Data Storage Systems in the Living World

The world has witnessed an explosion of digital technology in the past few decades. With these advances comes the question of how to preserve the digital information that is constantly being generated.


Self-sacrificing Cells Demonstrate a Selfless Designer

Scientists have discovered that a single yeast cell gene (FLO1) expresses a protein that causes individual cells to stick to one another for protection. The cells flocculate, or form clumps “consisting of thousands of cells,”1 with the outside cells sacrificing themselves to protect the inner cells from possible harmful chemicals.


What Spurs Evolution: the Old or the Young?

On October 7, 2008, University College London professor and geneticist Steve Jones delivered a bold lecture entitled “Human evolution is over.”1 In the past, he stated, elderly fathers provided more mutations for evolution to work with. Now that men are becoming fathers at younger ages, humans are not evolving much at all.


The Finest Solar Technology Doesn't Come from a Lab

Advances in solar cell technology have produced a new European record of 39.7 percent efficiency. The result was attributed to improved “contact structures” of solar cells, according to Frank Dimroth at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg.1


Non-stick Bugs

In South Africa, special “mirid bugs” make their homes in sticky, living-flypaper plants, feeding on other insects that get trapped in the plants’ leaf-secreted glue. How do they avoid getting stuck themselves?

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