I have a big interest in the natural world, in particular evolution and virology/microbiology. There are some fantastic videos around that show some of the beauty that often is taken for granted or goes entirely unnoticed. Here is one of those (Recommended: click to watch in 1080p).
You Tube Direct Link
There's no such thing as a jellyfish
Re: There's no such thing as a jellyfish
Edith Widder's TED.com talk is awesome (here's the original version of that youtube video in the link), and bioluminescence is a really cool phenomenon. Many bacteria use it for various different things, including a squid that Edith talks about there that uses these bioluminescent bacteria (in this case vibrio fischeri) at night to light it up and make things underneath it think it's a star or the moon rather than prey.
You Tube Direct Link
The cool thing about this is that it's basically a bunch of proteins encoded in the DNA of the bacteria. They come in different colours and each has a name (e.g. GFP for green fluorescent protein). There's a genetic machine called DNA polymerase that moves along the DNA, find's a "start site" and copies the DNA information from the DNA strand until it finds a "stop site", and the material it copies eventually becomes an enzyme that performs some function in the cell.
You Tube Direct Link
Now it gets really cool. It's possible to take the bases that encode a gene from the DNA of one organism and put them in another one. This means that it's possible to take e.g. GFP and put it in other things to make them fluorescent. For example, here it has been done with mice.
Why would you want to do that? Well you can track the position of certain bacteria in a colony for instance. But why would you really want to do that? Making a bacterial mexican wave.
You Tube Direct Link
You Tube Direct Link
The cool thing about this is that it's basically a bunch of proteins encoded in the DNA of the bacteria. They come in different colours and each has a name (e.g. GFP for green fluorescent protein). There's a genetic machine called DNA polymerase that moves along the DNA, find's a "start site" and copies the DNA information from the DNA strand until it finds a "stop site", and the material it copies eventually becomes an enzyme that performs some function in the cell.
You Tube Direct Link
Now it gets really cool. It's possible to take the bases that encode a gene from the DNA of one organism and put them in another one. This means that it's possible to take e.g. GFP and put it in other things to make them fluorescent. For example, here it has been done with mice.
Why would you want to do that? Well you can track the position of certain bacteria in a colony for instance. But why would you really want to do that? Making a bacterial mexican wave.
You Tube Direct Link
Last edited by Supernova on Wed Jun 01, 2011 2:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
-
CAMBO
- Posts: 757
- Joined: Thu Sep 10, 2009 9:17 pm
- What is 3hirty p1us 4orty?: 70
- Location: Denia, Spain
Re: There's no such thing as a jellyfish
Spanish for jellyfish is Medusa.
i found that out when snorkling of Ibiza and this girl came running along the cliff top above me shouting MEDUSA / MEDUSA as there was a huge amount of them coming in the cove behind me and the sting is quite painfull.
i found that out when snorkling of Ibiza and this girl came running along the cliff top above me shouting MEDUSA / MEDUSA as there was a huge amount of them coming in the cove behind me and the sting is quite painfull.
Re: There's no such thing as a jellyfish
to quote cracked: "you may be aware of the fact that the deep ocean is a stygian nightmare world of gelatinous tentacle demons, giant mutant sea lice and lamp monsters made of teeth. So there's really no surprise that there's something down there that will hollow out your torso and use it as a mode of transport."
fuck the ocean. and australia. australia is the land of monsters.
fuck the ocean. and australia. australia is the land of monsters.
