Worm kills insects by vomiting Hulk-like bacteria | Not Exactly Rocket Science. Insects have been around for almost 400 million years. That’s plenty of time for evolution to fashion countless horrific deaths for them. Case in point: some insects die because a little worm vomits glowing bacteria inside their bodies. The worm is Heterorhabditis bacteriophora, a microscopic creature used by gardeners the world over to control insect pests. Its accomplice-in-insecticide is a shiny bacterium called Photorhabdus luminescens, which only lives in the worm’s guts. When the worm infiltrates an insect, it vomits out the bacteria. This elegant partnership hinges upon a startling transformation. Until recently, scientists had almost always seen the P-form, and assumed that this was the bacteria’s default appearance.
This flip-flopping piece of DNA is known, fittingly enough, as the madswitch. The madswitch’s flips aren’t carefully controlled. In fiction, Dr Jekyll and Bruce Banner were only ever Mr Hyde and the Hulk some of the time. What a way to go: prehistoric turtles died during sex - life - 20 June 2012. What a way to go. Some 47 million years ago, these turtles clung to each other as they mated in a German lake. Now fossilised, the members of this species are the only known examples of vertebrates fossilised during copulation. The turtles (Allaeochelys crassesculpta, now extinct) have been excavated from the Messel Pit, a disused quarry that was once a volcanic lake and is now a rich source of fossils. Fifty-one specimens of A. crassesculpta have been found there, including six pairs. Having shown that each pair is made up of a male and female, Walter Joyce of the University of Tübingen in Germany and colleagues have now confirmed what palaeontologists long suspected – that all six pairs were mating when they died.
Males can be distinguished from females because they have a longer tail that protrudes beyond their shells. What killed the turtles, leaving them in this eternal embrace? Journal reference: Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0361 New Scientist Not just a website! Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years : Krulwich Wonders... No, this isn't a make-believe place. It's real. They call it "Ball's Pyramid. " It's what's left of an old volcano that emerged from the sea about 7 million years ago.
A British naval officer named Ball was the first European to see it in 1788. It sits off Australia, in the South Pacific. It is extremely narrow, 1,844 feet high, and it sits alone. What's more, for years this place had a secret. A satellite view of Ball's Pyramid in the Tasman Sea off the eastern coast of Australia. Toggle caption Google Maps Here's the story: About 13 miles from this spindle of rock, there's a bigger island, called Lord Howe Island. On Lord Howe, there used to be an insect, famous for being big. Then one day in 1918, a supply ship, the S.S. Totally gone. There was a rumor, though. Some climbers scaling Ball's Pyramid in the 1960s said they'd seen a few stick insect corpses lying on the rocks that looked "recently dead. " Climbing The Pyramid Where, they wondered, did that poop come from? That wasn't so easy.
The snake whose bite can send you back through puberty. I'm sorry but I have to get on my soap box for just a sec...ahem* In response to your statement regarding snake and their bites killing people in the second paragraph, "That's unpleasant, but we already knew that about most snake bites. " As a conservationist, nature boy, amateur herpetologist and all-around good guy, I must protest the implication in that sentence. Most snakes are not venomous and most snake bites are hence harmless. In fact, most snake bites are a result of unnecessary contact, agitation or improper (and needless) handling. I hate that snakes get such a bad rap, and let's face it, it's mostly because of their appearance that they've been demonized in various cultures and histories...also because we have an evolutionary response to be creeped out by potentially harmful forms (spiders, snakes, bright red berries).
Dear Deeplings: I thought I was a plant, but now I think I’m a killer! AHHHH! Why are we eating this baby worm? Slurrrrp. Slurrrrp. Mmm...worm juice... (Photo: Terje Berge/International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal) Dear Deeplings, I am a dinoflagellate – a single-celled microscopic plankton of the fine lineage Karlodinium armiger. But now I’m afraid there might be something wrong with me.
Sincerely, Karlodinium armiger the 21,783,912th Dear Karlo, I know it must be alarming to go from a peaceful plant-plankton to voracious hell-beast, but apparently that is how K. armiger do it when you are having a bloom. And you are indeed pretty scary. But eventually your bloom must end. I guess that wasn’t too comforting. Source: Thanks to K.H. for the original heads-up! Mammals Made By Viruses | The Loom. If not for a virus, none of us would ever be born.
