The Ed's Up #84
New Loki Microbe is Closest Relative to All Complex Life
"Loki’s Castle lies midway between Greenland and Norway, around 2,300 metres below the ocean surface. It’s a field of hydrothermal vents—black, rocky chimneys that belch out volcanically superheated water. And yet, despite the hellish landscape, life abounds here. Now, fifteen kilometres away from the vents, a team of scientists led by Thijs Ettema from Uppsala University have discovered a new group of very special microbes. They are the closest living relatives of all eukaryotes—the huge group that includes every animal, plant, fungus, and all other complex life on the planet." (Image: R.B. Pedersen)
Giant Whales Have Super-Stretchy Nerves
"“Hey, look at this,” said Bob Shadwick. He and his team were working on the dissected remains of a fin whale, the second largest animal on the planet, when they noticed a white cord-like structure lying against a slab of muscle. Shadwick picked it up and jokingly stretched it. “It was like a bungee cord,” recalls A. Wayne Vogl who was part of the group. It extended to more than twice its original length before recoiling back. The team initially thought it was a blood vessel, but they soon realised that it wasn’t hollow. It was a nerve." (Image: Flip Nicklin, Minden Pictures)More good reads
- Meet the worm with the fractal nose glove. By Kyle Hill.
- 3-D printed rhino horns are a great example of tech “solving” problems it doesn’t understand. By Rachel Nuwer.
- “Test results were chilling: The inside of Dr. Crozier’s eye was teeming with Ebola.” By Denise Grady
- The history of (hypothetical) human head transplants. By Erika Engelhaupt
- Empathy cards for people w/ serious illness. These are amazing & the sentiment behind them is so important.
- You will not spot the snow leopard here. You won’t.
- NatGeo profile of Pamela Ronald and her attempts to mend the rift between organic farmers and genetic engineers.
- Just outside Reading, England, lies the greenhouse that has been built to save chocolate for the world. By Nicola Twilley.
- "An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially." Atul Gawande on the critical problem of overdiagnosis.
Book recommendation
Alok Jha's THE WATER BOOK, casts a fresh light on this most familiar of substances. Framed by a fateful voyage to Antarctica, the book looks at how water was created, how it fuelled the origin of life, and how it might tell us about life elsewhere in the universe. (Out soon in the UK, and hopefully elsewhere too.)In The Water Book, Alok Jha takes us on a dual journey. First, a physical one as we join him on an expediction to Antarctica, where the power and importance of water is made manifest in the great ice fields, icebergs and world-shaping weather systems of the Southern Ocean. And secondly, on a parallel scientific voyage that will take us from the origins of water in the Big Bang, through the beginnings of life on Earth, the shaping of human civilisations and then back out into space as water becomes the key marker in our search for life in the Solar System and beyond. The Water Book will change the way you look at this ordinary substance. Afterwards, you will hold a glass of water up to the light and see within it the strangest chemical, something that connects you to everything and everyone else in the universe.
More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.
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And that's it! Thanks for reading.
-Ed