A wolf’s howl is one of those unforgettable sounds of nature. Now, this iconic sound is setting a new chapter for wolf conservation, fitting hand-in-hand with monitoring technology.To make sense of what wolf howls mean for an ecosystem, The Colossal Foundation (the non-profit arm of Colossal Biosciences, which recently made headlines for its dire wolf de-extinction project) has announced a partnership with non-profit Yellowstone Forever and the Yellowstone Wolf Project. The collaboration aims ...read more
It’s your trusty kitchen sponge that you use for everything. Whether it’s to clean the dishes, wipe down the counters, or scrub your pots and pans. But research has shown that sponges might not be your best tool in the kitchen. In fact, they harbor more bacteria than almost any other kitchen tool.According to Markus Egert, a microbiologist at Furtwangen University, in Schwarzwald, Germany, used kitchen sponges are colonized by a large diversity of microbes, including bacteria, fungi, and vir ...read more
Our DNA contains the functional instructions for all of our cells, from the cells in our brains to the cells in our bones and our blood. But it is only by activating and deactivating different segments of our DNA, or our genes, that our cells take on their specialized functions. This is true for all sorts of organisms, whose cells are differentiated when different genes are switched on and off. In simple organisms, these on-off “switches” are typically situated only a short distance away fro ...read more
Everyone who’s watched a police procedural knows that crime scene investigators can link the tiniest bits of organic evidence to a perpetrator though their DNA. A new technique could take DNA’s crime-fighting potential a quantum leap forward: by leveraging it to create a 3D model of the suspect’s face, researchers report in the journal Advanced Science.Their computational tool, called Difface, looks for genetic differences between single letters of the genetic alphabet, known as single nuc ...read more
New research on the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak puts another nail in the lab leak theory’s coffin. That theory claims the virus was either created in or studied at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and then it either escaped accidentally or was released intentionally.The new study shows that the virus’s path across China to Wuhan resembles that of the earlier SARS epidemic that started in 2002, in terms of time, distance, and route, they report in the journal Cell. Demonstrating its origins ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine