DailyDirt: Biological Discoveries
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Biology has created some really strange animals — not just the duck-billed platypus, but all sorts of extremophiles along with senses that sound like they belong in comic books and not in nature. Here are just a few examples.
- The jellyfish species, Turritopsis nutricula, can exhibit immortality under the right conditions. And it’s spreading across the globe by hitchhiking in ship ballast water. [url]
- People who say they can sense magnetic fields might not be totally crazy. There’s a light-sensitive protein in the human eye (a protein that is found in almost every animal, too) that can respond to magnetic fields. [url]
- A nematode worm that lives about 2 miles below the Earth’s surface in a South African gold mine can exist happily with very little oxygen as long as it can eat thousands of bacteria every day. Halicephalobus mephisto is the first complex life form found at such an extreme depth. [url]
- To discover other interesting biological curiosities, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
Filed Under: immortality, magnetic fields, nematode, turritopsis nutricula
Comments on “DailyDirt: Biological Discoveries”
Magnetic sense
Yes, but:
The actual magnetic sensing requires interactions with (at least) one other protein, which is not present in humans.
So those people probably are still just crazy.
Re: Magnetic sense
Yes, people who think they can sense magnetic fields are most likely crazy… (but maybe someday there will be Replicants that can do it.)
Most likely crazy? Er, 100% mental.