The Ed's Up #68

Here's looking at you, squid

It was a delight to profile the wonderful Margaret McFall-Ngai for Nature. Through her work on an adorable squid and its glowing bacterial partner, and her tireless evangelism for the importance of microbes in our lives, she has become one of the leading figures in the world of microbiome research. This piece is about her life and work, and (although written in a slightly more formal style) it's a little preview of a small part of my upcoming book.

"The aquarium looks empty, but there is something in it. A pair of eyes stick out from the sandy floor, and their owner is easily scooped up into a glass bowl. At first, the creature looks like a hazelnut truffle — small, round and covered in tiny flecks. But with a gentle shake, the flecks of sand fall off to reveal a female Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes), about the size of a thumb. As she jets furiously around the bowl, discs of pigment bloom and fade over her skin like a living pointillist painting." (Image: Kent Nishimura)

How Big Are The Biggest Squid, Whales, Sharks, Jellyfish?

"The oceans are home to giants: blue whales and great white sharks; giant squids and giant clams; elephant seals and Japanese spider crabs. These creatures have no trouble capturing the public imagination, but scientists often have trouble capturing them. Many are rare, elusive, or live in inaccessible parts of the sea. Some are only measured when they wash ashore, after dry land distends or deflates their bodies. Some are so big that they are just plain hard to measure. And so, oceans are also home to exaggeration. McClain decided to put together a scientific paper that would accurately answer a simple yet slippery question: How big do the biggest animals in the ocean get?" (Image: Emily M. Eng)

Two-Faced Insect is Both Sheep and Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

"The yellow morph behaves very differently. When it touches an ant, it sometimes makes honeydew, but more frequently stays still and pulls its legs in. The ants pick it up and carry it into their nest, depositing it in the brood chamber where their larvae live. There, the yellow aphid unfurls and turns vampire. It stabs the young ants with its mouthparts and sucks up their bodily fluids."
 

More good reads

• "The brain is mysterious, and I want to spend my life in the presence of mystery." On Sebastian Seung’s quest to map the brain. By Gareth Cook.
• An old question: is poker more a game of skill or a game of luck? Pete Etchell explores.
• A theory in psychology meant to cure depression was instead used to justify torture. By Maria Konnikova
• Ostensibly about white nose syndrome, but also a fantastic primer on bat biology. By Natalie Angier.
• “If the decision-making algorithm were to always choose the option in which the fewest people die, the car might avoid another car carrying two passengers by running off the road and risking killing just one passenger: its own.” Robin Henig on ethical robot programming.
• "The loggerhead sea turtle nests moved in tandem with the shifts in the magnetic field." By Carrie Arnold.
• "The palaeo diet is built on nostalgia and erroneous notions of how evolution works." By Christie Aschwanden.

 

More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

You can also follow me on Twitter, find regular writing on my blog. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you can sign up yourself.

And that's it! Thanks for reading.

-Ed