Science

This is twisted. I love it. From National Geographic: “The parasitic wasp…prepares to inject a spotted ladybug with a single egg…the ladybug has been paralyzed by the wasp’s venom…”: “In time the egg will hatch into a larva that will develop for a few days and then chew a small hole through the abdomen of the ladybug. The larva will then spin a cocoon between the legs of the ladybug, whose body will rest on top of the cocoon as the larva undergoes metamorphosis…”: “…sometimes the ladybugs survive the larva’s emergence, and in those cases, the…larva then “brainwashes” the bug into defending the vulnerable cocoon from predators, said study co-author Jacques Brodeur, a biologist at the University of Montreal…” There you have it. Ladybug

Two of my favorite topics are evolutionary biology and brewing. It’s rare that they overlap in the same article. It looks like brewer’s yeast has been coaxed to evolve to do more than make beer: IN JUST a few weeks single-celled yeast have evolved into a multicellular organism, complete with division of labour between cells. This suggests that the evolutionary leap to multicellularity may be a surprisingly small hurdle. Multicellularity has evolved at least 20 times since life began, but the last time was about 200 million years ago, leaving few clues to the precise sequence of events. To understand the process better, William Ratcliff and colleagues at the University of Minnesota in St Paul set out to evolve multicellularity in a

Category: Science

Ladybug Zombies

Yeast, Unite!