We like to think of ourselves as the better results of evolution. We humans are particularly proud of our ability to communicate, having invented cell phones, the Internet, and extended forelimb digits as sophisticated means of communication not found anywhere else in nature. Not true. Where there is life, there is communication. Vocal, visual, chemical. […]
Archaea are under-rated. For one, most people don’t really know they exist – and if they do archaea are thought of as a type of bacteria. This goes not only for the general public also for some of my non-microbiology colleagues. (I had to correct quite a few “archaeobacteria” utterances.) The discovery that Archaea are a […]
UPDATE: I submitted this post to the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center’s sponsored contest for a travel award to ScienceOnline2010. Let’s see how it goes… #scio10 In a previous post about Hatena we saw what might very well be the beginning of a (beautiful?) [:ttip=”symbiosis where one partner lives inside the cell of the other” id=”10″]endosymbiotic[:/ttip] […]
The story of a predator that, upon eating a certain food, suddenly becomes a peaceful plant. Sort of. Free-living versus symbiotic A working definition for symbiosis is two or more species that live and interact. Mutualism means that each derives a certain benefit from the other, or at most causing no harm to each other. […]
