So, I can't see eating whole insects (just a personal thing) but I really like the idea of using insect protein as a building block, a bit like in this article. Is there any work being done on turning insect powder (or some other insect intermediate) into an inoffensive for wimps like me, but still "meaty" food? I'm…

Sure, but I think they are mostly talking about storing tomatoes after they are purchased. You are probably going to use a tomato up pretty quickly once you slice it up, I'd hope.

It's not a problem with science. Scientists and agronomists know all about these things. It's a problem with companies that sell limited kinds of seeds, and farmers that prefer uniform crops instead of diversity.

The enzymes that break down the molecules that taste and smell good in tomatoes are at their most active at refrigerator temperatures! So they all get chewed up, and you are left with the boring, bland tomato flavor, even though the actual tomato itself might have a longer shelf life.

Biologists love to make everything an -ome. There's a proteome, transcriptome, even an omeome. And they all sound like awful sci-fi terms.

No, it's a traditional case of inheritance for those genes. They may have been acquired by horizontal gene transfer, which can give the impression of Lamarckian inheritance, but they are subject to traditional evolutionary pressures.

Did you read the paper? The author pretty much says all those things. They observe that there are few or no apparent physiological changes between the modern and ancient sulfur-cycling bacteria, and suggest that there has been little to no pressure for them to speciate since their environment has been very stable…

Yeah, you'd need to keep delivering both the protein and the RNA molecule that does the targeting, otherwise they'd both eventually get turned over and you'd lose the effect. You could break the gene permanently with regular CRISPR/Cas, but that's not as useful in most cases.

This article is currently behind the Cell paywall, but you can read the work that led up to this particular project (including the protocols for the masochists in the group) on Dr. Qi's website. Most likely this article will appear there soon, as well:

I was just looking at that and thinking that one ton per meter of ship seems awfully light.

Evolution can't happen in reverse, even though the author for some reason called it an evolutionary reversal. As for the genes "deteriorating", that usually only happens over long time scales (assuming he means deteriorate by picking up mutations), and the paper doesn't talk about how long ago they originally evolved…

So, unless my math is wrong, that means each piece of plastic has a weight of about 0.0017 ounces. I'm not sure how large that is - I guess it depends on the kind of plastic - but I'd have to assume that that's like...the size of one of those microbeads they put in soap that is fouling up the Great Lakes right now. …

Notably, this uses all the same bases as DNA/RNA, only with a different sugar backbone. This is still fairly impressive since it's the sugar molecule that actually does the reactions, doubly so since they were able to use several different kinds of sugars, and made a functional ligase out of them. Even aside from…

This would result in some very interesting biochemistry if life did evolve there. A huge number of enzymatic reactions rely on being able to abstract protons from the environment (RNAses come to mind) and a lot of biological structures rely on hydrophobicity, like the self sealing nature of cell membranes that would…

Molecular biology/genomics gets a pretty poor showing, though probably not as bad as computer science. People finding "genes for x" are extremely obnoxious, since genes that lead to the sorts of things they are looking at are usually involved in developmental programs, and aren't singularly responsible for the extra…

Ooh, from the Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries! I love that show.

That cronut weighs nearly over half a pound. Are they all that big? (I've honestly never seen one in person)

The really awesome part about viroids is that the RNA in these genomes is both the genetic material and is also capable of performing chemical reactions by itself. So it's only 400 nucleotides, but it contains both the material for its own replication, and the means to catalyze the reactions it needs.

Unfortunately increased CO2 concentrations are not necessarily ideal for food plants. Some plants may have slightly increased performance, but many of the ones we rely on for nutrition like corn and soybean actually perform less efficiently under high CO2 concentrations, or perform slightly better at the cost of…

We may have enough food now, but we won't soon. Increased population and decreased harvest yield thanks to climate change are going to be a nasty combination, especially for people who rely on extremely inefficient crops like rice for their daily calories.