Liam Shaw is a Wellcome-funded research fellow at the MacLean Lab in Oxford, researching bacterial genetics. He is writing a book about the history of antibiotics.
While normal life must compete with a whole ecosystem, a mirror bacterium might behave like the only real thing in a world of phantom reflections. Normal organisms are kept in check by an ecological balance between their death and growth rate. But without any predators, mirror bacteria that escaped a laboratory might grow exponentially, even with a lower growth rate than normal bacteria.
‘Great Auk’ by John James Audubon (1836).
The great auk, or garefowl, was a flightless North Atlantic seabird and it tasted delicious, perhaps a little like duck with a hint of seaweed. It’s hard to be sure because by the 1860s the great auk was extinct. It had once been abundant: in the 16th century, a breeding ground off Newfoundland – known as Funk Island for the...
At some point in the past, humans and other apes lost their tails. Research recently published in Nature proposes a mechanism to explain how.
When Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane VSS Unity made its third commercial flight on 8 September 2023, its three crew members were accompanied by three paying customers, ‘private astronauts’ who had bought their tickets as long ago as 2004 (when they were a bit less than half the current asking price of $450,000). Ken Baxter, a Las Vegas real-estate investor; the British racing...
In the 1880s, the Danish bacteriologist Hans Gram was working in the morgue of the Berlin city hospital, trying to identify bacteria in sections of lung tissue under the microscope. But there was so much blood that the bacteria were ‘impossible to see’. He used a dye – gentian violet – to stain the whole sample, then rinsed it with alcohol to wash out the purple colour. The bacteria appeared ‘an intense blue (often almost black)’ while the human cells were unstained.
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