Who knew that history and archaeology would be useful for something? 
“So when a state legislature hands out tax incentives and sweetheart deals to industry-friendly science departments with corporate-funded research teams — but scratches out budget line items funding classes in ancient pottery — then it’s as much in the interest of science departments to speak up as it is the beleaguered chairs of the arts.”
Maybe if they do enough research they can rediscover the importance of debt forgiveness for overburdened ordinary people.
Babylonians understood it 5,000 years ago so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility.
The South Atlantic Anomaly, in case your desire to know more has intensified.
The joint American and Ecuadorian research team set sail aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Falkor (too) research vessel
When they reached a region that seemed promising, they deployed the remotely operated vehicle SuBastian for a better look.
Nerds love puns!
A pun-ful article that was somehow not written by Dr. Beth Mole. She must be contagious to the other authors!
(It is a fascinating treatise on evolutionary response to environmental pressures, but, come on now, an article on beetle butts! How can that not be hilarious!)
That is very exciting! Gram-negative bacteria are a real bug-a-boo for us, and a new way to get to them is desperately needed. It bears keeping in mind that the road to actual clinical use is very long, and this:
This means the new drug can get around the defenses that CRAB has developed to other medications, but the scientists caution that more research is needed to investigate whether the wily microbes might one day be able to develop resistance to zosurabalpin too.
is almost certainly answered “yes.” Bugs have been fighting each other for a very long time, and finding ways to counteract each other’s toxins is part-and-parcel of being a microbe. The first recorded resistance to penicillin showed up months after the discovery, which, to me, at least, indicates that it was already there, just not very necessary until we made it so. That said, this is encouraging. Just hope it works out, and is used judiciously enough to remain useful for a time, at least.
In essence, the research revealed an “invisible ecosystem” of genes that cooperate or compete with one another.
This reminds me very much of the late Barbara McClintock and the discovery of transposons. Treating individual genes as actively participating in their own evolution makes things even more interesting and (IMHO) uncertain than just letting it all fall randomly. Fascinating stuff!
An Ars assessment of this new drug. Some caveats worth mentioning:
For one, zosurabalpin doesn’t seem to work on any other Gram-negative bacteria besides A. baumannii . The proteins in the LPS transporter complex are not conserved across different bacteria. Thus, targeting the LPS transporters of other nefarious Gram-negative bacteria will take yet more drug development research.
They did this using a standard method of subjecting the bacteria to varying concentrations of the antibiotic to induce spontaneous mutations. For bacteria that developed tolerance to zosurabalpin, the researchers used whole genome sequencing to identify where the mutations were.
They already have bacteria able to develop resistance. Like I said, that is inevitable, but yeah, already demonstrated.
Exciting, but yeah, very limited usefulness at this point.
ETA: And for Gram (+) bacteria, we have this hopefully in the pipeline
Interesting times, indeed!
Just look at them!
Nytimes gift link
