*sticks My Hand In Your Nucleus And Swirls Your Dna Around*

fruitie punches

Like humans, these big-brained birds may owe their smarts to long childhoods

Human beings typically don’t leave the nest until well into our teenage years—a relatively rare strategy among animals. But corvids—a group of birds that includes jays, ravens, and crows—also spend a lot of time under their parents’ wings. Now, in a parallel to humans, researchers have found that ongoing tutelage by patient parents may explain how corvids have managed to achieve their smarts.

Stop the ban on blood donation of gay men

my friend is studying for the mcat and was just trying to explain to me about heat transfer and she said ‘you know, like the reason you get cold when you go outside on a freezing day is that your tiny human body is trying to warm up the entire universe’ and i think that’s the best thing i have ever heard

candida and lactobacillus image under microscope / routine laboratory diaries

Reminder that the "fittest" in "survival of the fittest" does not mean "strongest/most violent".

It refers to an animal that is best fitted to thriving in a given ecological niche. A fit animal is one that is successful at the tasks of finding food food and water, avoiding predators, and reproducing, by whatever means work best for their situation.

Women in STEM are just witches in white lab coats instead of black robes

art source: abigaillarson-Poisonous Plants irenhorrors-Drawlloween Laboratory

Slime Molds and Intelligence

Okay, despite going into a biology related field, I only just learned about slime molds, and hang on, because it gets WILD.

This guy in the picture is called Physarum polycephalum, one of the more commonly studied types of slime mold. It was originally thought to be a fungus, though we now know it to actually be a type of protist (a sort of catch-all group for any eukaryotic organism that isn't a plant, animal, or a fungus). As protists go, it's pretty smart. It is very good at finding the most efficient way to get to a food source, or multiple food sources. In fact, placing a slime mold on a map with food sources at all of the major cities can give a pretty good idea of an efficient transportation system. Here is a slime mold growing over a map of Tokyo compared to the actual Tokyo railway system:

Pretty good, right? Though they don't have eyes, ears, or noses, the slime molds are able to sense objects at a distance kind of like a spider using tiny differences in tension and vibrations to sense a fly caught in its web. Instead of a spiderweb, though, this organism relies on proteins called TRP channels. The slime mold can then make decisions about where it wants to grow. In one experiment, a slime mold was put in a petri dish with one glass disk on one side and 3 glass disks on the other side. Even though the disks weren't a food source, the slime mold chose to grow towards and investigate the side with 3 disks over 70% of the time.

Even more impressive is that these organisms have some sense of time. If you blow cold air on them every hour on the hour, they'll start to shrink away in anticipation when before the air hits after only 3 hours.

Now, I hear you say, this is cool and all, but like, I can do all those things too. The slime mold isn't special...

To which I would like to point out that you have a significant advantage over the slime mold, seeing as you have a brain.

Yeah, these protists can accomplish all of the things I just talked about, and they just... don't have any sort of neural architecture whatsoever? They don't even have brain cells, let alone the structures that should allow them to process sensory information and make decisions because of it. Nothing that should give them a sense of time. Scientists literally have no idea how this thing is able to "think'. But however it does, it is sure to be a form of cognition that is completely and utterly different from anything that we're familiar with.

Two neurons sensing each other and trying to connect

Credit: @rockatscientist

Good bacteria may eliminate bad bacteria better than antibiotics

Experimental technology is like a microscopic poison arrow shot from a good bacterium to eliminate a bad bacterium under specific conditions.

The bacteria wars are coming. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have pitted “good” bacteria against “bad” bacteria and the good guys, it appears, are winning.

If the system can be scaled, this new approach could potentially replace antibiotics, which are increasingly struggling against antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.” For the TAU study, the researchers used a toxin injection system known as a “Type 6 Secretion System.” It’s usually deployed by pathogenic (“bad”) bacteria. They introduced the system into a “friendly” bacterium, Vibrio natriegens, which is not harmful to humans. The researchers described their technology as similar to a microscopic poison arrow shot from a good bacterium to eliminate a bad bacterium under specific conditions. “The system that we built allows us to engineer ‘good’ bacteria that can recognize pathogenic bacteria, attack them with toxins, and neutralize them,” explains Dr. Dor Salomon, who co-led the study. “We know how to change and control every component in the system and create a bacterium that neutralizes different strains of bacteria. This is proof of feasibility, showing that we have the knowledge and ability to create bacteria that take advantage of this killing system and may serve as antibiotic treatments. ”The current bacteria prototype is best suited for bugs that occur naturally in saltwater. This is a growing concern, as fish and seafood constitute a major food source in many regions of the world. “Their productivity is severely impaired as a result of bacteria-borne diseases,” Solomon notes, “and since we want to avoid pouring antibiotics into aquaculture farms, a biological solution such as the one we have developed is an effective alternative.” The system will eventually be adapted to treat pathogenic bacteria in humans, farm animals and plants. Tel Aviv University has filed a patent application through Ramot, the university’s technology-transfer company. In addition to Solomon, Dr. Biswanath Jana and Kinga Kappel of the department of clinical microbiology and immunology at TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine participated in the research. The results were published this month in the scientific journal EMBO Reports.