MOTHER NATURE NETWORK– It looks like any other sea slug, aside from its bright green hue. But the Elysia chlorotica is far from ordinary: it is both a plant and an animal, according to biologists who have been studying the species for two decades. Not only does E. chlorotica turn sunlight into energy — something only plants can do — … Read More
GUARDIAN– The oldest evidence of a fungus that turns ants into zombies and makes them stagger to their death has been uncovered by scientists. The gruesome hallmark of the fungus’s handiwork was found on the leaves of plants that grew in Messel, near Darmstadt in Germany, 48m years ago. The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control … Read More
COMPUTER WORLD– The discovery of water ice on the surface of an asteroid has NASA scientists conjecturing that asteroids and comets could have delivered enough water to a primordial Earth to fill its oceans. A study of data compiled during six years of observing the asteroid 24 Themis through a NASA-funded telescope found evidence of water ice and carbon-based organic … Read More
NEWS 24– Two partial skeletons unearthed in a South African cave belong to a previously unclassified species of pre-human dating back almost two million years and may shed new light on human evolution, scientists said on Thursday. Fossils of the bones of a young male and an adult female suggest the newly documented species, called Australopithecus sediba, walked upright and … Read More
BUZZFLASH– I took some drugs today to help me write this review. Specifically, a xanthine-family drug called caffeine that appears in the berries of a largely equatorial bush, along with a few weaker xanthine-family alkaloids that aren’t as well known but are also present in the coffee bean. Last night before going to bed, I took another drug. Fermented from … Read More
