Topic Archive
← All Topics

#amoeba

2 dispatches

• Essay

United States of Amoeba

Most people know that viruses are notoriously tricky disease-causing pathogens to tackle. Unlike bacteria which are completely separate organisms, viruses are parasites which use a host cell’s own DNA-and-RNA-and-protein producing mechanisms to reproduce. As a result, most viruses are extremely small, as they need to find a way into a cell to hijack the cell’s machinery, and,...

• Essay

Slime Takes a Stroll

The paper I read for this month brought up an interesting question I’ve always had but never really dug into: how do individual cells find things they can’t “see”? After all, there are lots of microbes out there who can’t always see where their next meal is coming from. How do they go about looking? A group of scientists at Princeton University took a stab at the problem by...