The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). As such, I included some mathematical content, but I tried to write the piece so that you could gloss over that bit without losing the gist of the story. This particular article has a lot of really fascinating content for a wide range of fields, from pure mathematics to drug design, and if you aren’t into any of those, there’s always the Terry Pratchett reference or the worm jello.

[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ]

Untangling Topology with California Blackworms

For SIAM News:

Elastic filaments have a tendency to spontaneously tangle, as evidenced by the frequent development of knots in electrical cords, headphones, and garden hoses. However, another class of systems can detangle just as rapidly without conscious intervention. Biological polymers inside cells—such as DNA, RNA, proteins, and other complex molecules—primarily reside in a snarled-up state but can spontaneously organize themselves to perform essential processes, particularly cell division.

California blackworms (Lumbriculus variegatus) exhibit a macroscopic version of this phenomenon, forming spheroidal tangles that consist of anywhere from five to 50,000 individual worms (see Figure 1). Though completion of this tangling operation can take from several minutes to as long as a half hour, detangling is practically instantaneous. Because blackworm brains only contain a few neurons, the detangling process must be purely biophysical in nature — analogous to the biopolymers inside a cell.

Read the rest at SIAM News