Microbiology

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White Blood Cells Walk to Infection on Tiny Legs

May 20, 2002

51; How do white blood cells know where to go when infection strikes? The cells have tiny little feet and crawl like millipedes, against the blood stream, if necessary, following signals from the infection site. When they arrive, more signals tell them where to slip through the cells of the blood vessel to get to […]

Amazing Facts

Genetics: Alternate Reading Frames May Be Common

May 20, 2002

Imagine a book written in a language where there were no spaces, and every word was three letters long. Now imagine that you could get one story by starting at the first letter, and a different story by starting at the second letter, and another by starting at the third letter. That’s the situation with […]

Genetics

Large Individual Differences Seen in Human Genome

May 20, 2002

What makes each individual unique? Nature1 reported a surprising thing about “the” human genome that is becoming apparent as more individuals’ genes are examined. The first part is not surprising; the last part is: When the finished sequence of the human genome was unveiled last year, biologists said that it told a story of harmony […]

Amazing Facts

Your Inner Postal Service

April 20, 2002

51; Zip codes – those five- or nine-digit numbers on mail – have an analogue in every one of your cells. Like a city,1 a cell has information to ship from place to place.2 To make sure that the manufacturing instructions for protein parts arrive at the appropriate assembly site, the shipper puts a molecular […]

Amazing Facts

Bacterial Flagellum Can Tune Its Swim Speed with Network-Controlled Brakes

March 20, 2002

51; What’s new with flagella? These are the favorite toys of intelligent design supporters, because they are irreducibly complex molecular machines that evolutionists rarely attempt to explain by a Darwinian process. More fodder for their position comes from a paper in Cell1 that finds that bacteria can fine-tune their swimming velocity by means of a […]

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