(Source: ihateallyourgods)
(Source: ihateallyourgods)
At the Zombie Cockroach Buffet, Bring Your Own Antibiotics
Meet the jewel wasp. This gorgeous, iridescent creature belies its gem-like appearance with a habit that, on the surface, is downright revolting: It turns cockroaches into mind-controlled zombies, chemically hypnotizing them in order to provide a helpless, living food source for the wasp’s young.
In short, it injects the cockroach brain with a neurochemical cocktail that, instead of killing it, forces the roach to surrender itself to the wasp’s will. It steals the zombie roach away to its burrow, where it lays its egg. That egg grows into a larvae that feeds inside the still-living roach, its prey trapped in a chemical noose that prevents it from escaping even as it is eaten from within.
Cool, huh?
Well, new research paints the picture a bit cooler. Cockroaches are filthy places, unsurprisingly. They harbor bacteria within them that could kill the young larvae, zombie host or not. It turns out that the young wasps secrete intense antimicrobial chemicals to keep their zombie roach buffet clean and disinfected.
The research involved one of the coolest tools I’ve ever heard of: Tiny windows were inserted in the roaches so the larvae could be observed!!
Want more detail on this squeaky clean zombie tale? Check out Carl Zimmer at The Loom, Ed Yong at Nature News, or Christie Wilcox at Science Sushi. Now where’s that alcohol gel? … I’m hungry.
good:
25 Reasons Why Bill Nye Was The Best Teacher You’ve Ever Had #happybirthdaybillnye
#12 Because his lessons transcend age
i want bill nye to be my boyfriend
Clearly, I Can See You’ve Got Guts
Meet the glassfrog, a strange South American amphibian with a nearly transparent underbelly. The evolutionary significance of the clear abdomen is unknown, as light can be harmful to organ tissues (although the frogs get around that with a cool adaptation).
Robert Gonzalez has an interview with a glassfrog researcher at io9 highlighting their odd biological adaptations. I suppose the clear belly could be a survival technique to avoid being cut open by high school biology students?
File this under things I did not know: There are species of bacteria that will eat calcium-rich food and excrete limestone. I knew that certain plankton left coastlines full of their chalky skeletons behind when they died, but this bacterial talent is news to me. Not only is it a pretty nifty trick, but human engineers are trying to exploit it to create self-healing concrete.
Long before concrete structures fail in massively destructive ways (like crumbling apart), they can be weakened by invisible micro-cracks. And it doesn’t take much space for concrete’s greatest enemy, water, to seep in.
Dutch researchers are testing a “self-healing” concrete that is impregnated with dormant spores of those limestone-excreting bacteria. When water seeps in, they can come to life, ingest the hydrated calcium from their environment, and secrete concrete “glue” to repair those micro-fractures before they become mega-fractures.
An amazing thought: One day our buildings and roads may be more “alive” than we ever thought possible.
(via BBC News)
There is no serious scientist who doubts that evolution is a fact.
OneZoom: A new, interactive tree of life that follows the diversity of life through fractal-like, swirling branches and leaves.
I have something of a soft spot for trees of life. This one is already near the top of my list. The interactive viewer lets you zoom in to individual species, with curved branches resembling fractal spirals. Each leaf carries information about its species, including a color code that relates to its endangered status.
It looks like it’s only mammals for now, but there are plans to add more. I really love how they embrace the idea that the web is not made of electronic paper, and stuff like this lets us explore science in ways that we never could in books.
How many people have ever been born? You’ve wondered this.
No matter how down you feel sometimes, take solace in the fact that you are one of the lucky 6.5% (or really a bit more, since this only goes through 2011) of people who are still alive.
It’s much more wonderful to know what something’s really like.
-Richard Feynman
(Source: thedemon-hauntedworld)
EPIC TAIL A humpback whale dives as whale watchers on a Zodiac boat observe in the waters off the Antarctic Peninsula. (Photo: Tony Beck / Barcroft Media via The Telegraph)