archaea

They were only discovered in 1977 and they get more unusual all the time: Microbes called archaea package their genetic material into flexible shapes that flop open in unusual ways, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Karolin Luger reports March 2, 2021, in the journal eLife. “Very much to our surprise, we found that these structures can undergo all sorts of gymnastics,” says Luger, a biochemist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Like DNA in the nucleus of human cells, archaeal DNA coils around proteins like string wrapped around a yo-yo. But there’s another twist, the team found. Those coils of DNA can also spread 90 degrees apart—a phenomenon scientists hadn’t seen before. Such bends in the springlike structures could Read More ›

When Nature’s Books and Arts editor Barbara Kiser’stop five for 2018 came out, #s 1 and 2 were Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder on the troubled state of theoretical physics, of which Kiser says, Lost in Math is a firecracker of a book—a shot across the bows of theoretical physics. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist working on quantum gravity (and author of the blog Backreaction) confronts failures in her field head-on. The foundations of physics have not improved, she reminds us, for more than three decades. and The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen on the troubled state of the concept of the Tree of Life. of which she says, thinking Read More ›