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Category: biological

Scientists from The University of Manchester have changed our understanding of how cells in living organisms divide, which could revise what students are taught at school. In a study published today in Science, the researchers challenge conventional wisdom taught in schools for over 100 years.

Students are currently taught that during , a parent cell will become spherical before splitting into two of equal size and . However, the study reveals that cell rounding is not a universal feature of cell division and is not how it often works in the body.

Dividing cells, the researchers show, often don’t round up into sphere-like shapes. This lack of rounding breaks the symmetry of division to generate two daughter cells that differ from each other in both size and function, known as asymmetric division.

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Comets that have hit Earth have been a mixed bag. Early in Earth’s history, during the solar system’s chaotic beginning, they were likely the source of our planet’s water, ultimately making up about 0.02% of the planet’s mass. (Mars and Venus received a similar fraction.)

Comets brought complex organic molecules and the biosphere, but later posed a threat to the same in cometary collisions. A (or asteroid) likely caused the Tunguska Event in 1908 in Russia, and a comet fragment likely triggered the rapid climate shift of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago, with its widespread extinctions.

If such collisions happen here, they likely take place in other solar systems as well. Now three scientists in the United Kingdom have modeled the impacts of an icy cometary collision with an Earth-like, tidally locked terrestrial planet. Such objects are prime candidates in the search for habitable exoplanets outside our solar system.

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Schavemaker and Lynch derived functions that relate the cell biology of endomembranes to cellular fitness. Applied to the pinocytosis of small-molecule nutrients and the insertion of membrane proteins by a proto-endoplasmic reticulum, the proto-endoplasmic reticulum is revealed to be the more likely path to complex endomembranes in the origin of eukaryotes.

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A single-celled microbe that revels in Earth’s most hostile salt lakes has the remarkable ability to transform its mote of a body into multicellular tissue when the pressure’s on.

“The advent of clonal multicellularity is a critical evolutionary milestone,” the international team who made this discovery, led by Brandeis University pathobiologist Theopi Rados, write in their new paper.

Haloferax volcanii is a member of the often-overlooked archaea domain, which looks quite similar to bacteria and yet have more in common with our own domain, eukaryota. Multicellularity is common in eukaryotes and rare among bacteria, and as far as we know, H. volcanii is only the second archaeon found to take this multicellular leap.

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In this remarkable conversation, Michael Levin (Tufts University) and Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Google) examine what happens when biology and computation collide at their foundations. Their recent papers—arriving simultaneously yet from distinct intellectual traditions—illuminate how simple rules generate complex behaviors that challenge our understanding of life, intelligence, and agency.

Michael’s \

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