Genetic engineering has produced some amazing species. One type of corn has a gene from bacteria. The corn is safe for people to eat, but the plant poisons caterpillars that try to attack it.There’s also a salmon that grows to market weight in less than half the usual time of three years. It’s an Atlantic salmon with genes from a Pacific chinook salmon.
Aging is a fact of life. Even if you avoid bad accidents, injuries, and infections, you won’t stay healthy forever. Your body will break down as you get older. You’ll get wrinkles and achy joints. Your vision and hearing will fade. Your chance of developing cancer, heart disease, and many other ailments will greatly increase. Aging “bedevils us all,” writes Steven N. Austad in his book, Methuselah’s Zoo. He defines aging as “the progressive deterioration over time of bodily functions and defenses along with increasing susceptibility to diseases.”
关于衰老，动物教会了我们什么 Continue reading »
Inside a living cell, something remarkable is happening. A very tiny machine cuts the cell’s DNA. Next, the cell repairs the broken DNA, but the segment where the cut happened no longer works the same way. The tiny machine has edited the DNA—the code of life.
基因编辑技术—合成生物学的基本工具 Continue reading »
The surface of our planet is populated by living things. Despite their apparent diversity, living things are fundamentally similar inside. Cells are the fundamental units of life. As emphasized by the cell biologist Edmund Beecher Wilson, “The key to every biological problem must finally be sought in the cell; for every living organism is, or at some time has been, a cell.”
When Kea hi Seymour was 12 years old, he watched a television show about kangaroos . He learned that these animals store energy in the long, stretchy tendons attached to their huge feet. Hitting the ground stretches the tendon like a rubber band, storing the energy from the impact. When the animal lifts off, the energy gets released, like a snapping rubber band, giving an extra boost of speed and power.
像鸵鸟一样快——新发明如何由观察自然界而来 Continue reading »
Next time you step outside, take a moment to notice all the plants. You may see a grassy lawn, weeds poking through the sidewalk, towering trees, moss growing on rocks or bricks, or maybe even a vegetable or flower garden. Now let this thought sink in: without plants, you and all the other human beings and animals on this planet couldn’t survive. We depend on plants for the air we breathe. But the relationship goes much deeper than that. We also rely on plants for food, clothing, medicines, materials, and so much more.
Everyone can see that, from birth through adolescence, humans get taller and their bones get longer. And then all th at stops around the end of the teen years. In the past, the mechanism of growth was a mystery. In the fourth century, there was a common belief that children’s natural character was hot and liquid, partly because of the blood that went into their creation. Thus, a physician to the Roman emperor believed that children grew because of their excessive heat. Twelve hundred years later, it was understood that food provided the material that allowed growth. A French physician, however, pointed out that even when sick children didn’t eat, they continued to grow.
