In the 1930s Clive McCay, a biochemist working in Ithaca, New York, made an interesting observation: rats that were kept on a low calorie diet lived longer than rats that had unrestrained access to food. In the next years this seemingly counterintuitive observation was extended to virtually all animals, including worms, flies and other rodents […]
Biochemistry • Biology • Materials • Molecular biology • Neuroscience
Some jellyfish species are beautifully fluorescent in the dark ocean, emitting light from different parts of their bodies in a process that is thought to help them to warn off predators. The molecular biology behind this process of glowing is possible thanks to one of the most famous proteins in molecular biology, the green fluorescent […]
In some beaches of Madagascar you can find in the sand, if you are lucky, fragments of egg shells that seem oddly large. They used to be, in fact, part of huge bird eggs, massive as watermelons (and able to become the most memorable omelet ever), laid by the avian titans: the extinct elephant birds […]
Although not the most important among the many different animals studied by Charles Darwin during his amazing journeys on board the Beagle, the little finches from the Galápagos Islands have become one of the most popular representatives of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. They embody the process of speciation forced by environmental conditions, in the […]
DNA damage is one of the most deleterious forms of cellular damage. If unrepaired, DNA lesions can create genomic instability, a hallmark of cancer . As most of the DNA is confined to the nucleus, for many years the study of DNA damage response has mainly focused on its nuclear effects, including mechanisms such as […]
Understanding aging and how it affects the lifespan of an organism is a fundamental problem in biology that is of great interest to our society. During the last decade, an incredible amount of research has been published trying to understand aging processes, unraveling what factors accelerate or decelerate this process in several animal models (worms […]
Yes, I talk to you, even more if you are one of those scientists working with any living being either unicellular or multicellular with sexual dimorphism seared in their chromosomes. Such a question may seem trivial. However, recent findings suggest that it is not so trifling, and that an affirmative answer could have major implications […]
Nitrogen (N) is an essential nutrient for plant growth and most plants require 20-50 g of N taken up by their roots to produce 1 kg of dry biomass. Although N is one of the most abundant elements on earth, agricultural soils are deficient in N and thus, to sustain crops productivity soils require their […]
‘Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo’ José Ortega y Gasset (Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914) In my first article for Mapping Ignorance I stated that “destiny” was an unrealistic concept disproved by the scientific evidence. However, it could be possible that this is not completely […]
Every single day, the scientific knowledge of the biodiversity of the planet is increased with the description of new species. All of them are, in their own terms, valuable: a new piece in the puzzle of the history of Life on Earth. Most of the times, the new species can be easily classified together with […]