Long before modern refrigeration, people in Russia and Finland reportedly placed living Russian brown frogs in milk to keep it fresh.
It turns out the curious practice has a basis in science: Recent research on the amphibians’ skin secretions led by Moscow State University organic chemist A.T. Lebedev shows they’re loaded with peptides, antimicrobial compounds as potent against Salmonella and Staphylococcus bacteria as prescription antibiotics.
Transgender Algae Show How Males and Females Came to Be
One of the few things older than the battle of the sexes is the origin of the sexes. How sexes evolved in the first place has been a lasting mystery in biology. Thanks to some transgender algae, scientists may have cracked this evolutionary whodunit.
A simple trick of genetic engineering forced female Volvox carteri algae to produce sperm and males to produce eggs. The process revealed that the evolution of males and females was much more straightforward than anyone thought.
Dissociative identity disorder is when someone exhibits multiple personalities.
What’s really weird is how one personality shows different medical conditions than the other one!
For instance, one of a patient’s personalities may need eyeglasses and another won’t. Or, one identity might be diabetic and another won’t.
In such cases, it isn’t simply a matter of the patients thinking they need eyeglasses or insulin; their bodies actually go through alterations, such as in blood pressure or sugar levels.
In one case, published by the American Psychiatric Press, a doctor noted how medications prescribed to a dissociative identity disorder patient had different effects depending on what “personality” took the drug.
For example, when a tranquilizer was given to the person’s childish persona, it made the individual sleepy and relaxed.
However, when the adult personality was administered the same drug it made him anxious and confused.
Doctors even noticed visibly apparent traits, like lazy eye, would come and go depending on which personality was present.
The placenta, long thought to be sterile, is home to a bacterial community similar to the one found in the mouth, researchers report today. The microbes are generally non-pathogenic, but according to the authors of the study, variations in their composition could be at the root of common but poorly understood pregnancy disorders such as preterm birth, which occurs in one out of every ten pregnancies.
In 2012, Kjersti Aagaard, an obstetrician at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and her collaborators found that the most abundant microbes in an expectant mother’s vagina were different from those in a non-pregnant woman, but were not generally representative of those that were most common in the stool of an infant in its first week of life1. To investigate where these microbes were coming from, the team decided to examine the placenta.
In the new study, the researchers took samples of placental tissue from 320 women just after delivery, extracted DNA from the tissue and sequenced it. They found that the weight of the mother or whether she gave birth by caesarean or vaginally did not seem to change the makeup of the placental microbiome. But, Aagaard says, the bacterial community “was different among women who either experienced a preterm birth or had a much earlier infection, such as a urinary tract infection — even if that infection was treated and cured many months or weeks previously”. Their findings are published today in Science Translational Medicine2.
The amniotic sac in which a fetus grows is a sterile environment, but the placenta — an organ the fetus shares with the mother — is home to a bacterial community.
A small fishtank that is driven by a goldfish with the help of computer vision, put together by studio diip - video embedded below:
By using a camera and computer vision software it is possible to make a fish control a robot car over land. By swimming towards an interesting object, the fish can explore the world beyond the limits of his tank.
cats that have faces like this with the colors split down the middle means that there were two cats in the mummy cats womb that merged together in the early stages of fertilization.
it’s actually called a chimera and is when 2 eggs fuse and 2 sperm fuse and then fertilise eachother to create an organism with 2 seperate sets of traits but we can make stuff up i guess
haha wow you are super wrong these kinds of viable chimeras are caused when two fertilized eggs fuse how do you think a fused-together sperm is gonna swim to an egg smh… and btw these patches of orange and brown (i’m not sure about the eye color) are usually not caused by chimerism but by different x chromosomes being suppressed in different parts of the body (thats why the vast majority of calico cats are female)…..but we can make stuff up i guess
Cellulose nitrate was used to make dice from the late 1860s until the middle of the twentieth century, and the material remains stable for decades. Then, in a flash, they can dramatically decompose. Nitric acid is released in a process called outgassing. The dice cleave, crumble, and then implode.
From Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck by Ricky Jay and Rosamond Purcell, 2002.
