whyisthisinteresting

The Acupuncture Edition

In 2021, scientists discovered a new system inside of our bodies. They've labeled it the interstitium, as it's a finely woven layer that sits just between the skin and the fascia, carrying fluids like tattoo ink and skincare favorite hyalauronic acid beyond its skin entry point. They also say that it plays a role in how acupuncture actually works; stimulus in one part of the body is carried via the interstitium to a wholly other part.

whyisthisinteresting

The Competitive Fly Fishing Edition

The fish choosing to move to the water-air interface, and pierce it with its mouth, to put its water-dwelling self into our world, is something magical.

longreads.com

Gassed Up

When that process happens naturally, cells near its seeds start producing the gas and it diffuses outward through the fruit. Each cell the gas reaches begins its own production, and the cascade softens the flesh and the tomato turns red from the inside out. The tomato turns red from the outside in.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #198

Basically, scientists can't see the proteins inside of a cell in real-time in their natural environment. They can image ~10% of the proteins once they're pulled out and purified, using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), or < 1% when they're actually working inside a cell, but most of our cell's proteins operate in the shadows.

wired.com

Not to Alarm Anyone, but Flesh-Eating Screwworms Have Entered the US

The USDA this week confirmed the first known infection of the carnivorous fly larva, which feast on the flesh of living mammals, after the United States eradicated the nightmare bugs in the 1960s.

themarginalian.org

How Evolution Invented Faith: The Patience of the Penguin and the Art of Withstanding Abandonment

The male's stoic, heroic devotion to his duty as incubator and nurse must be unique in nature, involving that almost incredibly long fast under conditions of exposure to intense frost that would kill most other living creatures. It is at last rewarded, while the rookery is still sunless in July, by the return of his mate, fat and full-bellied from her long sojourn amid the krill and small fishes.

3quarksdaily.com

How Grains and Grasses Fed (and Still Feed) Humankind

Their leaves send about two thirds of all the food they make to the underworld. There, roots tunnel many meters down. As they grow, they break up clay and rock, exude sugars and other molecules, and interweave their cells with fungi. When the roots die, they add spongy organic matter to the soil.

themarginalian.org

How Flamingos Got Their Pink

It is not simply that flamingos metabolize archaea, digesting them to turn their pigments into plumage coloration — modern molecular analysis reveals that archaea still live intact in the feathers of flamingos, perhaps the way our own past moves through us, lives in us, colors our present with the hue of something deeper than memory, something shimmering with the mystery of what makes life alive.

themarginalian.org

How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature’s Tiny Titans of Tenacity

They are what that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary was studying when he coined the word symbiosis, which is the technology evolution invented for unselfing.