I’ve been meaning to get around to writing about female orgasms.
It’s strange enough that beetles grow horns. But it’s especially strange that beetles grow so many kinds of horns. This picture, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Evolution, shows a tiny sampling of this diversity. The species shown here all belong to the genus Onthophagus, a group of dung beetles. The colors in this picture, which are false, show which parts of the beetle body the horns grow from. Blue horns grow from the back of the head, red from the middle of the head, and purple from the front of the head. Green horns grow from the center of the body plate directly behind the head (the pronotum), and orange horns grow from the side of the pronotum. These beetles can grow horns big and small, single or multiple, shaped like stags or like rhinos. And, as these colors show, the beetles can take very different developmental paths to get to their finished product. The biologist JBS Haldane was supposedly asked once if he could say anything about God from his study of nature. Haldane replied He must have an inordinate fondness for beetles. Add to that a fondness for putting horns on those beetles.
Smithsonian, May 31, 2005
On August 7, 1996, reporters, photographers and television camera operators surged into NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The crowd focused not on the row of seated scientists in NASA’s auditorium but on a small, clear plastic box on the table in front of them. Inside the box was a velvet pillow, and nestled on it like a crown jewel was a rock—from Mars. The scientists announced that they’d found signs of life inside the meteorite. NASA administrator Daniel Goldin gleefully said it was an “unbelievable” day. He was more accurate than he knew.
Today in Science scientists reported a potentially big advance in creating embryos that can be used for stem cell transplants. Briefly put, they figured out how to take skin cells from patients, inject them into donated eggs emptied of their own DNA, and nurture them along until they had divided into a few cells. The cells were able to develop into a wide range of cell types, their chromosomes were normal, and they were so similar to the cells of the individual patients that they would not be rejected as foreign tissue. The research stopped there, but the dream behind this work is to heal your failing liver or heart or dopamine-producing neurons by clipping off a little skin and farm new cells that could regenerate those organs.
Continue reading “Of Stem Cells and Neanderthals: Closing the Circle”
Discover, May 19, 2005
If you want to find alien life-forms, hold off on booking that trip to the moons of Saturn. You may only need to catch a plane to East Lansing, Michigan.
The aliens of East Lansing are not made of carbon and water. They have no DNA. Billions of them are quietly colonizing a cluster of 200 computers in the basement of the Plant and Soil Sciences building at Michigan State University. To peer into their world, however, you have to walk a few blocks west on Wilson Road to the engineering department and visit the Digital Evolution Laboratory. Here you’ll find a crew of computer scientists, biologists, and even a philosopher or two gazing at computer monitors, watching the evolution of bizarre new life-forms.