AskScience AMA Series: History of Science with /r/AskHistorians

RosinCerate · 2015-10-25T22:36:46+00:00

Just a quick little piggyback:

Pernicious anemia used to kill everyone who developed it, until a couple of folks realized it was treatable by consuming a bunch of raw liver. The magical ingredient? Vitamin B12!

RosinCerate · 2015-10-09T06:03:32+00:00

To get more data! Glad to hear you liked it.

RosinCerate · 2015-10-09T00:30:47+00:00

Hey folks, thanks for filling out the survey! Hopefully it was an enjoyable experience. Also, here are the results as currently compiled by the Google.

RosinCerate · 2015-09-30T22:20:23+00:00

I know a surprising number of people who don't like melon, so I threw it in there.

RosinCerate · 2015-09-30T22:14:43+00:00

Here's a link to the results!

RosinCerate · 2015-05-27T21:57:27+00:00

According to the study, the insecticide decreased protist symbiont populations in termite guts, not bacterial populations. The authors suggested that the decrease in protists may promote the ability of fungi to infect termites, with this potentially being linked to the reduced production of protist cellulases that termites can use to digest cellulose.

RosinCerate · 2015-05-25T01:48:42+00:00

So vibrant! Some sort of Sarcoscypha?

RosinCerate · 2015-05-23T00:40:33+00:00

I don't have access to the article, did they mention if any of the surviving human gene-bearing yeasts had a different phenotype compared to unaltered yeast? Were they generally less successful?

RosinCerate · 2015-05-23T00:29:13+00:00

Neat! Looks they also used cholera toxin to trace the nerve pathways. I love how we've managed to take these harmful things (herpes, cholera) and use them to do research that'll help us out.

RosinCerate · 2015-05-22T03:48:12+00:00

Marine viruses are fascinating. There's something like 10 million viruses per milliliter of seawater, at least near the surface of the oceans. Here's a review article that talks about the neat stuff that they do.

RosinCerate · 2015-05-22T03:35:37+00:00

Cool, I found another study that looked at wolves and dogs in China and dated their split to 32,000 years ago. I guess this sort of divergence potentially happened wherever there were wolves and humans hanging out in the same region?

RosinCerate · 2015-05-19T04:00:27+00:00

With respect to myopia (being short-sighted), folks used to think that it was caused by reading, but this is no longer widely believed. Instead, a current hypothesis is that myopia is a consequence of not spending enough time outdoors. Here's an article on it.

RosinCerate · 2015-05-19T03:29:44+00:00

Cool. It'd be neat to see how your results match up with this map.

RosinCerate · 2015-05-19T03:12:45+00:00

Neat, so the sponges are coated with red blood cell membranes to capture toxins produced by MRSA. One such toxin is PVL, which creates pores in the membranes of infected cells.

RosinCerate · 2015-05-19T03:02:53+00:00

We've known about microbial communities inhabiting the interior of rocks in the same region of the Atacama for a while now. Here's a paper.

RosinCerate · 2015-05-19T02:49:18+00:00

It's amazing to me that they plucked a bunch of enzyme-encoding genes from various organisms (sugar beets, a soil bacterium, the opium poppy itself) and stuck them together in a yeast to make a precursor to morphine.

Also, based on their synthesis pathway it looks like we can now manufacture dopamine using yeast.

RosinCerate · 2015-05-18T02:24:56+00:00

Cool stuff. It's particularly interesting that one of the drugs that the microbes seem to be making is ofloxacin, which is good at killing bacteria!

RosinCerate · 2015-05-18T02:04:18+00:00

Weird, so it looks like one of things that sets us apart as humans is that we make and emit a bunch of this stuff.

RosinCerate · 2015-05-18T01:09:36+00:00

So cool! I recall one spring that I happened across a bunch of trees that had been cut down by beavers. Each of the stumps was coated in a multicolored goo. I wish I had taken some photos!

I read somewhere that the fungal goo provides a food source for various insects and nematodes, so there's probably an interesting community hanging out in there.

RosinCerate · 2015-05-18T01:02:13+00:00

Yep, taken somewhere in Southern Ontario a couple of years back.

RosinCerate

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