Category: Curiosities of Nature

Spider Silk

So, hi, if you happen to be my mom, you might want to stop reading now. As the title indicates, this is a review of a book that is all about spiders. SPIDERS!!!

My mother does not like spiders. She really, really does not like spiders.

But I do[1].

I approached Leslie Brunetta and Catherine L. Craig’s Spider Silk with hope and dread. Hope that I might learn a lot more about spiders. Dread that the authors would mangle evolutionary theory with over-simplification while trying to use spider silk to teach the general public about natural selection.

One of these emotions was unnecessary and wrong. Continue reading “Spider Silk”

Good science writing makes me purr

For my money (what little of it there is), good science communication starts with the familiar and gives it a twist. People connect with the familiar and are compelled by the twist. If you are doing it right, you don’t even have to bother telling people that you are educating them. Brian Switek gets it right in his article, “Why Margarita Can Purr, but Can’t Roar” for Wired: Continue reading “Good science writing makes me purr”

Gene Networks and Natural Selection

This was originally posted at Adaptive Complexity, but it might be of interest to our patrons here at The Finch and Pea.

Life can be brutal for yeast in the wild. You don’t know where your next meal is coming from or what form it’s going to take. The key to being a successful yeast is to be metabolically agile, able to switch your metabolic state quickly based on the food source that’s currently available on the bark of an oak tree or in the leaf litter of a forest floor.

So yeast, especially the set of species related to baker’s yeast, have various networks of genes that specialize in making a meal out of different sugars. A yeast has to detect, pump in, and break down various sugars like sucrose, galactose, maltose, and glucose. Each of these sugars has different chemical properties, and therefore yeast requires different sensors, transporters, and enzymes to use each as a food source. Continue reading “Gene Networks and Natural Selection”

More than just a pretty shell

Researchers at UC Berkley exploited an interesting property of extant species of the mollusk genus Conus. Apparently, the patterns on the shells of these little buggers is a reflection of activity patterns in their neurons.

Continue reading “More than just a pretty shell”

Scientists scooped by evolution

It turns out that your classic experimental trick to mimic protein phosphorylation by mutating serines and threonines to aspartate or glutamate at phosphorylation sites was not first discovered by humans. Pearlman, Serber and Ferrell argue that many phosphorylation sites in proteins evolved from negatively charged amino acid residues, which means that phosphorylation evolved to mimic the effects of glutamate and aspartate. This, of course, occurred long before human scientists discovered in 1987 that you could replace phosphorlated serines and threonines with negatively charged amino acids and still get a functional protein.

“A Mechanism for the Evolution of Phosphorylation Sites”, Samuel M. Pearlman, Zach Serber, James E. Ferrell Jr., Cell Volume 147, Issue 4, 11 November 2011, Pages 934–946 Continue reading “Scientists scooped by evolution”