Monthly Archives: November 2017

Since the invention of the microscope and discovery of microbes, their role in everyday life has been, to say the least, contentious. As many of us have learned at one time or another, microbes can be a source of nasty diseases. At the same time, they are inevitably a part of us and our world. With the advent of sophisticated technologies that have peered deeper into microbial genetics and physiology, we’re now faced with a very interesting question: do we control the microbes or do they control us? Much research has been done in the past decade that has uncovered unique relationships between us and bacteria. A study conducted collaboratively by scientists at Yale, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and University of Copenhagen investigated how bacteria living in our intestines interact with the human body, and how that may be a key factor in nutrition related illness such as metabolic syndrome.…

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Since the invention of the microscope and discovery of microbes, their role in everyday life has been, to say the least, contentious. As many of us have learned at one time or another, microbes can be a source of nasty diseases. At the same time, they are inevitably a part of us and our world. With the advent of sophisticated technologies that have peered deeper into microbial genetics and physiology, we’re now faced with a very interesting question: do we control the microbes or do they control us? Much research has been done in the past decade that has uncovered unique relationships between us and bacteria. A study conducted collaboratively by scientists at Yale, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and University of Copenhagen investigated how bacteria living in our intestines interact with the human body, and how that may be a key factor in nutrition related illness such as metabolic syndrome.…

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Wikimedia Commons How long has life been around on Earth? Is life an inevitable part of planet formation? The second question is tough to answer, but if life formed soon after the planet formed, then this has important ramifications for the abundance of life in the Universe. In an article published in the leading journal Nature by Japanese geologist Takayuki Tashiro from The University of Tokyo and his team, evidence of life on Earth has now been documented in rocks that are 3.95 billion years old. This pushes back the oldest evidence of life by 12 million years, the record previously (although contentiously) held by evidence from 3.83 billion year old rocks from Greenland. The type of evidence in both Greenland and Labrador is the same. It is the ratio of heavy carbon (Carbon 13) to light carbon (Carbon 12) in a pure carbon substance called graphite, compared to that…

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Wikimedia Commons How long has life been around on Earth? Is life an inevitable part of planet formation? The second question is tough to answer, but if life formed soon after the planet formed, then this has important ramifications for the abundance of life in the Universe. In an article published in the leading journal Nature by Japanese geologist Takayuki Tashiro from The University of Tokyo and his team, evidence of life on Earth has now been documented in rocks that are 3.95 billion years old. This pushes back the oldest evidence of life by 12 million years, the record previously (although contentiously) held by evidence from 3.83 billion year old rocks from Greenland. The type of evidence in both Greenland and Labrador is the same. It is the ratio of heavy carbon (Carbon 13) to light carbon (Carbon 12) in a pure carbon substance called graphite, compared to that…

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Wikimedia Commons How long has life been around on Earth? Is life an inevitable part of planet formation? The second question is tough to answer, but if life formed soon after the planet formed, then this has important ramifications for the abundance of life in the Universe. In an article published in the leading journal Nature by Japanese geologist Takayuki Tashiro from The University of Tokyo and his team, evidence of life on Earth has now been documented in rocks that are 3.95 billion years old. This pushes back the oldest evidence of life by 12 million years, the record previously (although contentiously) held by evidence from 3.83 billion year old rocks from Greenland. The type of evidence in both Greenland and Labrador is the same. It is the ratio of heavy carbon (Carbon 13) to light carbon (Carbon 12) in a pure carbon substance called graphite, compared to that…

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Wikimedia Commons How long has life been around on Earth? Is life an inevitable part of planet formation? The second question is tough to answer, but if life formed soon after the planet formed, then this has important ramifications for the abundance of life in the Universe. In an article published in the leading journal Nature by Japanese geologist Takayuki Tashiro from The University of Tokyo and his team, evidence of life on Earth has now been documented in rocks that are 3.95 billion years old. This pushes back the oldest evidence of life by 12 million years, the record previously (although contentiously) held by evidence from 3.83 billion year old rocks from Greenland. The type of evidence in both Greenland and Labrador is the same. It is the ratio of heavy carbon (Carbon 13) to light carbon (Carbon 12) in a pure carbon substance called graphite, compared to that…

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