Yahoo!ology

Before I get down to science-y stuff, I thought I'd mention my big news of the week. To make a short story long, I follow a local cycling blog called CoMo CyCo (Columbia Missouri Cycling Cooperative). I'm very fond of this blog and read it every day. Yesterday I left a comment on one of the previous posts. And in response, the CoMo CyCo PooBah (author of said blog), gave me a shout out (sort of) on yesterday's post. So if anyone is reading this blog because they meandered over from the CyCo, I hope you find it...well...not boring?

It was also a big week for another reason. Again, to give more information than is really necessary, I use Yahoo! as my browser's homepage. I don't necessarily endorse using this site as your homepage, and I don't even necessarily endorse using its search engine capabilities. I'm just saying that I, for one, do. The primary reason that I have made Yahoo! my homepage is because I like to read through the headlines of featured stories. I find them informative at times, and it's a good way to force-feed myself the day's big news. Or at least what some schmuck in Silicon Valley thinks of as big news. The reason I'm saying all of this is because, in an unusual move by the popular search engine, two really, really science-y stories were featured on their homepage within only a couple of days of each other. I mean, it's not rare to see these types of stories featured on their page, but by 'not rare,' I mean, like, once a month. So to properly observe this fluke by the folks at Yahoo!, I thought I'd spend some time briefly describing these two stories; both of which are pretty cool.

The first story was titled 'NASA finds shrimp dinner on ice beneath Antarctica,' and basically the title sums it all up. NASA, despite that it was thought that no complex life existed below Antarctic ice sheets, dug a 600 ft hole in an Antarctic ice sheet, lowered a camera, and found...drum roll please...complex life. More specifically, they found a live shrimp-like creature and a jellyfish tentacle. The article doesn't suggest what they were actually looking for. If it was thought that no complex life existed in that environment, then why go through the trouble of digging a hole and dropping a camera? Seems odd to me. But regardless, the news is pretty groundbreaking and has opened up all sorts of new questions, not to mention new possibilities of finding life on planets where it was thought that life could not exist.

The second story was titled 'The world's only immortal animal,' and I thought this one was totally crazy. The animal that the blog is referring to is a species of jellyfish. The jellyfish uses a cellular process called transdifferentiation to revert from its adult phase back to its polyp phase, and then back again. It's somewhat comparable to an adult human with the ability to revert back to an infant, just so that they can grow up and do it all over again. And again. And again. And so on. The result is an animal that never has to die. Interestingly, because they never have to die, their populations are increasing rapidly as they are spreading around the world from their native Caribbean habitat.

So now I'll leave you to ponder our world's many natural wonders. And by all means, if you're not already a regular reader, I highly recommend checking out the CoMo CyCo blog. Particularly for Columbia residents, it's as entertaining as it is informative. Sometimes.