Some Thursday Links

More like this

This is Round Three of the NERS Stories of the Year Reader's Poll. In an attempt to find the most interesting posts on this blog over the last year (leave me the illusion that there were some), I'm doing a series of nine polls, each focused on a specific field of science. So far, we've had animal…
The two-toed sloth is a walking hotel. The animal is so inactive that its fur acts as an ecosystem in its own right, hosting a wide variety of algae and insects. But the sloth has another surprise passenger hitching a ride inside its body, one that has stayed with it for up to 55 million years - a…
Cast your mind back 40 million years and think about your ancestors. You're probably picturing creatures that looked like a bit like today's monkeys, but they're only part of your family tree. To see your other ancestors, you'd have to whip out an imaginary microscope. Meet your great-great-great-…
HIV is an elusive adversary. The virus is so good at fooling the immune system that the quest for an HIV vaccine, or even a countermeasure to resist infections, has spanned two fruitless decades. But maybe a defence has been lurking in our genomes all this time. Nitya Venkataraman from the…