Microbiolgy & Virology Flash Cards I Made Today.

TheStare by © wildernessprints.com

Wild adult lynx in Banff National Park

DON’T GO IN THE WATER: NEW EVIDENCE THAT SOME DINOSAURS WERE STRONG SWIMMERS

Claw marks left on a river bottom in Sichuan, China are evidence for dinosaurs’ ability to swim relatively long distances. According to an international team of scientists in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin, theropod species of dinosaurs were able to travel in relatively deep bodies of water.

Keep reading

Your sunscreen is contributing to the decline of coral reefs

A new report has found that a common sunscreen ingredient is actually toxic to coral, and is killing off juvenile coral and severely damaging adult coral in high concentrations around the world, particularly in Hawaii and the Caribbean.

The ingredient in question? A UV-filtering chemical compound called oxybenzone - also known as BP-3 or Benzophenone-3 - which is found in 3,500 brands of sunscreen around the world, including L’Oreal Paris, Banana Boat, and Neutrogena.

 - ScienceAlert

Persistent Sexual Harassment Is a Primary Reason Women Leave STEM

““The absence of women within STEM programs is not only progressive, it is persistent,” Hope Jahren writes in a recent essay in the New York Times.

“Indeed, despite programs designed to interest girls in STEM, GoldieBlox, and supermodels celebrating the virtues of coding, the fields are still overwhelmingly male and seem virtually resistant to change. Jahren, a geochemist and geobiologist, argues that the problem is hardly one of enthusiasm, but rather widespread sexual harassment in the fields that, unsurprisingly, goes unpunished.

The kind of sexual harassment Jahren describes is hardly that of a Mad Men episode: groping and outright dickishness are easier to label and condemn as sexual harassment (and it’s worth noting that STEM has a problem with that too).

Rather, it’s the kind that prioritizes men’s feelings, and their expression of them, over the simple act of treating a woman as a professional colleague. Jahren persuasively argues that the persistence of this kind of behavior—the constant demand from both male colleagues and academic advisors that their feelings be acknowledged and legitimized—is one of the reasons women leave STEM fields.

An email forwarded to Jahren by a former student asking her advice typifies the problem:

[The student] forwarded an email she had received from a senior colleague that opened, “Can I share something deeply personal with you?” Within the email, he detonates what he described as a “truth bomb”: “All I know is that from the first day I talked to you, there hadn’t been a single day or hour when you weren’t on my mind.” He tells her she is “incredibly attractive” and “adorably dorky.” He reminds her, in detail, of how he has helped her professionally: “I couldn’t believe the things I was compelled to do for you.” He describes being near her as “exhilarating and frustrating at the same time” and himself as “utterly unable to get a grip” as a result. He closes by assuring her, “That’s just the way things are and you’re gonna have to deal with me until one of us leaves.”

It’s hard to imagine that the sender of the email thought that it would earn him the romantic admiration of his female colleague, coupled as it is with a vague threat likely meant to convey the authentic intensity of his attraction. And yet, as Jahren writes, this behavior has “been encountered by every single woman I know.”

Read the full piece here

Palau vs. the Poachers

The isolated nation of Palau, in the South Pacific, comprises 250 small islands that take up only 177 square miles combined. But international law extends its authority to 200 miles from its coast, giving it control over 230,000 square miles of ocean. For a relatively poor country with no military and a tiny marine police division, and waters teeming with poachers, it’s a tall order. But, as The New York Times reporter Ian Urbina writes, Palau has mounted an aggressive response: it has banned bottom trawling and shark fishing, employed the latest in surveillance technology, and provided a model for collaboration among countries, companies and NGOs.

Reportage photographer visited Palau on assignment for The Times to show the marine police’s efforts and the natural resources they are trying to protect.

Read the article in this week’s issue of The New York Times Magazine.

by TINA HESMAN SAEY

SAN DIEGO — Cell biologists are taking clues from marching ants, flocking birds and other animals to learn how groups of cells move through the body.

Such studies are yielding insights about cell movement during development as well as the spread of cancer. Learning about cells’ social interactions may give researchers new ways to peer pressure cells into good behavior.

