This morning at lab meeting, we were treated to a presentation regarding the generation of vaccines for bats (specifically to white nose syndrome, a fungal disease common/tolerated in Europeans bats, which has recently been introduced into the naive American bat population, where it's been problematic ). Anyhow, they're sourcing bats from TAMU, apparently gathered from the stadium there. (i can personally attest that there are also bats in the upper reaches of at least one library). There are guys at A&M and tu studying batsong (yeah, like birdsong), and i offer this documentation of a bat courtship song in honor of Halloween. Also of note; the statement was made in lab meeting this morning that bats don't get cancer; this is not true, but bats ARE able to tolerate a staggering contingent of lethal-to-other-mammals-viruses without succumbing, and a recent Science paper attributes this to "an unexpected concentration of positively selected genes in the DNA damage checkpoint and nuclear factor κB pathways that may be related to the origin of flight, as well as expansion and contraction of important gene families", which may provide protection against disease.
This buzzfeed article of a young man who, during a papal audience, wandered on to the stage to hang out with Pope Francis, is fantastic. The kid even gets to sit on the Papal chair! Jack pointed out a picture appearing at the end of the article, depicting the Pope with his robe billowing in the wind like a cape. Awesome!
And now, grad student Barbie.
Via the Blogess, this post regarding 'Shrinking Women', featuring a taped recitation of a poem by the same name by Lily Myers. It's very striking (and there's certainly truth there). (And no, not the movie.)
No comments:
Post a Comment