Great. So tonight I’ll likely be thinking about how my eyelashes may really be bacteria as I try to get to sleep
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The face mites will eat them up, no worries.
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If you’ve not read the story of Taffy 3 and the battle where this ship was sunk, it’s pretty incredible.
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And discovered by O. Gros. Beth Mole is famous for inserting humor into her articles, but this seems to be real. Nominative determinism for the win!
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Phage therapy was pretty cutting edge in the 1920’s. The arrival of antibiotics in the '30s pretty much ended the research in the west. In the USSR they continued studying it, although I’m not familiar with their progress.
Though the original discoverer of bacteriophages remains a matter of debate, it’s widely accepted that in 1915, Frederick Twort, a bacteriologist from England, was the first to suggest that it was a virus that was responsible for previous observations of a “factor” that killed bacteria. Two years later, Felix d’Herelle, a microbiologist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, picked up where Twort left off and first proposed phages as a therapy for human infections. The first known therapeutic use of phages occurred in 1919, when d’Herelle and several hospital interns ingested a phage cocktail to check its safety, then gave it to a 12-year-old boy with severe dysentery. The boy’s symptoms cleared up after a single dose and he fully recovered within a few days. Yet d’Herelle didn’t publish his findings until 1931.
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Eventually, but for now there are probably many people wandering the halls and muttering to themselves.
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Oops, wrong L Zepp!
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So here it is, with Ars commentary.
Just gorgeous images.
And this one, which is really just a spectrum, but indicates what is to come.
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How long before the first copyright takedown notice from Shutterstock? Start your timers now.
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Just stunning.
I wouldn’t mind watching the moment they were shown in the live stream if anyone has a time stamp.
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A week after finding the oldest galaxy, Webb astronomers have found another, even older galaxy:
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For the question of which the first group of animals to diverge was, I ran into this:
I think it’s a really interesting approach. Basically, some evolutionary trees have been putting sponges first and some ctenophores first, and adding evidence has not tipped things one way or another, since it’s so easy to have artifacts. So instead they looked at how likely those were in different cases.
The result is that if sponges were first, ctenophore-first trees would be common artifacts, but if ctenophores were first there basically shouldn’t be sponge-first trees. Which seems like it gives really good support for the notion that sponges came first and comb jellies second, in agreement with morphology again. 
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