Cell biologists have traditionally studied individual cells or how groups of physically connected cells move. It’s only in the past few years that researchers have begun to regard cells as individuals with collective behavior. Taking cues from the linked movements of animals helps researchers “understand how cells, which everybody assumed had minds of their own, could possibly move as a group,” says Brian Stramer, a cell biologist at King’s College London.

Developmental biologist Roberto Mayor and colleagues have collected evidence that the migration of some important developmental cells is akin to the movement of swarming locusts. Mayor, of University College London, described the mass migration of neural crest cells December 13 at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology.

Neural crest cells are developmentally flexible cells in embryos that help form the bones and cartilage of the face, some nerves and brain cells, smooth muscle and other tissues. Some scientists have proposed that changes in early movements of these cells may lead to juvenile physical features in domesticated animals (SN: 8/23/14, p. 7).

Like locusts that cringe away from nipping neighbors, neural crest cells repel each other thanks to a process known as “contact inhibition of locomotion,” Mayor and colleagues found. Avoidance can increase the ability of cells to move in groups; cells that move astray and bump into a neighbor change course and move in the right direction again. A large crowd governed only by avoidance tactics, though, tends to break into smaller cliques, the researchers discovered in computer simulations. Cells are not just repelled by each other; they are also often attracted to other cells. That attraction causes cells to play follow-the-leader. On its own, attraction produces a group of cells that don’t get very far, computer simulations showed. A balance between avoidance and attraction produces the most efficient mass migrations, the simulations suggest.

(excerpt - click the link for the complete article)

A Deep Sea Squid Cares for Her Eggs

In recent years, submersibles have allowed scientists to explore the lives of deep-sea animals in ways that were not possible before. One of the many exciting discoveries was that a mother of the deep-sea squid species Gonatus onyx broods her eggs by holding them in her arms, a behavior that had never been previously reported for squids.

This shocking discovery was the first time scientists had evidence of parental care in squids. In 2012, a team of researchers led by Stephanie Bush, reported finding another species of deep-sea squid that broods eggs, Bathyteuthis berryi, suggesting that this form of parental care may be a common solution to a reproductive problem for deep-sea squids.

Watch a video about this amazing deep-sea discovery:

http://ow.ly/ZS9jc

(via: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute)

Bacteria use their own pumps to collect magnesium

Researchers at UiO and NCMM have discovered that the system used by bacteria to transport magnesium is so sensitive that it can detect a pinch of magnesium salt in a swimming pool.

Researchers at NCMM, the Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway at UiO and Oslo University Hospital have shown exactly how sensitive the bacteria’s transport system is.

Researcher Jens Preben Morth tells us ‘We have identified a nano-sized magnesium pump.’

The researchers manipulated an E. coli bacterium so that it overproduced using its own magnesium pump. 'The pump was isolated in the bacterium’s cell membrane.’ There are different methods of achieving this type of isolation. We could either divide up the proteins according to size, or we could examine the positive or negative electric charges of the proteins on the surface of the pump. 'As soon as the pump was isolated, we were able to work with the pure protein without disruption from other proteins,’ Morth explains. With the aid of enzyme kinetics, a special method of analysing chemical reactions, the researchers were able to obtain a calculation of the sensitivity to magnesium.

Saranya Subramani, Harmonie Perdreau-Dahl, Jens Preben Morth. The magnesium transporter A is activated by cardiolipin and is highly sensitive to free magnesium in vitro. eLife, 2016; 5 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.11407

The bacteria are shown in green. The multi-coloured area shows how the pump rests on the bacterial membrane (pink). The ‘machine’ itself inside the membrane is shown in orange. The grey dots are magnesium atoms. Credit: Jens Preben Morth, UiO

The Micro Monsters Beneath Your Beach Blanket

Little things live big lives between grains of sand...

Slithering and clawing and swimming through the liquid film between individual grains of sand, mud, and other sediment, is a thriving ecosystem of microscopic organisms that spend their entire existence in a world so miniscule that, as Rachel Carson once wrote, a droplet of water separating two grains of sand is “like a vast, dark sea.”

Unicellular organisms coat the sediments and ride the water between the grains. And animals, microscopic to us yet behemoths to the bacteria, algae, and protists they share these interstitial worlds with, take the roles of herbivore, carnivore, and detritivore to create rich and complex food webs…