Category: Definitions
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Bacteria. Viruses. Good. Bad…
Normally, you wouldn’t want to have anything to do with Clostridium novyi. The rod-shaped bacterium is commonly found in soil, manure or under rotting leaves. When it invades a human body, it releases flesh-eating toxins. The last place you would hope to find it is in a hospital. But researchers used a modified version of…
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Light. Right. Left.
How can a beam of light tell the difference between left and right? Tiny particles have now been coupled to a glass fiber. The particles emit light into the fiber in such a way that it does not travel in both directions, as one would expect. Instead, the light can be directed either to the…
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Gut, viruses, life itself…
Odds are, there’s a virus living inside your gut that has gone undetected by scientists for decades. A new study has found that more than half the world’s population is host to a newly described virus, named crAssphage, which infects one of the most common gut bacterial species, Bacteroides. This bacterium thought to be connected…
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Naming things. The anxiety of the “most evolved”…
Contradicting earlier claims, “The Family That Walks on All Fours,” a group of quadrupedal humans made famous by a 2006 BBC documentary, have simply adapted to their inability to walk upright and do not represent an example of backward evolution, according to new research by Liza Shapiro, an anthropologist at The University of Texas at…
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