knight’s and Dorrestein’s microbiome work, check out: Antibiotic Resistance in Microbiomes, Despite Isolation from Western Civilization

3D Human Skin Maps Aid Study of Relationships Between Molecules, Microbes and Environment

Pictured: Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. Source: NIAID

This week’s infographic is a metabolic map showing the chemical reactions that happen inside our body. You can check out the full size version here.

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