- Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts – Found by Maria, via.
- Push to talk: The tricky business of being a woman on vent – Becky Chambers has had a mostly positive experience being a woman gamer, but didn’t just stop there and assume that her experience meant that all of gaming has gotten more woman-friendly.
- Human cells a chimera of ancient life – The idea of ancient prokaryotes merging to form eukaryotic cells is an old one. But now we know that the proteins coded by each of the ancient parent cells still mostly interact with each other. From Ryan.
- We’re all cyborgs now – From Mark.
- Cute Animal Friday! Baby tiger and chimp are best friends, from Will. Baby elephant with prosthetic foot, from Maria. And how about a baby okapi to round things out?
From the first article: “The research could pave the way for advanced methods of enraging monkeys.”
How perfect of a sentence is that? Not just enraging monkeys, but enraging them using “advanced methods”.
This, my friends, is what science was made for. Next up: the search for advanced methods to make water buffaloes cry.
We have a whole slew of movies showing what happens when we enrage monkeys. Where do you think Ebola comes from?
That made me snerk, too!
I hates moose and flying squirrel.
Also, the “Human Cells a Chimera of Ancient Life” is a fascinating read, and raises some very interesting points. The rise of multicellularism is one of the most interesting mysteries in biology.
This isn’t about multicellularism, this is much earlier, the origin of the eukaryotic cell.
All multicellular organisms are eukaryotes, but not all eukaryotes are multicellular (e.g. the malaria parasite/germ.) Eukaryotes were around for perhaps a billion years or so before they came up with multicellularism. (I’m not sure if there is fossil evidence of when eukaryotes started.)
As of a few decades ago, we have divided life into three domains – eukaryotes, bacteria (or eubacteria) and archea (or archaebacteria). DNA sequencing let us see that what we had thought of as one monolithic ‘bacteria’ domain was in fact two.
It has long been known that the genetic machinery part of eukaryote cells (DNA duplication, translation into proteins etc.) seems to be more closely resemble archea, whereas the genes which code for structural and enzyme proteins seem to more closely resemble bacteria. This observation leads to the hypothesis that the eukaryote cell is descended from an archea/bacteria chimera. While this is undoubtedly the front runner explaination for the origin of eukaryotes, the issue is not yet settled.
This is separate to the endosymbiosis origin of mitochondria (in all eukaryotes*) and chloroplasts (in plants and some others), which is not controversial. Mitochondria and chloroplasts have ancestors which were free living bacteria, and we can even tell which modern bacteria are related to them.
* Some single celled eukaryotes do not have mitochondria, but there is reason to believe they had ancestors who did.
An alternative to the chimerical origin would be that eukaryotes and archea are related, but after they diverged the eukaryotes acquired many genes from bacteria by horizontal gene transfer. (Sort of a natural version of genetic engineering, where you mug some other organism for some genes rather than inheriting them from your mother. We can see this happen sometimes in modern bacteria, via mini-chromosomes called plasmids.) The ‘command and control’ genes are much less prone to horizontal gene transfer (as they are so critical) so they remain the archea-related ones, but other genes are replaced by bacterial derived ones.
I haven’t read this new paper, nor do I have the expertise to pass judgement on it, if I did. I am doing research in evolutionary biology, but I’m developing algorithms for data analysis, not looking at the origin of eukaryotes. Also, my background is not biology, so the information above is what I’ve picked up as I went, not the result of deep study.
I guess when I was playing WoW, my guild was almost half made up of women since many of them were playing with spouses or significant others. We didn’t hear much in the way of gender-based stupid in any case on vent. Just regular guild drama stupid.
From the Vent article:
If you do write one, send us the link! I’d like to read it.
Well, if you’re going to twist my arm like that…
Social Change Isn’t Caused by Time Passing
I hope that’s the right code for the link. Thank you for the invitation!
Thanks for the interesting blog post! Well written, and well said.