Archive for the ‘biological’ category: Page 158
Jun 1, 2019
To defend against phages, bacteria take ‘naps’
Posted by Genevieve Klien in category: biological
Microbes under attack by bacteriophages turn their defenses on their enemies and themselves. It doesn’t kill them, though.
May 22, 2019
Self-replicator that is simultaneously created and destroyed may lead to better understanding of life
Posted by Quinn Sena in category: biological
As living organisms eat, grow, and self-regenerate, all the while they are slowly dying. Chemically speaking, this is because life is thermodynamically unstable, while its ultimate waste products are in a state of thermal equilibrium. It’s somewhat of a morbid thought, but it’s also one of the characteristics that is common to all forms of life.
Now in a new study, researchers have created a self-replicator that self-assembles while simultaneously being destroyed. The synthetic system may help researchers better understand what separates biological matter from simpler chemical matter, and also how to create synthetic life in the lab.
The researchers, Ignacio Colomer, Sarah Morrow, and Stephen P. Fletcher, at the University of Oxford, have published a paper on the self-replicator in a recent issue of Nature Communications.
May 19, 2019
Where is the Origin of Life on Earth?
Posted by Xavier Rosseel in categories: bioengineering, biological, chemistry, evolution, physics
To answer the iconic question “Are We Alone?”, scientists around the world are also attempting to understand the origin of life. There are many pieces to the puzzle of how life began and many ways to put them together into a big picture. Some of the pieces are firmly established by the laws of chemistry and physics. Others are conjectures about what Earth was like four billion years ago, based on extrapolations of what we know from observing Earth today. However, there are still major gaps in our knowledge and these are necessarily filled in by best guesses.
We invited talented scientists to discuss their different opinions about the origin of life and the site of life’s origin. Most of them will agree that liquid water was necessary, but if we had a time machine and went back in time, would we find life first in a hydrothermal submarine setting in sea water or a fresh water site associated with emerging land masses?
May 16, 2019
The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology
Posted by Ian Hale in categories: biological, mathematics, physics
Quanta’s In Theory video series returns with an exploration of a mysterious mathematical pattern found throughout nature.
May 15, 2019
Worms Frozen for 42,000 Years in Siberian Permafrost Came Back to Life and Started Eating
Posted by Paul Battista in categories: biological, food
“Thus, our data demonstrate the ability of multicellular organisms to survive long-term (tens of thousands of years) cryobiosis under the conditions of natural cryoconservation,” the researchers said in a study published in Doklady Biological Sciences.
May 14, 2019
Indeterminate nature: the resurgence of quantum biology
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: biological, quantum physics
A melding of biology and physics first suggested in the 1920s is enjoying a revival as evidence mounts. Stephen Fleischfresser reports.
May 14, 2019
It’s not just fish, plastic pollution harms the bacteria that help us breathe
Posted by Xavier Rosseel in category: biological
“We looked at a group of tiny, green bacteria called Prochlorococcus which is the most abundant photosynthetic organism on Earth, with a global population of around three octillion (~1027) individuals,” says Sasha.
Ten per cent of the oxygen we breathe comes from just one kind of bacteria in the ocean. Now laboratory tests have shown that these bacteria are susceptible to plastic pollution, according to a study published in Communications Biology.
“We found that exposure to chemicals leaching from plastic pollution interfered with the growth, photosynthesis and oxygen production of Prochlorococcus, the ocean’s most abundant photosynthetic bacteria,” says lead author and Macquarie University researcher Dr. Sasha Tetu.
Continue reading “It’s not just fish, plastic pollution harms the bacteria that help us breathe” »
May 13, 2019
How Cyanobacteria Could Help Save the Planet
Posted by Quinn Sena in category: biological
It’s very easy to forget that complex life on Earth almost missed the boat entirely. As the Sun’s luminosity gradually increases, the oceans will boil away, and the planet will no longer be in the habitable zone for life as we know it. Okay, we likely have a billion years before this happens—by which point our species will probably have destroyed itself or moved away from Earth—but Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old or so, and eukaryotic life only started to diversify 800 million or so years ago, at the end of the “boring billion.”
In other words, life seems to have arisen around four billion years ago, shortly after Earth formed, but then a few billion years passed before anything complex evolved. Another few hundred million years of bacteria, algae, and microbes sliding around in the anoxic sludge of the boring billion, and intelligent life might never have evolved at all.
Unraveling the geologic mysteries of the boring billion, and why it ended when it did, is a complex scientific question. Different parts of the earth system, including plate tectonics, the atmosphere, and the biosphere of simple lichens and cyanobacteria interacted to eventually produce the conditions for life to diversify, flourish, and grow more complex. But it is generally accepted that simple cyanobacteria (single-celled organisms that can produce oxygen through photosynthesis) were key players in providing Earth’s atmosphere and oceans with oxygen, which then allowed complex life to flourish.
Continue reading “How Cyanobacteria Could Help Save the Planet” »
May 7, 2019
New discovery could alleviate salty soil symptoms in food crops
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: biological, food
New research published in Nature Scientific Reports (opens in new window) has found that a hormone produced by plants under stress can be applied to crops to alleviate the damage caused by salty soils. The team of researchers from Western Sydney University and the University of Queensland identified a naturally-occurring chemical in plants that reduces the symptoms of salt stress in plants when applied to soil, enabling the test plants to increase their growth by up to 32 times compared with untreated plants.
Salinity is a huge issue across the world, affecting more than 220 million hectares of the world’s irrigated farming and food-producing land. Salinity occurs when salty irrigation water is repeatedly applied to crops, leading to progressively increasing levels of salt in the soil which reduces crop yields, increases susceptibility to drought and damages soil microbiology. Scientists have long tried to find ways to breed salt-tolerance or develop methods that remove salt, and this new research is promising in its potential ability to reduce the damage in crop plants that results from salt.
“We identified a compound called ACC that occurs naturally in plants when they become stressed by drought, heat or salty conditions,” said Dr. Hongwei Liu, Postdoctoral Fellow in Soil Biology and Genomics at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University.
Continue reading “New discovery could alleviate salty soil symptoms in food crops” »