Tag Archive | nature
The List of Explanations for Ocean Acidification Keeps Getting Smaller
Over the past 20 years, Cathy Pfister and her husband Tim Wootton, both biologists in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, have been traveling to Tatoosh Island off the northwestern tip of Washington state to study the rich variety of plant and animal life in and around its coastal waters. And while they have turned […]
What Winds the Body’s Clock?
You may not be familiar with the term “circadian rhythm,” but you’re probably familiar with the idea of the body’s internal clock. A variety of biological processes in the body are set to a 24-hour cycle. Circadian rhythms, as these daily patterns are known, appear in both animals and plants. They’re present in sleep patterns, […]
Light-Guided Biology #1: TULIP Mania
The rise of optogenetics — where flashes of light can manipulate brain activity and rat behavior — have excited scientists looking for more precise ways of manipulating cells and their components in the laboratory and the clinic. Two papers published this month by University of Chicago laboratories explore new methods with great scientific potential of […]
Alan Turing’s Underrated Biology
By Rob Mitchum Alan Turing is best known as the father of the modern computer, a skillful World War II codebreaker, and a pioneer in the study of artificial intelligence. But in the last years before Turing’s death at age 41, he aimed his genius at a different target: the then-stalled field of developmental biology. […]
Recalculating a 40-Year-Old Ecology Riddle
By Rob Mitchum In 1972, a physicist named Robert May tried his hand at a different scientific discipline, publishing a simple formula that inflamed the field of ecology. Scientists studying the structure of natural ecosystems had long assumed that diversity was an inherently good thing — those ecosystems stocked with thousands of species were likely […]
Evolution and the Unraveling of DNA
By Rob Mitchum In cells, DNA doesn’t often hang out in the long, stretched-out strings you see in science textbooks. Most of the time, it is stored tight in a package called a nucleosome, wound like a ball of yarn around a protein called chromatin. In order for a gene to be “activated,” the stretch […]
Locating the Brain’s Strike Zone
In baseball, much is made of the half-second or less a batter is given to swing or not swing at each 100-mph fastball. But another important snap decision is made by the home plate umpire, who must pinpoint the position of the ball as it crosses the plate and immediately decide whether it counted as […]
Time Travel in a Test Tube
In books and movies, time travel is typically fraught with negative consequences. Any attempt to change the past — say, stopping the JFK assassination, or taking your mom to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance — is bound to produce ripples of change that alter the future. But what if you could safely contain a […]
An Experiment that Freezes Time
Many of the most interesting processes in nature are so fast, they can make “a blink of an eye” look like a millennium. Cellular proteins undergo elaborate transformations in as little as a picosecond – one millionth of one millionth of a second. That astonishing time scale presents an enormous challenge to scientists who would […]
A Fickle Pump and its Protons
Like a basement in a flood plain, a cell needs a good pump. Cells must maintain a particular mix of ions inside their membrane walls, with low concentrations of sodium and high concentrations of potassium. The only problem is that cells are leaky, and sodium constantly rushes into the cell while potassium rushes out. To […]
