Lia Paola Zambetti – Australian Science

My Dog Speaks To Me With His Eyes – Evolution of Human/Dog Bonds

Lia Paola Zambetti — Mon, 11 May 2015 10:11:21 +0000

Puppy love – same as baby love? Yes, it seems so:

“My dog talks to me with his/her eyes

Cite this article:
Zambetti L (2015-05-11 10:11:21). My Dog Speaks To Me With His Eyes - Evolution of Human/Dog Bonds. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 02, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/news/my-dog-speaks-to-me-with-his-eyes-evolution-of-humandog-bonds/

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Life – Evolved

Lia Paola Zambetti — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 00:15:56 +0000

What is a life form? Most of us, if asked, will think of an animal or a human being-in other words, a multicellular organism. However, life itself evolved in cells, single cells of various types that existed and propagated independently. What are, then, the factors that led cells to collaborate together and give rise to complex organisms? Collaboration is possible only if there are no cheaters -cells that exploit the collaboration of others- and cheaters always arise. How is possible, then, for a multicellular organism to develop? Do the cheaters need to be eliminated –an evolutionary impossibility- for complex organisms to occur? This seems the classic common sense response. However, new and unexpected findings by a team of scientists working in New Zealand and the US, suggest the opposite: that the presence of cheaters can be instrumental to the formation of self-generating groups of cells, or collectives.

Evolution can be studied in many ways; fossil examination is a well-known example. However, for researchers looking to have results in a quicker fashion –and with the added bonus of controlling variables within their experiments- bacterial models are the gold standard. Bacteria are used as they grow fast, in most cases multiple generations in one day, and their visible characteristics (their “phenotype

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Microbiota and us – we feed our bacteria even when we are sick!

Lia Paola Zambetti — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:15:23 +0000

There are good bacteria and bad bacteria. For millennia, we humans never made a distinction: bacteria were associated with diseases and death, no exception. It was known that we are carrying along a large assortment of microbes in our gut, but this was considered to be an evolutionary accident or a coincidence rather than a lucky occurrence for us. Recently, in the last 10-15 years, the scientists’ view on the bacteria living in our gut has changed drastically. Now we know that they are good for us in ways that we are just beginning to understand. What is already clear is that, without the bugs in our gut, we would be way worse off than we are.

Let us start with some numbers to put things in proportion: bacteria make up 1 to 3% of our body mass, which does not seem much. However, in absolute number, it means that we have approximately 10X more bacteria than we have cells in our body, which by itself is quite remarkable. The bacteria we carry around are also so diverse, belonging to literally hundreds of different species, that it is very hard to figure out the exact composition of one person’s bacterial population in detail. Not only they are more than “us

Cite this article:
Zambetti L (2014-10-10 00:15:23). Microbiota and us - we feed our bacteria even when we are sick!. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 02, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/research-2/microbiota-us-feed-bacteria-even-sick/

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