We-are-all-paranoid - Microbe Nerd Alert

The Good Place (2016-2020)

WATCH THIS VIDEO

a very, VERY important post. spread everywhere and screen record the video to your phone. or message me and ill happily send you the video. give to every woman and girl you know.

bc as they both said / demonstrated, its not only super easy to do, but super easy to miss.

return to

uncomposed

(Imprint from store-bought meat, Gram staining)

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.

google's search suggestion feature helps us to articulate a question that we've all been wondering about but have never been able to put into words: "Can bacteria make smarter?"

"Pelomyxa are giant amoeba, capable of growing as much as 5 millimeters in length. So it doesn't seem like they should be that difficult to find. In fact, Jame--our master of microscopes--found hundreds of them filling up his pond tank, completely visible without the help of a microscope. They were so large that he actually took one and touched it. So, if you would like to know what it feels like to pet an amoeba, he is now an expert. He says, "It's squishy.""

Journey to the Microcosmos- The Microbe That's Big Enough to Pet

Images Originally Captured by Jam's Germs

Quote Voiced by Hank Green

Study discovers that mitochondria transmit signals in the immune and nervous systems

The new study has revealed that mitochondria play a crucial role in the regulation of the NF-κB signaling pathway.

Mitochondria are primarily known as the powerhouse of the cell. However, these cellular organelles are required not only for providing energy: Professor Konstanze Winklhofer and her group at the Faculty of Medicine at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, recently discovered that mitochondria play an important role in signal transduction in innate immune pathways.

They regulate a signaling pathway that helps to eliminate pathogens, but can cause damage through inflammation upon overactivation. The research team published their findings in the EMBO Journal.

Continue Reading.

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.