Immortal Jellyfish

Believe it or not, this jellyfish is biologically immortal. The jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii but formerly classified as Turritopsis nutricula, can revert back to its childhood stage through a process called transdifferentiation.  It can only be killed by predation or by getting sick.

A group of ants is called..

Ants Bees           Caterpillars

A colony A grist, hive, swarm An army

Clams Cockroaches   Flies Gnats

A bed An intrusion A business  A cloud, horde

Grasshopper Hornets   Jellyfish Locusts Oysters

A cloud A nest A smack A plague  A bed

Microbe turns newspaper to fuel

 

Scientists from New Orleans’ Tulane University, discovered a bacteria that converts the dailies to butanol – a flamable material similar to gasoline. The new microbes called TU-103 eats the cellulose materials found in organic materials such as newspapers then produces butanol as by-product. Although there were other bacteria that produces similar reaction, they have all required an oxygen-free environment which would cost more. The h bacteria doesn’t need such setup. The abundance of organic materials for these bacteria to thrive on makes this a very promising alternative as bio-fuel.

The Elvis Presley Bug

A camouflage that bears resemblance to the king.

 

 

All-black king penguin

A king penguin in "wet suit" rather than "tuxedo". This under-dressed penguin was photographed by Andrew Evans of National Geographic on the island of South Georgia near Antarctica. It's a one in azillion kind of mutation, biologists said.

Mouse builds nest in Oregon ATM with $20 bills

LOUISIANA GRANDE, Oregon — A mouse found inside an automatic teller machine — along with a nest it had built with chewed-up $20 bills — gave an Oregon gas station employee the surprise of her life.

The mouse, discovered Thursday, had thoroughly torn up two bills and damaged another 14 to line his nest. Employee Millie Taylor says she screamed and slammed the machine's door shut.

The bank replaced all the money that wasn't extensively damaged, and the ATM has continued to work just fine. The mouse also got a reprieve: He was evicted from his nest but set free outside the station.

Other workers at the Gem Stop Chevron in La Grande in eastern Oregon say they're mystified about how the mouse got inside the machine. - AP

Bird experiment shows Aesop's fable may be true

NEW YORK – From the goose that laid the golden egg to the race between the tortoise and the hare, Aesop's fables are known for teaching moral lessons rather than literally being true. But a new study says at least one such tale might really have happened.
It's the fable about a thirsty crow. The bird comes across a pitcher with the water level too low for him to reach. The crow raises the water level by dropping stones into the pitcher. (Moral: Little by little does the trick, or in other retellings, necessity is the mother of invention.)
Now, scientists report that some relatives of crows called rooks used the same stone-dropping strategy to get at a floating worm. Results of experiments with three birds were published online Thursday by the journal Current Biology.
Rooks, like crows, had already been shown to use tools in previous experiments. (AP)

Mosquitoes deliver malaria 'vaccine' through bites

AP - In a daring experiment in Europe, scientists used mosquitoes as flying needles to deliver a "vaccine" of live malaria parasites through their bites. The results were astounding: Everyone in the vaccine group acquired immunity to malaria; everyone in a non-vaccinated comparison group did not, and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later.

The study was only a small proof-of-principle test, and its approach is not practical on a large scale. However, it shows that scientists may finally be on the right track to developing an effective vaccine against one of mankind's top killers. A vaccine that uses modified live parasites just entered human testing.

Rover, call an ambulance — dog calls 911

PHOENIX - "Man's best friend" doesn't go far enough for Buddy — a German shepherd who remembered his training and saved his owner's life by calling 911 when the man had a seizure.

And it's not the first time Buddy has been there for owner Joe Stalnaker, a police officer said Sunday.

On a recording of the 911 call Wednesday, Buddy is heard whimpering and barking after the dispatcher answers and repeatedly asks if the caller needs help.

"Hello, this is 911. Hello ... Can you hear me? Is there somebody there you can give the phone to," says the dispatcher, Chris Trott.

Police were sent to Stalnaker's home, and after about three minutes Buddy is heard barking loudly when the officers arrived.

Scottsdale police Sgt. Mark Clark said Stalnaker spent two days in a hospital and recovered from the seizure.

"It's pretty incredible," Clark said. "Even the veteran dispatchers — they haven't heard of anything like this."

Black bear busts secret marijuana farm

PANGUITCH, Utah — Investigators say a large black bear raided a clandestine marijuana growing operation so often that it chased the grower away.

Deputies found food containers ripped apart and strewn everywhere, cans with bear teeth marks, claw marks and bear prints across the camp in Garfield County, Utah, on Tuesday.

"This bear is definitely law-enforcement minded," said Garfield County Sheriff Danny Perkins. "If I can find this bear I'm going to deputize him."

Perkins said the operation on Boulder Mountain included 4,000 "starter" sacks of pot and 888 young plants.

"This particular bear apparently was not going to give up and basically chased these marijuana farmers away," Perkins said. "Our county is so tough on drugs that even the wildlife are getting in on the action." AP

A Hipo-size Rodent Discovered

A 1-tonne rodent has been discovered by scientists in Uruguay. But there is no need to worry, Josephoartigasia monesi is around 2 million years old and fossilised.

J. monesi's skull, a whopping 53 centimetres long, was discovered in a broken boulder on the coast of Uruguay by Andrés Rinderknecht of the National Museum of Natural History and Anthropology, and Ernesto Blanco of the Institute of Physics, both in Montevideo.

By comparing the skull's dimensions to the body sizes of existing rodents, the researchers determined that its owner probably weighed about 1000 kilogrammes, making it the world's largest known rodent.

However, unlike today's rodents, the relatively small size of the animal's teeth suggests it did not have a great deal of chewing power and might have fed on soft vegetables and fruit.

The discovery displaces Phoberomys pattersoni, a 700 kg cousin of the guinea pig that roamed the Orinoco delta in Northern Venezuela some 8 million years ago. When a nearly intact P. patersoni skeleton was described in 2003, its size was compared to that of a cow and it was hailed as the world's largest rodent.

"There no doubt whatsoever that this was a huge and exceptional animal because of its size," says Marcelo Sánchez of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who discovered the P. patersoni skeleton.

Sánchez says that while the latest discovery is "incredible", it is only a matter of time before another, larger rodent is unearthed. This is because South America saw a huge explosion in the diversity of rodents after the continent split from North America and became an island some 65 million years ago. Dinosaurs had just been wiped out and many animal groups were filling the void they left behind.

Without competition from other mammals which were diversifying on the other side of the water in North America, rodents of all sizes emerged in South America.

Just one giant species remains today of the rodent explosion: a 50 kg guinea pig known as the capybara which lives in much of South America and is the largest living rodent.

Giant Fossil Sea Scorpion Discovered

The discovery of a giant fossilised claw from an ancient sea scorpion indicates that when alive it would have been about two and a half meters long, much taller than the average man.


This find, from rocks 390 million years old, suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought.

The claw was discovered by Markus Poschmann, in a quarry near Prüm in Germany.

The claw is from a sea scorpion (eurypterid) Jaekelopterus rhenaniae that lived between 460 and 255 million years ago. It is 46 centimetres long, indicating that the sea scorpion to which it belonged was around 2.5 metres (8 feet) long – almost half a metre longer than previous estimates for these arthropods and the largest one ever to have evolved.


Eurypterids are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of scorpions and possibly all arachnids.

Some geologists believe that giant arthropods evolved due to higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere in the past. Others, that they evolved in an 'arms race' alongside their likely prey, the early armoured fish.