The Ed's Up #50
With Evolutionary Rocket Fuel, Bacteria Give Peas a Chance
Many bacteria have evolved partnerships with plants, by picking up large packages of genes that help them colonise roots and produce useful nitrogen compounds. But there's more. These symbiosis packages also contain genes that trigger a temporary flurry of new mutations in a recipient’s genome. These genes are adaption accelerants—a kind of evolutionary rocket fuel that microbes can pass to one another. (Image: USDA)
To Protect An Endangered Snake, First Protect A Venomous One
The smooth snake looks like a venomous adder. That would normally protect it, but humans are screwing everything up. We kill adders, so we kill smooth snakes by mistake. But we also make the snake's disguise less effective... (Image: Christian Fischer)More good reads
- On the roadside where Mandela's 27-year-arrest began, a most extraordinary monument has been built. By Robert Krulwich.
- You camera is a "species discovery engine". Rose Eveleth on the coming age of the Internet naturalist
- The weirdest jaws that ever evolved? They surely have to be the coiled buzzsaw jaws of this extinct ratfish. By Brian Switek
- Can you distil the complexity of ecology into just a few variables that let you predict the number of species in a forest from just a small piece of land? Veronique Greenwood meets a man who thinks so.
- Neuro(pseudo)science is being used to spread quackery in business and education. Excellent and sorely needed piece by Matt Wall.
- How movies trick your brain into empathising with characters. Part of a great series from Greg Miller about the neuroscience of cinema.
- Pointing with your index finger is WEIRD. Virginia Hughes discusses a group of people with a different method of pointing.
- 52 Blue: a singular and wonderful piece by Leslie Jamison, about a blue whale, alone and repeatedly calling at frequencies inaudible to its own kind, and a woman whose life is transformed by its story.
- Coffee plants evolved caffeine to kill competitors and possibly to manipulate animals. MANIPULATE ME MORE, COFFEE. By Carl Zimmer.
- Nadia Drake provides a measured, incisive, and much-needed corrective to the Columbia Journalism Review’s fawning piece on I F*cking Love Science. Key point: “Having a large, loyal audience does not make you immune to the rules – if anything, it makes you even more beholden to them.”
More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.
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The Ed's Up will be taking a break for two weeks, since I'll be on a much-needed holiday. Excitingly, I've also written 15,000 of my book, which I should be handing in a year from now.
And that's it! Thanks for reading.
-Ed