Biology

Reconstruction of Hallucigenia sparsa

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Hallucigenia, an animal lived in the Cambrian period, between 520 and 505 million years ago, has been considered for decades a really weird animal, hence the name. It looked like it could be part of a family that got extinct but the discovery of new fossils allowed to study it better since the ’90s. Now according to a new research carried out at the University of Cambridge hallucigenia, or rather the hallucigenia genus, is a lobopode, related to modern velvet worms, part of the Onychophora phylum.

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Google announced the Baseline Study project, a detailed study on the biological level of human beings to determine what a healthy person should be. The initial study includes 175 people of which an enormous amount of medical information will be collected. A team that includes dozens of specialists led by molecular biologist Andrew Conrad will use this information to create a portrait of a person in perfect health.

Artistic concept of Metaspriggina swimming near colonies of the cyanobacterium Marpolia

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The discovery of new fossils of Metaspriggina walcotti allowed to shed light on the origin of some of the characteristics of the chordates, animals with a backbone structure which in vertebrates has become the spine. It’s an animal lived about 500 million years ago, during the Middle Cambrian period. Due to their worm-like appearance and a length that could reach 10 centimeters (almost 4 inches), they don’t seem like much but they could be the ancestors of all vertebrates living today.

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A study presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology showed that the Mars Rover Curiosity was anything but sterile when it left for the red planet. Despite the cleaning procedures the rover has been submitted to, swabs passed on its surface were analyzed and revealed the presence of 65 species of bacteria. Some of them may have survived the interplanetary journey.

Overview of DNA structure

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Daniel Levner, a bioengineer of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, and some colleagues of the Bar Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, built nanobots, microscopic robots made ​​from DNA. They were inserted into cockroaches to test their ability to perform logical operations that will allow to diagnose diseases or deliver drugs in an extremely targeted way.