Mapping the bug (articles at ScienceDaily and The Great Beyond)
Biologists have tried, for the first time, to nail down every detail of a living organism, molecule by molecule. They chose a pneumonia bacterium, partly because it was very small and therefore one of the simplest to tackle, and partly because we have, from necessity, a lot of information about the organism's biology and how to handle it.
The total spec for the bacterium includes all its DNA (the "genome"), the RNA molecules transcibed off the DNA (the "transcriptome"), all the proteins in the cell (the "proteome"), and the total list of chemical reactions relating them (the "metabolome").
The result was even more complicated than they anticipated. For one thing, exactly because it's small, the bacterium makes many proteins serve more than one purpose.
More on Climategate (articles at Enviroknow and DeSmogBlog)
Enviroknow, an environmental website, posts their take on the main points of the Climategate affair. Michael Mann, one of the main figures involved, defends himself at DeSmogBlog, a blog devoted to countering climate-change skeptics.
The view from the hammerhead (article at The Great Beyond)
People have long wondered why hammerhead sharks have those weird heads. Something to do with their vision, is a common guess. Some research now supports this: Not only do hammerheads have great forward stereoscopic vision, they even have stereoscopic vision behind them.
Life on Mars? (articles at The Great Beyond and Space Flight Now)
You may remember ALH 84001, though probably not by that name. It was the meteorite found in Antarctica, later determined to be from Mars, and, back 1996, found to have some microscopic features on it that might be fossil Martian microbes. Scientists have been going back and forth on the probability of this ever since. Another bit of evidence has come trickling in:
The possible microbial remains include crystals of magnetite, of a kind created by some bacteria on Earth. But were these Martian magnetite crystals possibly created by some other, non-biological way? The new evidence compared crystals created under hot conditions with those created under cool conditions and says the Martian ones were created under cool conditions. The investigators conclude, “This origin does not exclude the possibility that a fraction is consistent with formation by biogenic processes, as proposed in previous studies.” This is as measured and un-pressing a way of putting it as one can imagine, but it's enough for some tabloids to decide there's life on Mars. (See The Sun, The Telegraph, and the Daily Mail.) Well, I certainly hope so, but I'm still not counting on it.
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