An astronaut administers a shock to an alien life form in a Petri dish aboard the International Space Station, in a scene from the movie Life. Bad idea? (CTMG via YouTube) A real-life organism provides the inspiration for the alien monster at the center of Life, ahorror movie thats set on the International Space Station. But youd never guess which one. Would you believe slime mold? We used that as a model, working with the effects team, but ramped it up enormously, said Adam Rutherford, who served as a science consultant for the film. Moviegoers can get a glimpse at the results in the online trailers for Life, which opens in theaters on March 24. Rutherford didnt just throw a dart at the tree of life to select slime mold. Its a weird kind of fungus-like critter that can be considered a one-celled or multicellular organism. Studies have shown that although it doesnt have a brain, it seems to be capable of learning and even figuring out railway routes. Thats not a bad model for a fictional organism from Mars that combines neural and muscular functions in one cell. And its not a bad pick for Rutherford, a geneticist who … Continue reading →

Are you envious of Dutch men and Latvian women? They are, after all, the tallest people on the planet, and there are a variety of theories as to why this may be. As a new study by researchers at the University of Washingtons School of Medicine (UWSM) reveals, Neanderthals may have had something to do with it. Homo neanderthalensis, our ancestral cousins that suddenly died out around 42,000 years, had a thing for getting frisky with H. sapiens. This naughty interaction meant a lot of gene-swapping, and plenty of the human population today derives part of their genome and its physical effects from Neanderthals. Writing in the journal Cell, a team of geneticists wanted to know whether some of these genes were inactive, or whether they played an active role in our own evolution and contemporary biology. As it turns out, these genes affect the way other genes behave or express themselves so often that traits like disease resistance and, yes, height, are influenced by them. Even 50,000 years after the last human-Neanderthal mating, we can still see measurable impacts ongene expression, study co-author Joshua Akey, a geneticist at UWSM, said in a statement. Although working out how much of … Continue reading →

Homegrown in southern Utah, Jeremy Evans is taking the biology department by storm. Evans is a senior biology and zoology major from Hurricane who not only enjoys his studies but also takes advantage of every opportunity to learn more about his field. He is currently working on three projects in addition to his studies: building a zebrafish habitat, photographing beetles and studying invasive turtles in the Virgin River. In his spare time, Evans is starting a chess club on campus. Samuel Wells, a lecturer of biology, is working with Evans in many different capacities. Jeremy is an ideal student, Wells said. Hes always interested in whats going on, whatever subject it is ... He thinks a lot about projects that he can do and then he designs his projects and goes out and does more than hes expected to do, so its fun to have him. Wells thought of starting a chess club at SUU and was excited when Evans liked the idea and decided to be the president and founder. The club is currently under review with SUUSA and should be finished soon. Jeremys a natural at presiding over these sorts of things, Wells said. He sends out emails … Continue reading →

The University of New Mexico Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology presents the Milton Kahn Annual Lectureship on Friday, March 3 at 4 p.m. in the Science and Math Learning Center (SMLC) 102. The talk features Todd Martinez, a David Mulvane Ehrsam and Edward Curtis Franklin Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. Martinez, who is also a professor of Photon Science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, will present Discovering Chemistry with Advanced Computing and Machine Learning. He will discuss how novel computational architectures and methodologies are revolutionizing diverse areas ranging from video gaming to advertising and espionage. In his talk, he will discuss how these tools and ideas can be exploited in the context of theoretical and computational chemistry, and discuss how insights gleaned from recommendation systems (such as those used by Netflix and Amazon) can lead to reduced scaling methods for electronic structure (solving the electronic Schrodinger equation to describe molecules) and how the algorithms in electronic structure can be adapted for commodity stream processing architectures such as graphical processing units. Martinez will describe how these advances can be harnessed to progress from traditional hypothesis driven methods for using electronic structure and first principles molecular dynamics to a … Continue reading →