[Phage viruses attempt to infect a cell. Image via Wikimedia Commons.] In 2015, the largest database of genetic information in the world– the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)–had complete genomes for 45,000 species of bacteria–but only 2,200 genomes from viruses. Viruses outnumber bacteria in every habitat researchers have sampled. In fact, they outnumber stars in …
[Ultrasound of a spleen by Nevit Dilmen via Wikimedia Commons & CC 2.0] Blood moves fast. It only takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to make a full circuit through your entire body, and your blood makes that journey thousands of times each day. The speed of the blood stream is a …
Blaming things on genetics–everything from lateness to diet quirks–is wildly popular these days. However, DNA’s role in your body’s overall destiny has been greatly exaggerated. Sure, DNA is the “master blueprint”, but any one gene from that blueprint can contain instructions for making hundreds or thousands of tiny cell parts. And even so, there are plenty …
About half a billion people live on fan-shaped floodplains that form where rivers meet the sea. Those plains, called river deltas, share the same fan-like shape the world over. Even after controlling for factors like the size of the river, the slope of the land its channel traverses, and the makeup of the local soil, …
[A diabetic supply kit, complete with a knitted pouch that’s shaped like a pancreas. Photo by Erin Stevenson O’Connor via Flickr and Creative Commons.] The box arrived around 5:00 pm. Many of Efsun Arda’s colleagues were already heading home for Thanksgiving, but Arda had work to do. As a post-doc in Seung Kim’s lab at Stanford, …
[Image via the NIH Image Gallery. Photo by Alex Ritter, Jennifer Lippincott Schwartz, and Gillian Griffiths. Full video, complete with narration here.] Under the Radar: A series of listicles about biology concepts you definitely won’t find in newspaper headlines. #1: Be a Navigation App for Immune Cells Natural killer cells, or “NK cells” are the …
[Photo by Tomas Fano via Flickr/Creative Commons] Last August, a paper in Nature debuted with evidence supporting an idea that many suspected but few wanted to hear: If two teams of scientists run the same psychological experiment, the two sets of results end up mismatched. (In fact, when a network of 270 researchers retried 100 …
[Portrait of an HIV virus by Dominic Alves via Creative Commons & Flickr] Y’know that feeling when you stumble across a study that makes you think, “Holy s***! Scientists actually did this!!!!”? And then like two weeks later, another team of scientists manages to kind of upstage the first team’s finding? It’s been that sort …
About the “Under the Radar” series: Some scientific concepts come up again and again in interviews with scientists but never find their way into newspaper headlines. Each post in this series follows one of those biology “bogeys” that fly under journalism’s radar through 3 different mini-stories. Story #1: Scientists splice up a CRISPR chicken…and find …