Unzip Your Genes

fyeahcutebugs:

maid-of-thyme:

idk what this mutation is called but i love it

It’s called gynandromorphism, and it’s really neat! It actually causes the organism to develop half (or part) of its body as one sex, and the other half as the other.

It mostly appears in insects and other arthropods, but it can happen in some birds, too! 

(via dual-process)

sciencesoup:

Badass Scientist of the Week: Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) was a world-renowned evolutionary biologist, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a recipient of the National Medal of Science, and one of the most creative challengers of mainstream Darwinian thinking. She was born in Chicago, and after just two years of high school, she began studying at the University of Chicago. It was here that, aged 16, she met the famous Carl Sagan, whom she married two years later. After completing a Master’s degree in Genetics and Zoology and a PhD in Genetics, she and Sagan divorced, and Margulis moved to Boston to teach fulltime at Boston University, continue to research, and raise two children at the same time. It was at this time that she began to challenge what she called “ultra-Darwin orthodoxy”, downplaying the traditional natural selection idea of competition and instead suggesting that symbiosis is equally important feature—i.e., cooperation. Her idea was considered evolutionary heresy and her findings were rejected by 15 academic journals—as were her grant applications. One read: “Your research is crap. Don’t ever bother to apply again.” Margulis, however, continued to collect data and finally published her paper in 1967. Soon, data to support symbiosis accumulated and it became an orthodox theory, and Margulis came to be regarded as a respected researcher. Her expertise in microbes also led her to the British atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, with whom she developed the concept of “Gaia”, which proposes that the Earth is a self-regulating living ecosystem, all life locked in a symbiotic relationship. Margulis was committed to helping the public understand science, and she lectured, produced videos and reviews, and wrote a range of popular science books all throughout her life. She passed away at 73 following a stroke. Without creative, persistent rebels like her, science would never progress.

Artificial Beginnings: Understanding the Origin of Life by Recreating It

The Origin of Life on Earth was certainly, in retrospect, and from the human vantage point, the most fateful event in the history of the Universe. On a young, tepid Earth chemistry sprung into biology and set course on a four billion year journey that would eventually lead to us. However, all traces of the first, primitive organisms have vanished. They were outcompeted and devoured by their evolutionary descendents, leaving nothing to form fossils. Though we will never be able to set eyes on the first Earthlings, the first pioneers, we can understand what they must have been like through more subtle, indirect approaches. Comparative biochemistry across the whole of life takes us back quite a ways, though not to the first cells. The most recent common ancestor shared by all living organisms—bacteria, plants, animals, fungi, archaea, and unicellular eukaryotes like amoebae—was born long after the first cell ceased to exist. The only way we can truly understand what life must have been like in its earliest days is to create it ourselves.

fuckyeahmolecularbiology:

Scientists at the University of California - Berkeley are revolutionising the way we look at the growth and development of neurons as they form connections with each other to allow our brains to process information. They’ve developed the next best thing to cracking open a skull and peering inside at the brain: A three-dimensional, artificial neural network, constructed with tiny beads. 

Ehud Isacoff, a biophysicist with a dual appointment at Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences and Materials Science division and UC Berkeley’s Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, developed the idea (along with Sophie Pautot and Claire Wyart, both of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology), because he believes the more realistic the method of studying neural networks, the better our understanding of the brain. “The brain is a multilayered structure, with billions of neurons interconnected in complicated ways,” he reminds us. “Some neurons have 100,000 connections.”

The scientists grew neurons on beads measuring several dozen microns in diameter. These beads assemble themselves into hexagonal sheets, which can be layered on top of each other - a bit like a stack of pancakes - to produce a three-dimensional scaffolding. This scaffolding allows the observation of neuronal growth just as it would occur in the brain: Scientists can watch neurons grow, connect, and communicate with other neurons in all directions. This technique is a dramatic improvement over current lab-based methods of studying neural networks, in which neurons are grown on two dimensional plates - providing a very crude approximation of the actual network structure forming in our three-dimensional brains.

“Our 3D neural network will help us understand how connectivity emerges when neurons grow, and how these connections change over time,” said Isacoff.

In fact, being able to create a 3D neural network at all is an exceptional feat. Previous attempts at growing a three-dimensional neural network have been wildly unsuccessful, mostly because neurons are very finicky - they’ll die if they’re ripped from their surface and stacked atop another neuron, or they’ll just settle back into the surface. Although the two-dimensional models have increased scientists’ understanding of how neurons reach out and connect with each other, Isacoff and his colleagues realised a better model was needed - simply because the brain is a three-dimensional structure. “We knew that neurons grow on a flat surface,” said Isacoff. “So we thought we could trick them and grow them on a spherical bead that appears flat to a neuron, just like Earth appears flat to us.”

The finicky neurons obliged, and grew on the tiny beads, which were then placed in solution to order themselves into a highly structured, two-dimensional array. These arrays of beads were then stacked on top of each other, forming the three-dimensional scaffolding that allows neurons to connect with each other in three dimensions. Fluorescence microscopy imaging of the structure revealed the development of a three-dimensional web of neurons, as densely packed as neural networks in the brain.

“Of course, the brain is much more complicated, but this is a start,” said Isacoff.

If the complexity of the brain can be mirrored in an easy-to-develop system, we could gain fundamental insights into how neural networks enable phenomena of everyday life: Seeing, hearing, kicking a football, or reading this blog. Such a system could be used to gauge the effectiveness of drug therapies that target neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It could also help design computer processor architectures that mimic the brain’s ability to optimise neural networks as new skills are learned.

The full paper, entitled “Colloid-guided assembly of oriented 3D neural networks”, can be found here. 

The image above shows a computer simulation of their results from their paper, originally published in Nature.

theatlantic:

The Women Who Would Have Been Sally Ride

Whenever the Soviets beat us to a milestone in space, it caused a moral-scientific panic in the United States. They got a satellite up there first in 1957, sparking “Sputnik Mania.” Their space program was the first to put a man in space in 1961, sending the American effort to redouble its efforts. “We look back now [at Gagarin’s flight] and say, ‘Oh, that was just a small incident,’ but in those days there were serious writings about the future of communism around the world, whether it was going to be a dominant factor,” astronaut John Glenn recalled. “We took this very seriously — the administration, President Kennedy and President Eisenhower after he came around to believe in the importance of it. At the time, we looked at this as representing our country in the Cold War.”

So, one might have expected great movement when Valentina Tereshkova left the Earth’s atmosphere on June 16, 1963 to become the first woman in space. After all, Tereshkova spent three days in space, completed 48 orbits around Earth, and logged more time in orbit than all the Americans (three) who had been in space to that point. She’d proven that a woman was physically capable of withstanding the rigors of spaceflight. Surely, the Americans would rush to get a woman into space! Rosie the Riveter, perhaps, dusting herself off after her stint as a factory laborer in the successful war effort?

But no, there was no Tereshkova moment. In fact, one NASA official who declined to give his name to a reporter, said it made him “sick to his stomach” to think of women in space. Another called Tereshkova’s flight “a publicity stunt.”

It would be another 20 years before Sally Ride, who died yesterday at the age of 61, would become the first American woman in space. 

The truth is: the sexism of the day overwhelmed the science of the day.

Read more. [Image: NASA]