links for 2010-07-16

"This finding points to an easily administered and inexpensive approach where commensal bacteria are engineered to communicate with invasive species and potentially prevent human disease." Engineered probiotics – also protecting? Cool.

"These large windstorms are proving to be important to our understanding of how the Amazon works, in terms of carbon storage, biodiversity, and other factors,"

We keep forgetting that the planet is like a living breathing organism. So much of what we do is skewed by what we see and our habit of seeing the world in a temporal transect – that the stasis we see now is as it always was or will be. But the homeostatic mechanisms of the world do not mean that all stays static, but that there are huge fluctuations possible that in the end fall back to baseline, but temporarily can be quite different. This discovery that huge swaths of trees can be felled in a storm make the amazon look less like a static area, but a mass of life with varying degrees of change over time.