Linda and Amanda
About 25 years ago
A while back I posted a blog called “Fun Facts about
Biology”. Here it is:
The idea was to alert all you avid biology fans of articles
I had stumbled upon which didn’t really merit a blog entry of their own but
were too interesting to simply delete. For a time this worked (I got lots of hits –
I can tell!), but lately, not so much.
Therefore I have resolved to stir the pot with a new blog: new name,
same purpose. I begin with an article
from the NYTimes which I consider fascinating.
If you think about it in a deeply twisted way you will realize that there is a lot of
similarity between a human being and an ant hill. Humans consist of a large number of
“individuals” (cells), doing a lot of specialized things for the benefit of the
“tribe” (an individual person). Same
goes for ants; fewer individuals, fewer specific functions, but a similar
cooperation for the good of the “tribe”.
Termite mounds and bee hives also qualify. Thus, the main difference between you and a
termite mound is that your cells don’t wander about eating wood. Ponder that for a while.
Well, it transpires that this guy in NYC is using a species
of ant to study – not humans, but the origin of societies. Not just insect societies it seems, but
societies in general, from termites to the TEA party and “Babes for Bernie", if such exists. He and his minions have just published a
flurry of scholarly papers on the subject which, needless to say, I have not
read. Hence the NYTimes article, below.
The principal scientist here is named Daniel Kronauer. Dr. Kronauer works for Rockefeller University
and runs what appears to be an unusually well-funded lab. In keeping with the time-honored tradition of
NYTimes essayists of tossing in irrelevant human-interest information we are
informed that Dr. Kronauer was born and raised in Germany, is 40, tall,
sandy-haired, and is married to a dentist. Important stuff: I can hear their bedtime conversation. He: "Oh God, what a day - I stumbled and squashed one of my most important ants!". She: "Well, that's too bad. I didn't want to tell you, but today I yanked the wrong molar out of a patient, who happens to be a trial lawyer."
The subject of this experiment is an ant, Cerapachus birosi, described as a “weedy clonal raider”. “Weedy” apparently indicates that C. birosi, like a garden weed, can
thrive in disparate environments.
“Raider” clearly indicates that they raid other ant colonies for
food. The really interesting adjective
here is “clonal”. All these scurrying
little nasty's are clones; that is to say, the all have identical
DNA. And – I am truly astonished – this
comes about because they are born parthenogenetically! No sperm involved! No males AT ALL! Every single individual ant is female! (Don’t let this get out, for God’s sake.)
Well, so far what the Rockefeller folks have been doing is
to mess around with the DNA of individual ants to see how behavior is
affected. Some very interesting results have
been obtained, and I will leave you with the pleasure of reading about them for
yourself. There is a lot more of
interest in this article; I urge you to read it.
One last fun thing: It is
an old essayist’s trick to start with some unusual statement and then loop back
to it at the end; I do it myself, when I can figure out how. The first paragraph refers to Dr. Kronauer’s lifelong
penchant for flipping over rocks to see what’s crawling around underneath. The last sentence reads “When the ant police
come knocking, there’s no rock big enough to hide you”
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The incidence of colorectal cancer in young people is increasing at a brisk
pace, and nobody knows why, or what to do about it. This isn’t exactly a “fun fact”, but it’s
interesting
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Here is an interesting article on “regenerative medicine”. Crudely, what is meant by RM is the process
of growing tissue in the lab, to be injected or grafted (or something) into or
onto a patient, to replace something he/she lacks. The example used here is AMD, short for
age-related macular degeneration (a topic of some interest to my fellow geezers
and I). Short story shorter: it shows
promise, but has problems.
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How long you live depends on where you live.
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/05/16/widening-gap-in-u-s-life-expectancy/
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This one is really interesting: how cowbirds learn to be cowbirds
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My brain was free-wheeling along just now through the early
annals of this blog, when it ran smack on into the following Atlantic
article. You really should make time to
read it.
My daughter Karen reports this very interesting article in epigenetics
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-observed-epigenetic-memories-passed-down-for-14-generations
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Now here is something especially revolting: An ovarian tumor
with teeth!
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Interesting new perspective on autism:
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/06/13/autism-spectrum-disorder-progress-toward-earlier-diagnosis/
Good introduction to how bio-geeks determine structure in
tiny organic molecules. New technology.
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2018/10/30/cryo-em-method-from-powder-to-structure-in-under-a-half-hour/
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Some of this stuff is getting downright creepy! A beating human heart, in a dish?
I first fell in love with llamas when a big, beautiful buck
spit at Linda and me in Cotopaxi Park, Ecuador.
Or was it earlier, when a blind one in the San Francisco Zoo sniffed me
to make sure I wasn’t dangerous? Well,
whatever,. . . I love the beasts.
And, by the way, that’s Yah
mah, not Lah mah. Double el is y, man!
It turns out that, in addition to being cute, they are
useful to medical science. It may be
that our best protection against the flu virus will turn out to be a mist made
from highly-doctored llama snot! Read
all about it here:
