All of us know that animals use camouflage and mimicry as strategies to protect themselves from predators. Many examples have become famous with many TV documentaries showing, among others, foxes and rabbits that in higher latitudes are white to be confused with the snow and thus, to become harder to be distinguished and caught. Insects […]
When the general media report news about genetics, there is a deplorable tendency towards gene determinism. Headlines in the vein of “Gene for X discovered”—where X is anything from a physical trait to a complex behavior—are regrettably common, and almost always incorrect. That’s why I face this article with some trepidation. Because, you see, there […]
Orcas or killer whales (Orcinus orca) are widely distributed and feed on a large array of prey —fish, seals and sometimes whales—. These powerful predators are highly adaptable, cooperative and live in stable matriarchal social groups of related animals. Each prey species they feed on requires special hunting skills and there have been observational reports […]
Robert Hooke discovered the cell in 1665. Plenty of years passed until the human being, in less than three decades, went from elucidate DNA structure (1953) to control artificially the genetic expression of a living cell. Thorough knowledge of the life´s language (genetic code) and information flows (DNA–>RNA–>Protein) was paramount to achieve such a goal […]
Proteins perform most of the daily work of the cell, they catalyse most of the biochemical reactions, initiate and mediate the electrical signals in our neurons and form an important part of the structure of our bodies. Formed by up to several thousand amino acids (from a set of 20 different types) chained one after […]
Symbiosis is a close relationship between two organisms that benefits both of them. Many different types of symbiotic processes exist in nature, some of them are very famous like the symbiosis between clownfish (like Nemo from the film) with sea anemone or for example lichens which consist in a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and […]
It is interesting how some ideas get stuck in our minds even long after it is proved that they are incorrect or incomplete. Haeckel’s Recapitulation Theory, which states that during the embryological development of an organism it undergoes through different stages recalling the evolutionary history of its ancestors (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny), is considered obsolete nowadays […]
The term “midlife crisis” was coined in 1965 by psychologist Elliot Jacques. In our collective imaginary we believe that it refers to a time in life when adults realize that their life is halfway over, that they may not have achieved all the aspirations or dreams developed during youth, and they come to admit the […]
Smell has often been the neglected sense, despite—or, hopefully, until—the increasing number of interesting discoveries being made about and around it. Trivially, smells are interpreted as a series of neurochemical reactions mediated by receptors; this is no novelty, and at the single-molecule and single-neuron level the mechanism (how a molecule triggers a specific receptor which […]
Life is full of compromises, and so is evolution. We often wonder about the explanation for particular traits that we find in many different organisms; distinct characteristics present in some of those organisms but not in others. We may hypothesize their story, and it can make sense, but finding actual evidence to support it will […]