Why read about Science?
This post is about why should anyone bother to write about science, to ‘do’ science writing. But really I’m interested in two other things here, consider this post a conversation starter. Firstly, you, the reader, why do you read about science? Or if you don’t, what would it take for you to do so? (Also, [...]
Science Hubb update: Designs, facebook pages and being published! Yay!
This post is just on a few things I thought I’d update you with about what been going on lately with Science Hubb. First up, and least consequential, I made a new logo and header things for the site, which you can see above. I struggled for a while trying to thing of designs that felt appropriate [...]
Osedax: Ancient bone eaters
Somewhere, in the depths of the ocean, a marine ambrosia descends from above; the body of a dead whale. Despite the depth, the corpse won’t be in solitude long; a mini-ecosystem will soon erupt around it, one that could last a decade. The body draws hag fish, sea cucumbers, rat tail fish, brittle star fish, a [...]
Flying Mammals and a New Jumping Gene
Within our DNA are the remains of thousands, maybe millions, of genetic nomads. They once roamed free through the landscape of our genomes; now most are silenced and still, unable to move. These are the ‘jumping genes’, or ‘transposable elements’ to give them their proper name; curious stretches of mobile DNA. Almost 50% of our [...]
Slimy, Weird, Cheaters
Lurking in gutters, gardens and forests, just under-foot, lies something strange. Something almost alien. They lead independent lives as single cells foraging for, and feeding on, bacteria. But when food becomes scarce they work together, in their millions, forming a multicellular ‘organism’ of individuals. In this form they’re more mobile; moving about, looking for food [...]
Food fight: Bacteria’s biological warfare
You’re not just eating for one. You’re eating for trillions. We like to think of ourselves as an individual, but the truth is we are never alone. We are a buzzing hive of bacteria and other microbes that make up our ‘microbiome’. They eke out a living in whatever niches they can find, our skin [...]
Fighting fat with… fat?
What do explosives and weight loss have in common?* To find out we need to go back to World War One, to a munitions factory in France. People working with explosives were running high temperatures and losing weight. Some dangerously so. This was no fever, due to some viral or bacterial infection. It was due [...]
A dried up celibate kleptomaniac
If there’s one thing that biologists agree on, it’s that sex is good. Really good*. Huge amounts of time and energy are invested in it. Well, alas, not so much in the act per se, as much as in finding a way to have sex; to tempt a mate or dispatch a rival. But is it [...]
My enemy’s enemy is my… enemy?
Like a kind of Russian doll infection, a prolific human parasite—responsible for almost 250 million infections annually—can itself harbour a parasite, a virus. You might reasonably feel a sense of something akin to schadenfreude; glad it’s getting a dose of its own medicine, so to speak… But you may be too hasty. The very presence of this [...]
An Unlikely Traveler In The ‘Death Zone’…
It’s called the ‘death zone’. The area above 8,000 meters where humans can no longer acclimatise to the effects of altitude; the oxygen is too low, the air too thin. We can only venture there briefly if we want to survive*. Yet despite the thin air and low oxygen there are reports of an unlikely visitor: [...]
Waking the (Tiny) giant…
Nestled safely away within your cells, among your DNA, lies something…foreign. An invader. Something you weren’t born with, hidden, evading your immune system and waiting to make its next strike: a ‘latent’ virus. In all probability, there are armies of different viruses performing this same trick throughout your body. Remaining silent; some of their own [...]
Ancient whales, secret passages and diversity
Getting to see the relatives can be a chore for most, especially if they’re a long way away. Now imagine your relatives live in a different ocean, separated by a continent, and the only way there is frozen solid all year long. This is the problem that the Atlantic Bowhead whale populations face if they [...]
Fall Fashions: Red or dead…?
“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” – Albert Camus This is certainly true of the autumn here in Ontario. It’s spectacular. Parks and woods are alive with colour; yellows, oranges, golds and reds so impossibly deep it’s like a new kind of black. Some trees are a near uniform gold, [...]
Finding the un-natural in the lab…
Taming the power of the immune system in the lab wasn’t easy. For a start, it was a mystery how we have so many different antibodies, millions at any one time. But if it’s one gene per protein, and we only had something like 30,000 genes, how could we have millions of different antibodies? Understanding [...]
Well, I could’ve told you that…
We’ve all been its victims. We ‘knew it all along’; we look back on events and can clearly see that something was obviously going to happen. Or at least, you ‘knew it all along’ now that it’s happened. This is the weird world of ‘hindsight bias’: when we convince ourselves that an event—maybe a football [...]
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