Emerging Scholars Blog

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evolutionary biology

Science Corner: It *IS* a question of where he grips it!

Interestingly, some hummingbird feeders (like this one) require hovering while others offer a chance to rest and sip. (Image by AS R at Pexels)

Something has been pulling the fake flowers off of our hummingbird feeder. Raccoons are the primary suspect. Hummingbirds don’t seem strong enough, and don’t need to tug at petals to feed. Also, the vandalism occurs overnight. Oh yeah, and there are the incriminating raccoon paw prints all around the feeder. Seemed pretty cut and dry. But then a headline about how “some hummingbirds are flower robbers” caught my eye. Maybe hummingbirds do engage in more than nectar sipping.
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Science Corner: Weltraumgötterdämmerung

All of those are Rocket; this is not an illustration of descent with modification. (Image © Marvel)

This summer’s installment of “If you don’t teach your kids theology, Marvel Studios will” comes in the form of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Sure, it’s not a Scorsesian theological treatise. At times it felt very much like a roller coaster ride–an impression helped along by the fact that just a month ago I was riding an actual Guardians of the Galaxy coaster with filmed story elements featuring the same cast. But every now and again, this technicolor space opera takes a breath between virtuosic cadenzas of violence and Zune tunes for a melodramatic musing. The question weighty enough to pull away from the black hole of bombast: What does a creator owe its creation?
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Science Corner: Dawn – A Proton’s Tale of All that Came to Be

I think some neutrinos did the cover art. (Cover image © InterVarsity Press)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a biophysicist, a writer, a theologian walk into a bar. OK, so that’s not actually how Dawn was written, but the diverse backgrounds of the three co-writers–Cees Dekker, Corien Oranje, and Gijsbert van den Brink respectively–do sound more like résumés for the cast of a niche joke than for collaborators on a novel. And not just any novel, but one that spans 14 billion years–from the instants after the Big Bang until the moment the manuscript was sent to the printers (or so it seems, given the current events mentioned in Chapter 23, “Space”). As the subtitle “A Proton’s Tale of All that Came to Be” suggests, the protagonist of this novel is also unique; I’ve never read a book from the point of view of a subatomic particle before. (Talk about your unreliable narrators; subatomic particles make up everything!) So what does a proton have to say?
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Science Corner: Unlocking Immunity

I hope by now you’ve accepted that sometimes the visuals will be a bit on-the-nose. (Image by stevepb)

As you read this, millions of people around the world are making antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. None of those people were born with a gene for those specific antibodies. Yet in just a couple of weeks following exposure to the virus–or now, one of its proteins via a vaccine–their immune systems can make antibodies that bind tightly and very specifically to the outside of the coronavirus, inhibiting its ability to infect their cells. The close and unique match between antibody and antigen has been compared to the fit of a key to a lock. While inert macroscopic metal objects don’t fully capture the Brownian mosh pit of molecular dynamics, keys and locks can be a helpful starting point for understanding why each virus requires a tailored immune response. And that unique fit is achieved via an evolutionary mechanism of selection and inheritance with variation.
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Science Corner: Origin Story

Maybe a bit on the nose, but I thought this was a lovely image. (Photo by jodylehigh)

Today is a day for fresh starts in the United States. A personally exciting one is that, for the first time, the science adviser to the President will be a life scientist: geneticist and mathematician Eric Lander. So it seems like a good day to announce some new directions for my blogging here at Emerging Scholars Network. I’d like to work in a couple of new strands more focused on biology. We’ll still check in on the science news, just not every week. We’ll still chat about sci-fi books and films from time to time. I just think we could stand to mix things up a bit and to address what I think are some growing needs.
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