Words about science and hiking
From Quora: Viruses have not evolved to become “resistant” to vaccines the way that bacteria have evolved to become resistant to antibiotics. Vaccines don’t attack viruses directly, they just prime our immune systems to do so. Our immune systems and viruses have been battling it out for hundreds of millions of years, and the likelihood Read More …
If you’ve ever wondered what I sound like in French–and surely you have–now’s your chance to find out. The French version of Slate ran one of my posts, and you can read it here. Or in English here.
It’s not immediately obvious why fundamentalists so despise Darwinism. I mean, yeah, they advocate a literal interpretation of the Bible, and creation through evolution does not map perfectly on to the Genesis story. But the fundys have little problem ignoring other inconvenient teachings (that eating shellfish is an abomination, that rich men cannot get to Read More …
No one knows for sure why only eucarya form large multicellular organisms (bacteria can form small ones), but we can make a few observations that limit the scope of plausible answers: Large multicellular organisms are a fairly recent phenomenon. The eucaryal lineage is thought to go back perhaps 2.7B years[1] , but the first large multicellular Read More …
We’ve been using plants as medicines for a long time. Longer than history — hollyhock has been found in the graves of Neanderthals, and yarrow and chamomile have been found on their teeth [1]. Longer indeed than humanity itself — many animals self-medicate, including chimpanzees, monkeys, baboons and lemurs [2]. A long time. Plants are full Read More …
Published in Mental Floss Yes. We know that bacteria range in size from 0.2 µm to nearly a mm. That’s more than a thousand-fold difference, easily enough to accommodate a small bacterium inside a larger one. Nothing forbids bacteria from invading other bacteria, and in biology, that which is not forbidden is inevitable. We have at least one Read More …
Animal cells differ from single-cell organisms in two significant ways: 1) They don’t have the tools to survive outside an animal body 2) They are programmed to die after a certain number of cell divisions. We know that it is possible for animal cells to live as individuals. The ancestor of all animals is believed to Read More …
If there was indeed a massive outbreak of antibiotic resistant bacterial infections, the government and CDC would do little or nothing. Why? Because they no longer function in any recognizable form. A severe outbreak of bacterial disease could only happen if these institutions have collapsed. Antibiotics are not critical to keeping society safe from bacterial Read More …
Biology is not a lawful science. That is to say, you can’t start with a set of principles and reason your way to interesting conclusions. The big intellectual leaps in biology always follow advances in technique and technology, particularly those advances that make data collection faster and easier. The biggest advance of all – Darwin’s Read More …
The chance that extraterrestrial bacteria would be deadly to humans is zero. Not just very, very small. Zero. Pathogenesis requires intimacy, which is only attained through millions of years of co-evolution. The need for intimacy is apparent when you look at how bacteria and viruses cause infections and disease. Infection requires binding to a cell Read More …