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Making Life Multicellular
Single celled organisms dominate life on our planet. They rule
in diversity and in numbers. But at some point back in deep time, a group of
unicellular organisms decided to team up -- to put the group ahead of the
individual. Simple multicellular creatures began to appear, and their
descendants are today's plants and animals. Since staying single-celled is
clearly still such a popular option, evolutionary biologists are still puzzled
by the question of how and why multicellularity appeared. New research by
Dr.
Michael Travisano, from the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour, and
the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul, and
his colleagues may have hinted at an answer. The evolution of multicelluar
organisms might have taken billions of years of evolution in Nature, but it
took only weeks in his lab.
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A Cambrian Tulip Patch
 Reconstruction of Siphusauctum gregarium.(Marianne Collins/ROM/U of T/PLoS One) |
The last thing you expect to find in a 500-million-year-old fossil deposit
like the Burgess Shale is a patch of tulips. After all, flowering plants didn't
evolve until hundreds of millions of years later, and besides, the Burgess Shale
preserves a marine ecosystem. So it wasn't that surprising when Lorna O'Brien,
a PhD candidate at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the
University of Toronto, got a closer look at these fossils and confirmed that
they weren't in fact tulips. What they were, however, was surprising. They
were filter feeding animals with a unique feeding apparatus that seems to be
like nothing on Earth today.
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Telltale Telomeres
 Young, middle aged and old zebra finches.(Courtesy of Paul Jerem) |
What's your probability of dying young or living to a ripe old age? That's something a peek at your DNA may be able to reveal.
Dr. Britt Heidinger of the University of Glasgow and her colleagues found that the future lifespan of zebra finches was related to how long critical segments of their DNA, called telomeres, were when they were young. Long teleomeres predicted long life, and short ones? Well, don't bother with that avian pension fund. Dr. Heidinger suggests that it's possible that similar correlations might be expected in humans.
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When Savvy Snakes Squeeze
 (Courtesy of Scott Boback) |
Boa constrictors are predators feared for their ability to squeeze the life out of their prey. However, knowing when to stop squeezing is very important - if they let go too soon, their prey may fight back or escape, and if they squeeze too long, they waste precious energy.
Dr. Scott Boback, a biologist at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, wanted to find out how snakes know when to stop squeezing. So in an experiment using dead rats and a mechanical heart, he discovered that they keep close tabs on the beating of their victims' heart.
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A Universe from Nothing
A little over 13 billion years ago, our universe sprang into
existence. And physicists now have a pretty good picture of what happened from
the first fractions of a second after that moment to the present day. But why
do we have a universe at all? Why is there something rather than nothing?
That's the question renowned physicist Lawrence Krauss attempts to answer in his
new book - A Universe from Nothing: Why there is Something Rather than
Nothing. You'll be surprised just how interesting nothing actually can
be. Dr. Krauss is the Foundation professor and director of the Origins Project
at Arizona State University.
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Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein, Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
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We're coming to Halifax in early June for our annual Quirks Question Roadshow, and we want to see you there. Stay tuned to this space for details.
Saturdays at noon, Mondays at 11:00 p.m., Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. and Fridays at 5:00 a.m. (ET)
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