One mission of the Loom is to champion unjustly neglected forms of life. And so I spend a lot of time blogging about the sinister powers of parasites. But I don’t want to leave you with the impression that hosts are simply helpless bags of grub. Hosts have evolved defenses to ward off parasites, and those defenses can be just as baroque and marvelous as the adaptations of their parasites.
Continue reading “Flies and booze: strictly for medicinal purposes”
The New York Times, February 16, 2012
Fruit flies may seem as if they lead an uneventful life. They look for old fruit to lay their eggs. The maggots then hatch and graze on the yeast and bacteria that make the fruit rot.
In reality, however, these flies have to do battle with horrifying enemies. Tiny wasps seek out the maggots and lay eggs inside them. The wasps develop inside the still living flies, feeding on their tissues. When the wasps reach adult size, they crawl out of the dying bodies of their hosts.
The flies are not helpless victims, however. In the journal Current Biology, Todd Schlenke, an Emory University biologist, and his colleagues report a remarkable defense the insects use: To kill their parasites, the flies get drunk.
Continue reading “To Evict Parasite, Canny Fruit Flies Pick Their Poison”
For a lot of writers, there’s no greater dream than to get onto the Colbert Report or the Daily Show.
This was not exactly how my dream was supposed to go.
Discover, February 15, 2012
There was no way the blind mice could see, yet somehow, they could. The year was 1923, and a Harvard grad student named Clyde Keeler had set out to compare eyes from different animals, starting with mice that he bred in his dorm room. Keeler cut open one mouse’s eye and put it under a microscope. Immediately he realized something was wrong. Missing from the eye was the layer of rods and cones, the photoreceptors that catch light. Turning back to his colony, Keeler realized that half of his animals were blind. Somehow a mutation had arisen, wiping out their rods and cones.
Continue reading “Our Strange, Important, Subconscious Light Detectors”
If not for a virus, none of us would ever be born.
In 2000, a team of Boston scientists discovered a peculiar gene in the human genome. It encoded a protein made only by cells in the placenta. They called it syncytin.
The cells that made syncytin were located only where the placenta made contact with the uterus. They fuse together to create a single cellular layer, called the syncytiotrophoblast, which is essential to a fetus for drawing nutrients from its mother. The scientists discovered that in order to fuse together, the cells must first make syncytin.
What made syncytin peculiar was that it was not a human gene. It bore all the hallmarks of a gene from a virus.