In 2000, a team of Boston scientists discovered a peculiar gene in the human genome. It encoded a protein made only by cells in the placenta. They called it syncytin. The cells that made syncytin were located only where the placenta made contact with the uterus. They fuse together to create a single cellular layer, called the syncytiotrophoblast, which is essential to a fetus for drawing nutrients from its mother. The scientists discovered that in order to fuse together, the cells must first make syncytin. What made syncytin peculiar was that it was not a human gene. Viruses have insinuated themselves into the genome of our ancestors for hundreds of millions of years. It turned out that syncytin was not unique to humans. In 2005, Heidmann and his colleagues realized that syncytins were not just for primates. Despite their name, however, the primate and mouse syncytins didn’t have a common history. Forget fittest, it's survival of the most cultured. David Sloan Wilson, contributor Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel enters tricky terrain to argue that social structures are key to human evolution in Wired for Culture FOR decades, proponents of the power of culture in human development have been tribal enemies of those who champion the power of evolution.
The former have been vilified for portraying humans as blank slates; the latter scorned for embracing genetic determinism. The middle ground was no-man's-land. Now, at last, the war might be over. A consensus is emerging that humans have an impressive capacity for open-ended change, much as culturalists have claimed, but that this is a result of genetic evolution - and is itself an evolutionary process. Mark Pagel, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Reading, UK, is well placed to write on these recent developments. Memes, he says, have built vehicles around themselves made up of groups of people. Why do women menstruate? Menstruation is a peculiar phenomenon that women go through on a roughly monthly cycle, and it’s not immediately obvious from an evolutionary standpoint why they do it. It’s wasteful — they are throwing away a substantial amount of blood and tissue.
It seems hazardous; ancestrally, in a world full of predators and disease, leaving a blood trail or filling a delicate orifice with dying tissue seems like a bad idea. And as many women can tell you, it’s uncomfortable, awkward, and sometimes debilitating. So why, evolution, why? One assumption some people might make is that that is just the way mammalian reproduction works. Phylogeny showing the distribution of menstruation in placental mammals and the inferred states of ancestral lineages. I suppose we could blame The Curse on The Fall, but then this phylogeny would suggest that Adam and Eve were part of a population of squirrel-like proto-primates living in the early Paleocene. There are many explanations floating around. That’s a hint. Giant living power cables let bacteria respire - tech - 29 June 2012. IT IS the ultimate in subsea communications: bacteria living in sulphurous mud beneath the seabed respire by transforming themselves into long, insulating cables and shuttling electrons from one to another.
This phenomenon has now been imaged for the first time, allowing us to see how some microbes pull off such a feat. Some bacteria get energy by oxidising the hydrogen sulphide gas in the sediment on the ocean floor. Because there is no oxygen in the sediment to accept the electrons that are produced, bacteria such as Geobacter grow tiny filaments along which the electrons travel until they reach the oxygen in the seawater. This allows the respiration reaction to be completed. To find out how other bacteria solve this problem, Lars Peter Nielsen of Aarhus University in Denmark and colleagues used an electron microscope to image electrically conducting Desulfobulbus bacteria in sediment samples.
New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist Promoted Stories Recommended by. Eat me baby: wooing the sagebrush cricket way. Sally Adee, features editor Imagine if every time you wanted to have sex you had to get bitten by a shark. That's life as a shark. But the graphic pictures of the fin-ripping aftermath of a shark “romp” were far from the worst thing I saw on Tuesday night at the Valentine’s-themed night safari at London's Natural History Museum. There were two tracks; you could choose between the Turn Me On and Turn Me Off tour. Having already been thoroughly turned off by a month of exploitative Valentine’s day adverts, I chose the latter.
It’s downright fashionable to be irritated by the eagerness of commerce to capitalise on our most fundamental drives. For example, on Valentine’s day a wealth of advertisements for romantic meals make us acutely aware of the importance of feeding the lady before you get the good stuff. But if the lady cricket dispenses with her lover’s wings too quickly, which she usually does, she keeps on snacking on the rest of him.