Tag: biology
Cellosophical Explorations #3: The Third Life of Ideas
The prominent philosopher Jerry Fodor once said that every idea has two lives: the first, in philosophy, and the second, in cognitive science. To which I might add: the third, in biology. The third avatar is quite relevant for our investigation into unicellular cognition. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, there was a lot of debate over the substrate independence of intelligence, cognition and mind, with some people saying that you need a very specific kind of fleshy apparatus to be considered intelligent, while others saying that it doesn't matter what you're made of, as long as you're solving the same problem that a human being is, then you're as intelligent as a human in that respect.
Cellosophical Explorations #1
While Cellosophy is meant to be a deep dive into unicellular cognition, I'm aware that the ATmosphere isn't exactly teeming with ideas about how to study cognition in bacteria :) Forget that niche topic; my investigations so far haven't revealed as much biology on the ATmosphere as I might have expected.
SPICE: Our Antifragile Biology
Spicy food and capsaicin demonstrate hormesis and antifragility in human biology. The science of pain, TRPV1 receptors, and how controlled exposure to stressors makes our bodies stronger rather than weaker.
On Being a River
Sixty thousand miles of blood vessels run inside each of us, more than twice around the Earth. 330 billion cells are replaced every single day. Humanity has always built civilization beside rivers because we are rivers. Always in motion, never stepping into the same current twice, carrying cells that live only days alongside neurons that will last precisely as long as we do.
The Daily Planet #124: The Anatomical Compiler
Michael Levin is an interesting thinker; a rare Platonist in Biology. This quote from a recent post of his makes me think of biological engineering, but not the kind where we force organisms to do our willing, but rather work with their agential capacity to produce forms that we need:
Paralogs
Seeing before LUCA. Most genes trace back to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (~4.2 billion years ago) and stop — a barrier beyond which we cannot see. But universal paralogs are different: rare gene families present in all organisms today that were duplicated BEFORE LUCA. Both copies were inherited by all descendants. These ancient pairs pierce through the barrier, letting us glimpse evolution that predates the origin of all modern life. All known universal paralogs involve protein synthesis or membrane transport — the oldest functions.
Assembloid
Lab-grown brain circuits reveal who's really in charge. Nagoya University researchers fused thalamic and cortical organoids derived from human iPS cells, watching axons extend bidirectionally to form synapses. Neural activity propagates from thalamus to cortex in wave-like patterns, selectively synchronizing pyramidal tract (PT) and corticothalamic (CT) neurons while intratelencephalic (IT) neurons remain unaffected. The thalamus plays a decisive role in cortical maturation — connected organoids show greater development than isolated ones.
Plectoneme
DNA through nanopores: not knots, but twisted coils. For decades, scientists thought messy electrical signals during nanopore sequencing were caused by DNA knots. Zheng & Keyser (Cavendish Laboratory, Physical Review X 2025) discovered they're actually plectonemes — twisted structures like a phone cord. Electroosmotic flow inside the pore spins the DNA helix, torque propagates along the strand, and regions outside the pore coil up. Nicked DNA (with breaks) can't propagate twist, confirming the mechanism.
Silk
Spider silk's molecular transformation from liquid to fiber. Based on King's College London / SDSU research (Feb 2026) revealing how arginine-tyrosine 'stickers' drive silk formation. Cation-π interactions between these amino acids initiate liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), then persist during β-sheet crystallization as shear forces convert the dope into fiber. The result: material stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar, from a simple molecular trick.