Ultra Bithorax

The Juno orbiter has sent back its first photo of Jupiter. And it’s awesome.

In it, you can clearly see the giant gas planet, as well as three of its moons, Io, Europa, and Ganymede. But to take this photo, Juno had take this eccentric path to sneak past the radiation.

Scientists discover the secret behind the power of bacterial sex

While horizontal gene transfer – also known as bacterial sex – has long been acknowledged as central to microbial evolution, why it is able to exert such a strong effect has remained a mystery.

But now scientists from the Department of Zoology have demonstrated through mathematical modelling that the secret is migration, whereby movement between communities of microbes greatly increases the chances of different species of bacteria being able to swap DNA and adopt new traits.

The study, published in Nature Communications, sheds new light on how the spread of traits such as antibiotic resistance is able to happen.

Earthworms are hermaphroditic! That means they can get it on with any other earthworm (of the same species) they come across since they both have boy and girl parts.

When earthworms are feeling sexy, they rub up against each other and exchange semen. I’m not sure if they also exchange phone numbers. I’m not judging.

That “bandaid” section on worms is called the clitellum. That’s where the eggs are stored.

After making sweet worm love, the clitellum secretes a substance that forms a ring around the worm’s body. The worm then wriggles out of the ring, depositing its own eggs and its lover’s sperm inside of it along the way. 

Once the worm has fully passed through the ring, the ends of it close up to form a capsule that’s now filled with eggs and sperm.

This delightful reproductive soup cooks up into as many as 20 worm embryos. Eventually, they emerge from the cocoon as wee little baby worms.

8,400 High-Res Apollo Images Released

Over four decades after the last Apollo mission, a space enthusiast and archivist in Virginia just shared 8,400 previously unreleased high-resolution photos from this historical time of space exploration.  

Yeah Science, Bitch!

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to…

William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites, and Youyou Tu for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against malaria.

Oxford University Press is proud to publish the work of many Nobel Prize winners, including William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura.

“Biochemical and Spectroscopic Properties of Cyanide-Insensitive Quinol Oxidase from Gluconobacter oxydans” by Tatsushi Mogi et al in The Journal of Biochemistry

“Siccanin Rediscovered as a Species-Selective Succinate Dehydrogenase Inhibitor“ by Tatsushi Mogi et al in The Journal of Biochemistry

“Polymyxin B Identified as an Inhibitor of Alternative NADH Dehydrogenase and Malate: Quinone Oxidoreductase from the Gram-positive Bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis” by Tatsushi Mogi et al in The Journal of Biochemistry

“Complete Inhibition of Mouse Macrophage-Derived Foam Cell Formation by Triacsin C” by Ichiji Namatame et al in The Journal of Biochemistry

“Review Ivermectin in human medicine” by Eric A. Ottesen and William C. Campbell in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy

“Serendipity and New Drugs for Infectious Disease” by William C. Campbell in ILAR Journal

“Macrolides Promote CCL2-Mediated Macrophage Recruitment and Clearance of Nasopharyngeal Pneumococcal Colonization in Mice” by Naoki Iwanaga et al in the Journal of Infectious Diseases

“Identification of new inhibitors for alternative NADH dehydrogenase (NDH-II)“ by Tatsushi Mogi et al in FEMS Microbiology Letters

“Identification of precursor peptide of aculeacin A acylase as a protein with proteolytic activity” by J. Inokoshi et al in FEMS Microbiology Letters

For a greater understanding of the use of artemisinin in antimalarial therapy, check out

“The Antiviral Activities of Artemisinin and Artesunate" by Thomas Efferth et al in Clinical Infectious Diseases

Science

First ancient human genome from Africa is sequenced

Scientists have sequenced the genome of a 4,500-year-old man in Africa for the first time, a difficult achievement since the hot climate has made DNA difficult to recover from old remains, researchers said Thursday.The breakthrough was made using the skull of a man buried face down in a cave in the southern Ethiopian highlands, according to the study in the journal Science.The cave was cool and dry enough to preserve his DNA for thousands of years, said the study, which noted that previous ancient genome analysis has been limited to samples from northern and arctic regions.While the man died before a wave of migration back into Africa from western Eurasia around 3,000 years ago, his genome showed that this migration “was up to twice as significant as previously thought, and affected the genetic make-up of populations across the entire African continent,” said the research team in a statement.This event, known as the “Eurasian backflow,” occurred when people from regions of western Eurasia such as the Middle East and Anatolia suddenly flooded back into the Horn of Africa.By comparing his ancient genome to DNA from modern Africans, researchers found that East African populations today have as much as 25 percent Eurasian ancestry from this event.Beyond the region, African populations across the continent can trace at least five percent of their genome to the Eurasian migration.Researchers believe their findings show that the massive wave of backflow migration was far bigger than previously thought and may have amounted to a quarter of the population of the Horn of Africa at the time.“

said Andrea Manica, of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, a senior author of the study.

people from regions of western Eurasia such as the Middle East and Anatolia

A Prominence on the Sun : This eerie landscape of incandescent plasma suspended in looping and twisted magnetic fields stretched toward the Sun’s eastern horizon on September 16. Captured through a backyard telescope and narrowband filter in light from ionized hydrogen, the scene reveals a gigantic prominence lofted above the solar limb. Some 600,000 kilometers across, the magnetized plasma wall would dwarf worlds of the Solar System. Ruling gas giant Jupiter can only boast a diameter of 143,000 kilometers or so, while planet Earth’s diameter is less than 13,000 kilometers. Known as a hedgerow prominence for its appearance, the enormous structure is far from stable though, and such large solar prominences often erupt. via NASA

Favus of the Scalp and Body

Favus (or favid), from the Latin favus, means “honeycomb”, and is a dermatological infection by the fungus Trichophyton schoenleinii.

This was the first disease that had a fungus recognized as its cause. In 1839, J. L. Schonlein described the spore and mycelia of the causative organism. This predates the earliest isolation of infectious bacteria by several decades, but its early discovery did not do much to prevent or treat infections. In fact, despite the knowledge of the condition and its cause, it was frequently mistaken for Hansen’s disease (leprosy) until the early 1900s, and many Europeans who were given incorrect diagnoses were committed to leper colonies or leprosaria (the leprosy equivalent of a sanitarium).

In the modern world, griseofulvin, an anti-fungal discovered in 1939, kills the favus fungus so easily that the condition is almost unheard of, outside of inaccessible and extremely impoverished communities.

Paul Erdős

Four gut bacteria decrease asthma risk in infants

New research by scientists at UBC and BC Children’s Hospital finds that infants can be protected from getting asthma if they acquire four types of gut bacteria by three months of age. More than 300 families from across Canada participated in this research through the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) Study.

Most babies naturally acquire these four bacteria, nicknamed FLVR (Faecalibacterium, Lachnospira, Veillonella, Rothia), from their environments, but some do not, either because of the circumstances of their birth or other factors.

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Einstein.