"How much life could you find in one cubic foot? That's a hunk of ecosystem small enough to fit in your lap."
Can this please become a standard unit of volumetric measure?
"To improve access to scientific literature, we have created Botanicus, a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of digitized historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. We have been digitizing materials from our library since 1995, focusing primarily on beautifully illustrated volumes from our rare book collection." via karinalane.
"The last common ancestor of all life was not a free-living cell at all, but a porous rock riddled with bubbly iron-sulphur membranes that catalysed primordial biochemical reactions. Powered by hydrogen and proton gradients, this natural flow reactor filled up with organic chemicals, giving rise to proto-life that eventually broke out as the first living cells - not once but twice, giving rise to the bacteria and the archaea."
"These scholars want to break down the categories and distinctions that have defined how we think about our relationship to everything that is not us. Some of them see it as nothing less than a revolution in how to think and how to live."
"This strategy for survival, known as autophagy ('eating oneself'), evolved in our ancestors over two billion years ago. Today, all animals rely on it to endure famines, as do plants, fungi and single-cell protozoa."
"Some ant nests are so enormous that they are akin to the skeletons of whales. Those of one species of leafcutter ant from South America, for example, can contain nearly two thousand individual chambers, some with a capacity of fifty liters, and they can involve the excavation of forty tons of earth and extend over hundreds of square feet. Coordination within such giant colonies, which can house eight million individual ants, occurs through ant communication systems that are extraordinarily sophisticated and are the equivalent of the human nervous system."
"Even human beings, Hugenholtz said, are subconsciously eavesdropping on chemical conversations between the inhabitants of our guts; this leads us to crave, say, potato chips when our microbes want salt. His eyes fell warily on his coffee. 'Do you think our stomach bacteria have trained us?'"
Evolution is observed in the course of an extremely long-running, documented, scientific experiment and even reproduced within the bounds of that experiment. So, check that off the list.
Feature in the current issue of Seed tracing the curious effect of small amounts of Hydrogen Sulfide on a number of different living species to one of the 5 only partially explainable mass extinctions in the fossil record.
A well-written, interesting, and dare I say it (I do!) sort of nerdorable nytimes blog about biology. Of course, its interesting biology, like how T-Rexs made out (maybe). All my exes are T-Rexes. Google says no one has typed that before.
All of the bacteria in an adult human would fit into a half gallon jug, and surpass human cells in quantity by 10 times. Not only that, but some of our genes appear to be "bacterial in origin."
