Thursday, 9 February, 2012

A crash course in “sink or swim” teaches computerized robots to adapt to changing circumstances. When taught by “directed evolution,” robots that started without legs learned to walk sooner than robots that started with legs! Can you explain?

Dive deep, and meet the flashlight squid — with a billion-bacteria light bulb. Meet bacteria that live in boiling water, and the immense variety of weirder-than-weird critters that live between grains of sand. Plus a highly selected bio-freak show…

Long ago, nature devised the hinge and ball and socket for appendages like legs and wings. The screw is the latest simple machine to be discovered in nature. Why do weevils, a type of beetle, have a screw? How does it help weevils survive their 3-D world?

White nose syndrome has killed a million bats in the eastern U.S., and spread to Nova Scotia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Why is the fungus deadly here, but not in Europe? Can quarantines, anti-fungals or heated bat houses help our bats survive the onslaught?

Darwin thought life had to predate the Cambrian era, and yet there was no evidence. In 1953, a Wisconsin geologist saw fossils aged almost 2 billion years. Now, life has been discovered in rocks from 3.5 billion years. What was life like, and how do we recognize it?

The BP spill released about 160,000 tons of methane into the Gulf of Mexico, but a new study shows that it was eaten by friendly bacteria. The seabed contains an astonishing amount of methane, a strong greenhouse gas. So can bacteria reduce the global warming hazard of massive methane releases?

All life requires oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, carbon, hydrogen and phosphorus. Until now. Bacteria in a toxic California lake that have replaced phosphorus with arsenic are quite healthy, thank you very much. Tune in for our scientific remake of the boffo comedy: “Arsenic in Old Lake!”

Ethanol in gasoline now comes mainly from corn, a food crop. Cellulose, found in crop wastes, wood and switchgrass, could be a great source of ethanol, if only the yeast that makes ethanol could digest cellulose. A new genetic alteration forced yeast to break down cellulose, and then convert it into ethanol.

Many of the tastiest crops can’t pollinate themselves: melons, cucumbers, strawberries, almonds, cacao. But pollinators — both native and managed — are under threat from diseases and pesticides. They aren’t finding enough to eat. Their colonies are dying. What can we do?

Strong, tough, sticky, elastic and biodegradable, silk may be used for a mesh to support injured tissues, or as a temporary container for drugs, stem cells and growth factors. As scientists divine the secret of how spiders and silkworms make silk, they are finding ways to engineer silk into medical devices.