This morning, during my daily graze of news and commentary, I’ve come across some fairly excellent science-themed April Fool’s jokes. But it will take an exceptional hoax to mount a serious challenge to what is arguably the finest science-themed April Fool’s joke of all time, which today celebrates its fifteenth anniversary: the tale of the hotheaded naked ice borer.
Continue reading “Who Will Dare To Challenge The Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer?”
National Geographic, March 31, 2010
A hungry fly darts through the pines in North Carolina. Drawn by what seems like the scent of nectar from a flowerlike patch of scarlet on the ground, the fly lands on the fleshy pad of a ruddy leaf. It takes a sip of the sweet liquid oozing from the leaf, brushing a leg against one tiny hair on its surface, then another. Suddenly the fly’s world has walls around it. The two sides of the leaf are closing against each other, spines along its edges interlocking like the teeth of a jaw trap. As the fly struggles to escape, the trap squeezes shut. Now, instead of offering sweet nectar, the leaf unleashes enzymes that eat away at the fly’s innards, gradually turning them into goo. The fly has suffered the ultimate indignity for an animal: It has been killed by a plant.
The Atavism put together a nice picture showing how the X-woman’s DNA could just be plain old Neanderthal genes. I’ve shamelessly stolen it for my own post.
Originally published March 27, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Corey writes, “I got this tattoo as an homage to the pain of my graduate work. It’s a model of fulvic acid which is a representation of natural organic matter in the soil. I work with this molecule for my grad work and I figured I might as well get it etched into my skin so I can look at it and say, ‘Well, at least it hurt less than grad school at Cornell.'”
You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here or in my book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.
Originally published March 27, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Most of life on Earth is a mystery to us. The bulk of biomass on the planet is made up of microbes. By some estimates, there may be 150 million species of bacteria, but scientists have only formally named a few thousand of them. One of the big causes of this ignorance is that scientists don’t know how to raise microbe colonies. If you scoop up some dirt and stick it under a microscope, you’ll see lots of different microbes living happily there. If you mash up all the DNA in that mud and read its sequence, you’ll discover an astonishing diversity of genes belonging to those microbes–thousands in a single spoon of soil. But now try to rear those microbes in a lab. When scientists try, they generally fail. A tiny fraction of one percent of microbe species will grow under ordinary conditions in Petri dish.