Biologist Answers Biology Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

and you agree full frontal on this, we'll let the Twitterverse comment on it. Hello, I'm the author and

biologist

of Tor Hanson, today I'm here to answer your

questions

on Twitter, this is

biology

support

and jerry peters

questions

are viruses. Alive let me answer that question with another question: What does it mean to be alive? Most

biologist

s define life as an organism with cells that respond to its environment and an organism that can reproduce. Viruses do not meet that definition because they do not have cells. They reproduce only by co-opting the reproductive capabilities of a living cell, but we see that viruses have a very direct impact on our lives and the lives of other creatures in this world, so this shows us that the very definition of life is still somehow open to questions in sub nom nom nom asks why succulents are delicate little succulent plants that live in a particular condition in nature, where they have adapted to really dry situations where they need to retain a lot of water in their leaves and Those are difficult conditions to replicate inside your home, which is part of the reason why they can be very difficult to maintain as houseplants.

Hello, Adrienne asks. The seeds are interesting. Who knew that when you eat one, you are eating little plant embryos? It's hard to imagine. how small a seed can be until you come across the seeds of an orchid these come from a small orchid in our flora called spotted coral root and each seed is like a moat of dust just a few cells organized together there are about a million spotted coral root seeds in this vial that contrasts sharply with the largest seed in the world, the double coconut that grows on palm trees and is found only on two islands of the Seychelles archipelago isolated in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and a double coconut full size can weigh 40 pounds 11 orders of magnitude larger than an orchid seed, so ask yourself where else in nature can you find something so different in shape that has the same function in arbatra01 asks if the theory of Darwin's evolution applies to plants too yes et hungley silly question question time Do you think Archeopteryx would have made a good pet?

This replica of an Archeopteryx fossil hangs on my office wall and I look at it every day and biologists have been looking at this fossil for over 150 years. Some call it the rosetta stone of

biology

. Because it contains so much information about evolution and reveals a creature that displays characteristics of reptiles and birds, this is one of the first fossils that gave people an idea that birds are actually living dinosaurs. Look at your mouth closely. you would see little teeth is what some people at the time it was discovered called evidence of a missing link if you want evidence of evolution in progress we know it lived in trees if you look at the feathers they are like modern feathers displaced and streamlined on the wings, indicating that it was flying or flapping its wings at the time so it would have been a messy pet to have in the house knocking things over and such and it could have given you a nasty bite because it had teeth in general it's like that. an important creature that I think any biologist would love to have one as a pet.

Aunt John Mace Live sent a photo with a question. Bones found while she was walking through the woods. Any idea what was bigger than my 50 pound dog you're looking at? the skeleton of a deer and if you look closely you will see that something is missing from that skeleton you have the upper part of the skull and it turns out that I have the jaw of a deer skull right here this part has teeth in the front but If you went back to the forest and looked the top of that skull, you would find just a bone plate with no upper teeth on a deer, they are pinch and tear herbivores, meaning they pinch vegetation with their lower teeth against that bone plate and then break it so you can always know when you are in your garden if it has been a deer attacking your favorite bushes or if it has been something like a rabbit making a clean cut because deer always leave a rough cut on the end of the vegetation they have been nibbling on r.j zenith asks if the Dogs and foxes can be crossed or they are too different, so dogs and foxes are different from what biologists or taxonomists would call genera, they have a different genus, they are not closely related.

They are very, very distant cousins, they cannot interbreed and produce viable offspring, while dogs and wolves are closely related. In fact, dogs are descended from wolves, they were domesticated from wild wolves only 40,000 years ago, which isn't very long evolutionary time, so those two definitely can and often do hybridize actually elise16 asks how the heck A fish stood up one day and said: I want to walk on the earth and now here we are as if it miraculously turned its gills into lungs and could walk even though we can't. I'm not saying exactly how things were at that critical moment, that there are creatures in the world. that still show some of those characteristics.

There are creatures called lungfish that can crawl short distances through mud to get from one pond to another. We are all familiar. with that caricature of evolution with the creature emerging from the water and then progressing through a series of forms until there is a human being at the end, it is the most destructive caricature in the history of science because it gives us this false idea that Evolution is a linear progression of one form replacing the other along the way when in reality it is much more complicated, more complex and more wonderful than that, so yes, there was a creature that began to emerge from those watery depths to the land, but that led to a great diversity of different forms. paths once the transition took place at the beginning the soul asks how the human species will evolve the future of our species is a big question and open to questions, but we know a lot about human evolution by looking at the past and the history of human evolution It's really In many ways, the history of brain size and every time we've seen some increase in our brain capacity, biologists and anthropologists have associated it with some change in human behavior that allowed us to gain more calories because the tissue brain is what physiologists call metabolically.

It's expensive, it takes a lot of fuel to run a brain, up to twenty percent of our daily calories go to fueling something that's only two percent of our body weight, so if you want a bigger brain you'll have to. have more calories to run it and we have seen that over time as our species has adopted new characteristics, new traits, new habits that have given us more to eat, those things include the use of social tools and behaviors and cooking food , so now we are in a period of time in which food for many people is abundant calories are abundant a question for future biologists then will be how did that change the human brain in the behavior of flies asks for mutant corn for have dinner?

Does anyone know what mutation would probably cause the double sized grains? Well, we don't know. Yes it is a mutation because sometimes corn or other plants respond in strange ways like that to diseases, bacteria or fungi, so we can't say what makes those grains big in that situation, but whoever has that ear for dinner will have an extra education. Cheryl Roefer asks: can Crispr save bananas from the fungal threat? A serious question for biology tweets. It's a serious question for anyone who loves bananas. The common banana we buy in the supermarket is called a Cavendish banana and unlike many other fruits in the store, Cavendish.

