On July 17, Instagram announced the unthinkable: the company was exploring the idea of hiding the number of “likes” from its photo-sharing platform. According to the company, the new design would encourage “followers to focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes they get,” ostensibly shifting the emphasis away from the quantity of likes to the quality of content.
Posted on December 16, 2019 - 3:36pm
One of biology’s wilder facts is that we’re all family. You and me, sure, but also me and a mushroom. Triceratops shared genes with you. So does the virus that makes you cough, and a rosebush. Bacteria left us on the tree of life around 2.7 billion years ago, but the wet world they came from is still ours: One code runs all of life. The same proteins that imprint memories in your neurons, for example, do so in octopi, ravens, and sea slugs. This genetic conservation means tricks from one species can be hijacked. If you stick a jellyfish gene in a monkey, it’ll glow green.
Every week the number jumps. The epidemic of a mysterious lung illness, first reported this spring, has swept across the nation, jumping from a few to more than 1,000 cases in 48 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released in early October.
Posted on November 4, 2019 - 11:19am
The Breakthrough
Researchers at Berkeley have produced the first detailed picture of the molecular structure of human telomerase, an enzyme that plays key roles in both the repair of aging cells and the endless cellular rejuvenation typical of cancers. Berkeley biology professors Kathleen Collins and Eva Nogales published their discovery, complete with 3D images, in the journal Nature in April.
The Background
The big question is why the scam wasn’t detected earlier. Theranos promised the moon—or at least a full battery of blood tests from a minim of blood—but it never came close to delivering.
Posted on July 2, 2018 - 1:48pm
When Rebecca Skloot was 16 years old, her biology teacher wrote a name on the blackboard: “Henrietta Lacks.” He explained that Lacks was a black woman whose surgeon had extracted cells from her tumor in 1951. They turned out to be the first human cells to survive indefinitely in a laboratory. Billions of so-called HeLa cells lived in labs around the world and had helped produce treatments for leukemia, influenza, Parkinson’s disease, and many other ailments.
Posted on May 18, 2017 - 11:42am
Racism hurts the heart. Both black and white residents of counties where whites reported more racist attitudes were more likely to die from heart disease than those in areas with lower racial bias, according to a recent study from Berkeley psychology researchers. The relationship between whites’ racial bias and death rates was more pronounced for blacks, according to the study, which appeared in the journal Psychological Science last fall.
Posted on May 16, 2017 - 4:11pm
In the pantheon of fad diet crazes, perhaps the most enduring is the grapefruit diet—over the years it has inspired countless overweight Americans to guzzle grapefruits and their bitter juice in hopes of shedding pounds. But although fad diets are typically synonymous with dubious science, new UC Berkeley research suggests the grapefruit diet might actually work, at least on tubby rodents with a taste for Brie and butter.
Posted on October 8, 2014 - 5:15pm
Fall and winter birthdays can be a real drag.
September celebrants will forever have their special days clouded by the beginning of a new school year. October through December birthdays are too closely clustered to all the good holidays, leaving the rest of the year a giftless wasteland. And while all the Geminis and Cancers get to have their parties in the park, the children of winter are forced to blow out their candles indoors and out of the gloom.
Posted on March 6, 2014 - 2:10pm
Does this bacteria make me look fat?
I ask because in the latest search for causes of the obesity epidemic, the one victim of sausage-like finger pointing is the community of microbes residing in the human gut. And according to the surprising recent work by UC Berkeley grad student Taichi Suzuki, it seems that where you live goes a great way to determining what microbes you have.
Posted on February 20, 2014 - 9:00pm
You are mostly not you.
That is to say that 90 percent of the cells residing in your body are not human cells, they are microbes. Viewed from the perspective of most of its inhabitants, your body is not so much the temple and vessel of the human soul as it is a complex and ambulatory feeding mechanism for a methane reactor in your small intestine.
This is the kind of information microbiologists like to share at dinner parties, and you should too, especially if you can punctuate it with a belch.
