In the 1970s, an obscure scientist named Carl Woese (pronounced “woes”) was working on something apparently rather mundane: finding a way to classify bacteria. Though that may seem a straightforward task, bacteria had stubbornly resisted all previous attempts. The traditional method — looking at differences in appearance, structure, and metabolism and sort of eyeballing it [...]

When you think of a mollusk, you probably have something shelled, slimy, and possibly stalk-eyed in mind. But mollusks include creatures that are none of these things. In fact, there are mollusks that are wormy, be-spined, and eyeless. They are called aplacophorans, and scientists have long puzzled over their place in the mollusk family tree. [...]

In this photograph are elegant, microscopic agents of death. They are crystals made not of minerals, but of protein, and are found not in vugs, but in guts. Bug guts. They are Cry protein crystals made by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. You may know them better as Bt toxin. Bt toxin has gotten a lot [...]

Does these look like lichens to you? According to Gregory Retallack, they should. Yesterday, Nature published an article by Retallack that makes a radical claim: the Ediacaran Biota (635-542 mya) of bizarre creatures that preceded the Cambrian Explosion were not pneumatic semi-mobile marine animals, but instead sessile land-dwelling lichens and protists living high and very [...]

Southern conifer species have had it easy over the past 65 million years — especially compared to their hard-knock northern kin. Unlike their Southern Hemisphere cousins, whose northward-drifting continents continued to host stable habitats with cozy, Club-Med like conditions similar to those in which these conifers evolved, northern hemisphere conifer species were forced to cope [...]

As the titles of journal articles go, it’s hard to find one more elegant, enticing and — notably, if you’ve been in the business long — succinct than “Gliding Ghosts of Mycoplasma mobile“. Jules Verne short story? Steampunk Western? No. This was the title of an article in “Cell Biology” back in 2005. But the [...]

Perhaps like Moselio Schaechter and me, you were surprised to hear the identity of the fungal pathogen in the New England Compounding Pharmacy fungal meningitis outbreak: Exserohilum rostratum. Unlike outbreaks caused by names we see regularly — influenza, norovirus, E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, etc. — Exserohilum is not a name that is likely to have [...]

At least gazelles can run. But if you’re a tree, a blade of grass, or a hapless kohlrabi, there’s nothing you can do when the choppers, nippers, or clippers of your predator — aka “grazer” — approach. Such is the fate of most photosynthetic organisms, which we landlubbers tend to think of as plants. But [...]

Blogger’s note: I’m still away from the blog taking care of important life stuff, but I’ll be back soon! This post originally appeared on March 28, 2010. It has been edited slightly. Earlier this week I posted a link to Victorian microscope slides that included arranged diatom art. People really seemed to respond to the [...]

Blogger’s note: I’m still away from the blog for a few weeks. In the meantime, here is another post from the Artful Amoeba archive. It originally appeared on October 4, 2010. I recently read a delightful leaflet on water bears which gave me a whole new appreciate for their anatomy (some of them have armored [...]