Bananas are not produced from seeds and traditional cultivation of a banana plant produces shoots that are easy to separate from that plant, which are clones of the banana plant itself, so if you find a banana that has the characteristics that will be commercially successful, will last a long time. once it tastes good you can send it all over the world to grocery stores, it is a really valuable fruit and that is why the Cavendish banana is so popular and it is produced by cloning, when there is a threat like this fungus that lives in soil. and destroys the Cavendish banana plant, everyone is susceptible to that fungus in the same way, Crispr is a tool in molecular biology that is used to turn on or off particular genes within the genome of a species, so if there is a gene currently deactivated in the cavendish banana which could be turned on again to provide resistance, that is a possible solution to this problem in ac she asks friday debate in the office, do plants grow from below or from above?

Well, normally plants grow from above, but there are situations. that we are very familiar with where that growing part of the plant descends and we see that in our own lawns grasses have evolved to grow from the bottom in response to grazing by animals and, more recently, cutting by lawnmowers, so that leaf that you see when we cut it will be replaced from below, but most plants like a spruce or an apple tree grow from the tips of their shoots in k baumlier asks how climate change affects wildlife we ​​often summarize the impacts of climate change on plants and animals with the acronym mad, short for move, adapt or die, and we see examples of all three developing in nature around us, between 25 and 85 percent of the species in this planet are now moving changing their ranges in response. to climate change seeking the temperatures and conditions to which they are accustomed, many other species are adapting by changing diets or behaviors to try to cope with this crisis and yes, some species are dying and becoming extinct and we also see species struggling to adapt and adjust their relationships with each other, a fascinating example that occurred recently in Gabon, Africa, where for the first time scientists observed chimpanzees attacking a group of gorillas and, in fact, even killing one of the gorillas, one of the reasons why that this may be happening, one of the theories is that there is now a shortage of fruits and other foods for those creatures in that forest due to climate change creating a new hyper-competitive environment for those two species that used to coexist peacefully in Nico Miller asks what the Blue eyes are weird, what's wrong?

I'm sorry, how can I say that or what do I say in Nico Miller Asks Are Blue Eyes Weird? Honestly, how can a mutation like that happen? Mutations in biology occur in DNA when it is copied. It is not a perfect process. Many times these errors lead to new characteristics in the organism, generally they are not very useful and disappear over time, but sometimes they can impart a benefit and persist. This is one of the fundamental ways that new traits are introduced into the evolutionary system. The process that blue eyes were introduced relatively recently in human evolution has persisted, but no one is yet sure what the advantage of blue eyes may be.

Tara Luzuriaga asks how extinct species return to the world. Short answer: "It's not like that." We are extinct, but efforts are now being made to try to recreate or recover some extinct species like the woolly mammoth from ancient DNA. It's still a work in progress that's a long way off, but some experts are working on that same question that Lauren Peters asks if they have evolved from monkeys why don't they go extinct when new species evolve they don't need to replace the species from which they evolved. evolved, in fact, it is more common for new species to exist alongside many closely related species atkaru1402 question is the number of genetically different species human beings that can form, finite people, are often curious about whether there could be a double or someone almost exactly like them in today's world or at some point in history, and the fact is that we may be quite close genetically, but each individual is in fact unique when you consider the number of genes in the human genome, twenty thousand. thirty thousand, but also if you consider the number of base pairs in those DNA molecules, we are talking about billions of different combinations.

Also, it's not just the genes themselves that are crucial, but how those genes are expressed - all those things can be different between individuals - we're not going to run out of unique individuals anytime soon in ibis journal asks what makes the hashtag feathers of penguins are ice-proof not only are they ice-proof they are waterproof structurally waterproof and biologists still aren't sure exactly how that works, but if you look microscopically at the veins in those feathers you'll see that they trap all sorts of little air pockets and it may be that the air prevents the water from moving through the plume, that intricate plume.

The vein has thousands andthousands of individual places where the plume's surface pushes against the natural surface tension of the water. Either way, you don't have to worry about the penguins getting their skin wet, and Heisman asks what some of your favorite unsolved mysteries are. In biology, he interprets it however you want, one of the great mysteries we have discovered recently is how mysterious our own genome is when the human genome project sequenced our DNA. I think a lot of people thought we would have the recipe book on how to make a human being, but it turned out to be much more complicated than anyone thought because it's not just the sequence of the genome but the shape of the molecule, it's the genes, it's the patches of DNA around the genes that control them, they are all kinds of things that combine to see how those genes are expressed and what makes us human, but it is not even necessary to delve into molecular genetics to find mysteries, they are at our disposal. around, a constant reminder that there is much to learn about ourselves and about nature.

Consider something as familiar to all of us as yawning, we still don't understand why people yawn before Michael McCaller asks how Darwin knew all those things about evolution that he didn't know that he learned them while he was traveling and exploring his world because in the 19th century he still It was widely assumed that everything was created very recently, if you will, by the hand of God and that is why Darwin was fascinated by geology and how there were species in fossil rocks that were no longer present in the modern world. He came up with the idea of ​​evolution by natural selection that would help explain how things changed over time and how you had this great diversity of life on the planet and it was a radical idea at the time he sat on it for years and years before finally publishing his theories because he knew they would be controversial in Lonely Kino asks what is bioethics, the ethics of biology, The answer is yes and we should think about the ethics of biology as our ability to do more and more develops over time.

Technologically we now have the ability to change DNA. We have the ability to combine species in new ways, so we must constantly ask ourselves if not. We can only do these things, but should we? Those are all the questions for today and we've covered a lot of ground. Thanks for watching the biology

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