When I Was In The Hospital, They Gave Me A Big Bracelet That Said ALLERGY, But Like. I'm Allergic To

millipedes eating Tubifera ferruginosa

by Bea Leiderman

BRAINLESS BOX JELLIES CAN LEARN BY EXPERIENCE

Mangrove box jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophora) is a small species of box jellyfish, native to the Caribbean Sea and the Central Indo-Pacific, presenting a simple nervous system. But despite tiny, researchers have demonstrated present the ability to learn by association. Although has no central brain, and being the size of the finger-tip, this box jelly can be trained to associate the sensation of bumping into something with a visual cue, and to use the information to avoid future collisions.

In the wild, the Mangrove box jellyfish forage for tiny crustaceans between the roots of mangroves. To mimic this environment, researchers placed the box jellies in cylindrical tanks that had either black and white or grey and white vertical stripes on the walls. To the jellyfish, the dark stripes looked like mangrove roots in either clear or murky water. In the ‘murky water’ tanks, the jellyfish bumped into the wall because their visual system couldn’t detect the grey stripes very clearly. But after a few minutes, they learnt to adjust their behaviour, pulsing rapidly to swim away from the wall when they got too close, this state learning is based on the combination of visual and mechanical stimuli in simple animals with no brain.

The learning process, in difference with vertebrate animals, doesnt occurs in a central neuronal organs, but instead in a small organs named rhopalial nervous system, which act as learning center, in which the jelly combines visual and mechanical stimuli during operant conditioning.

Main image: An adult specimen of the box jellyfish T. cystophora., showing where is located one of the four sensory structures named rhopalia, which includes two lens eyes. Each rhopalium also contains a visual information processing center.

Reference (Open Access): Bielecki et al., 2023. Associative learning in the box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora. Current Biology.

Filoboletus manipularis is found in south-east Asia, Australia and other parts of the world. No one would guess that these seemingly ordinary mushrooms glow at night like magical toadstools in a fairy wonderland.

Photographer Callie Chee

Common puffball / Flaschen-Staubling fungi Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

Stemonitis sp.

photo source-The MacroClub Project (Myxomycetes)

Slime Mold

A mushroom cultivated in a petri dish on Agar Agar shows it’s actual shape, the essential part of the mushroom - the Mycel, is usually hidden from the eye. By Aimee Cornwell

Microbiology!

[ID: a banner made of emojis of microscopes, bubbling flasks, and DNA, with different bacteria emojis from a combo emoji scattered between them. /End ID]

by Edward Jones on yt

ChemistryViews

Silkworms Produce Spider Silk for the First Time - ChemistryViews

Spider silk by silkworms offers a green alternative to synthetic fibers

With the fast fashion industry… how it is… finding sustainable ways to make fabric is super important.  Fibers from synthetic fabrics make up 35% of the microplastics that make their way to the ocean.  Natural fibers sourced from plants or animals are much more environmentally sound options, including silk.

Currently, the only way to get natural silk on a large scale is to harvest it from silkworms.  You’ve probably heard about the strength and durability of spider silk (it is 6x stronger than Kevlar!) but as of yet there hasn’t been a good way of getting it.  Raising spiders the way people do silkworms isn’t really an option.  Spiders need a lot of room to build their webs compared to silkworms, and individual spiders don’t produce that much silk.  Plus, when you put a whole bunch of spiders in captivity together, they tend to start eating each other.

Attempts to artificially recreate spider silk have also been less than successful.  Spider silk has a surface layer of glycoproteins and lipids on it that works as a sort of anti-aging “skin”- allowing the silk to withstand conditions such as sunlight and humidity.  But this layer has been very tricky to reproduce.

However, as scientists in China realized, silkworms produce that same kind of layer on their silk.  So what if we just genetically modified silkworms to produce spider silk?

That is exactly what the researchers at Donghua University in Shanghai did.  A team of researchers introduced spider silk protein genes to silkworms using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and microinjections in silkworm eggs.  In addition to this, they altered the spider silk proteins so that they would interact properly with the other proteins in silkworm glands.  And it worked!  This is the first study ever to produce full length spider silk proteins from silkworms.

The applications of this are incredibly exciting.  In addition to producing comfortable textiles and new, innovative bulletproof vests, silkworm generated spider silk could be used in cutting edge smart materials or even just to create better performing sutures.  In the future, this team intends to research how to modify this new spider silk to be even stronger, and they are confident that “large-scale commercialization is on the horizon."

pixie’s parasol (Mycena interrupta), one of my favourites!