When I was a graduate student, I did a rotation in a tuberculosis lab. Mycobacterium tuberculosis and research strains grow very slowly; one round of cell division can take nearly a day. E. coli can divide every 20 minutes, meaning that in the time it takes to grow two M. tuberculosis from one, you can get ten trillion E. coli. Since my rotation was only a couple of months, I was given an E. coli research project. And M. tuberculosis is still among the relatively small proportion of bacterial species that we can actually grow in the lab at all. Given all of that, I have a lot of respect for the Japanese team that spent 12 years culturing organisms from a group called Lokiarchaea. Imagine being a grad student in that lab.
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endosymbiosis
Science in Review: Symbols and Symbiotes
Given my interest in the metaphoric use of scientific language, I couldn’t pass up this editorial on metaphorical science experiments. Physics has made some remarkable advances in its ability to study and hypothesize about features of the universe far removed from everyday experience. Black holes aren’t on every street corner; there was just the one Big Bang; quantum entanglement doesn’t work with billiard balls. In order to pair observational data with with theoretical developments, some researchers design clever experiments on related systems that are available in the lab. The math describing the proxy systems is analogous to models for the inaccessible systems. For example, one group created sonic black holes, systems which trap sound in the way black holes trap light, and used them to explore predictions made about the behavior of regular black holes. How far does the analogy carry? It’s not clear; if we could test black holes to see if their behavior matches these sonic substitutes, we wouldn’t need the substitutes. We might be learning something or we might be tumbling down the rabbit hole.
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