[Cyanobacteria–green, brown, and orange streaks–grow in hot spring at Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Harvey Barrison via Flickr & Creative Commons 2.0] The troublemakers were hardly new to the neighborhood. For 300 million years, they had lived in the water column, floating in the sunlight near the surface, sending tiny plumes of toxic gas into …
[Computer rendering of DNA. Via Caroline Davis2010 on Flickr & CC 2.0] The Talk: “DNA-mediated Signaling with Metalloproteins” In Plain English: DNA can conduct electricity–like metal wire–and that helps the cell life The Speaker: Jacqueline Barton of Caltech The Sponsor: MIT Inorganic Chemistry (invited by the grad students) What It Covered: When Jacqueline Barton’s lab …
[Photo by Yale Rosen, via Creative Commons] “Pitch Imperfect” is a series of blog posts where I highlight stories that I pitched but didn’t quite sell and discuss why it was tough to sell them. The goal is to share both interesting research stories and some of the obstacles in getting them into the news …
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 …
The Talk: “Planetary Changes from Deep Time to the 4th Kind” In Plain English: Life doesn’t just adapt to geochemical features; it transforms them simply by…living. The Speaker: Andrew Knoll of Harvard and David Grinspoon of the Planetary Science Institute The Sponsor: Planet and Life Series, sponsored by MIT Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences dept. …
The Talk: Host Defense and Viral Immune Evasion: A Proteomics Perspective In Plain English: Human cells and viruses are locked in a protein-based arms race for global domination: Will the cell’s defensive proteins successfully recognize viral DNA and alert the immune system? Or will the virus counter with proteins that stop the defensive proteins in …