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Welcome Home is a recently completed project by No Architects, who designed a modern apartment for a family with small children. The Prague apartment received a reconfigured layout that includes a new multipurpose room that works as a study, playroom, and guest room. Sliding doors can close to hide the room from the living room when it’s not in use or for privacy when someone is visiting or needing to work. Even with the doors closed, the open kitchen, dining room, and living room provide ample space for the family to enjoy.
The unique kitchen boasts an oval, angled island with two bases in different finishes. The larger white base rests upon an elevated floor decked out in a patterned tile, while the wood column base sits on the main herringbone floor. The cabinets include a row of wood fronted uppers with light blue cabinets surrounding them.
The blue cabinets curve at one end, complementing the curves of the island and raised tile floor.
A double-sided, navy blue leather sofa floats in the center of the living room surrounded by built-in storage and display cabinets. One side of the sofa faces the television, while the other looks towards the windows with views of Prague.
The combo room just off the living room houses an elevated, built-in bed with storage under and behind it. On the opposite side, a light blue desk setup lives beside a large wooden storage cabinet with red legs.
The all-white hallway gets a boost from a cobalt blue console table that rests against the wall.
A seating nook with storage is built into the hallway near the front door, offering a good place to drop belongings after entering the apartment.
More wooden storage cabinets with red legs outfit the entryway.
A child’s room features a modern bunkbed that’s complete with storage, stairs, hidden lighting, and a privacy screen.
No Architects
Photos by Studio Flusser.
New research with pythons and lizards identifies a gene that results in white blotches, or piebald coloration, in reptiles.
Much of what we know about skin coloration and patterning in vertebrates generally, including in snakes, is based on lab mice. However, there are limits to what mice can tell us about other vertebrates because they don’t share all of the same types of color-producing cells, known as chromatophores. For example, snakes have a type of chromatophore called iridophores that can generate iridescent colors by reflecting light.
To gain a better understanding of the genetic basis of coloration in vertebrates, researchers combined a range of techniques—whole gene sequencing, gene-editing, and electron microscopy—to look more closely at color variations and patterning in the skin shed by ball pythons bred in captivity.
They were able to identify a particular gene (tfec) that plays a crucial role in reptile pigmentation generally and more specifically in a classic color variant found across vertebrates and distinguished by blotches of white, the piebald.
The sale of captive-bred reptiles is a $1.4 billion industry within the US alone. Over 4.5 million American households keep reptiles, and close to one in five of these are snakes bred in captivity. Due to the spectacular color variations produced through captive breeding, an individual ball python (Python regius, originally found in West and Central Africa) can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
“Ball pythons show incredible variation in skin coloring and patterning, which is part of their appeal for hobbyists, but also makes them really useful for researchers who want to understand the genetic basis of coloration,” says Rowan Barrett, interim director of McGill University’s Redpath Museum and the senior author of the paper in Current Biology.
“The pet trade has created a huge pool of color variation that would not have existed otherwise. This provides a catalogue for us to figure out the many ways that genes produce the amazing diversity of colors, spots, and stripes we see across different animals.”
To identify the genes that control a particular trait, scientists look for genetic variants that are present in animals that have the trait and absent in animals that don’t. Using shed skin collected from snake breeders, Barrett’s team found that piebald snakes carried the same mutation in the tfec gene.
But a common problem for scientists is that finding a correlation between a gene and a particular trait, such as the piebaldism, does not imply causation. To make that functional link, the McGill researchers collaborated with Doug Menke’s lab at the University of Georgia to modify tfec in a different reptile species, the brown anole lizard, using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. They found that genetically modified lizards do indeed show altered coloration, proving that mutations to tfec cause changes to color-producing cells.
“Our research advances knowledge of the genetics of vertebrate coloration generally and particularly of the development of iridescent cells, which haven’t been studied as much as other color pathways” adds Alan Garcia-Elfring, a PhD student in McGill’s biology department and the first author of the paper.
“It also highlights the potential benefits of working with non-academic communities like ball python breeders to accelerate discoveries in fundamental science. Our job, at this point, is to figure out what other mutations underlie all this variation seen in captivity, and how these mutations interact. It’s an exciting time for both researchers and reptile hobbyists.”
Source: McGill University
The post To explain piebald pythons, study pets and lizards appeared first on Futurity.
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