Biology • Biotechnology • Ethics • Evolution • Genetics
Ever since the 1993 film based on Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park was released, the thought of reviving extinct species using molecular biology techniques has been on the forefront of the collective imaginary. The idea seemed pretty simple: reading the genetic code of fossilized animals would provide the instruction manual to bring them back to […]
Ant nests are complex three-dimensional spaces with particular places allocated for specific functions: egg-laying, care of the brood, food storage… In the chambers and tunnels, many insects live in very confined spaces and are thus especially vulnerable for infectious diseases. Feces are hazardous materials since theoretically at least they can foster bacteria, transmit diseases, and […]
Laziness, sloth or indolence is, depending on who you ask, a sin, a psychological characteristic, or a basic human right. It is usually used as a pejorative and is considered a disinclination, a personal choice where one the lazy person decides not to carry out an activity despite having the ability, the time […]
The field of population dynamics lies between mathematics and biology. Its subject of study is the evolution of biological populations with time. The natural language for dynamical problems is that of differential equations, and population dynamics is not an exception to this rule. Such a powerful tool was well known since the times of Isaac […]
Fernando Nottebohm was born in Buenos Aires in 1940, a second generation Argentine. Animals fascinated him since he was a child and he always wanted to understand how birds sing. After moving to the United States, he began to investigate the bird behavior and he found, using unilateral denervation of the syrinx, song handedness, i.e […]
Back in 2001, the Human Genome Project gave us a complete readout of our DNA, unraveling that magic sequence of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts that contained all the information for making one of us. Thanks to that, we now know that in that sequence only 1.5% has information to make proteins, a fact that […]
Since the cells were discovered with the advent of the microscope in the late seventeenth century, scientists have tried hard to find out what is going on into them. An avalanche of techniques and technologies emerged over the course of decades slowly discovering important molecular features of the cellular world to our knowledge and our […]
The Penrose–Hameroff theory of orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) claims that quantum computations in the brain account for consciousness . The communication among neurons by the secretion of neurotransmitters is based on synaptic vesicles distributed along their axons. The neuronal cytoskeleton has a key role in the dynamics of these vesicles. In the 1990s, Stuart […]
Just as people constantly exchange messages via email, cells communicate with each other and their microenvironment by sending and receiving packages of information; and as we react in one way or another depending on the news we get, cells respond to the “message” by changing the expression of their genes. Following the analogy, in a […]
The term epigenetics refers to heritable changes in gene expression (active vs. inactive genes) that does not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequence. It results in change in phenotype without a change in genotype. An easily comprehensible example are identical twins: since they develop from a single fertilized egg, they have the same genome […]