Life is Everywhere

-FUPPETS- loves hearing about new discoveries of life and of living organisms in areas where none was to be expected. It appears ever more likely that life, once established, will spread itself to the furthest ecological niches available.
Take, for example, the Antarctic ice shelves. Humans have never before explored the underside of these things, and never expected to find living creatures at such depth and cold and pressure. Scientists from NASA drilled a hole 200 meters down into an Antarctic ice shelf (the McMurdo ice shelf) and sent a camera down to take images of the underside of these ancient ice structures. They were very surprised to see, in one of the images, a small, orange arthropod. Check it.

Scientists also found a jellyfish living under the ice shelf. This is just one of a series of discoveries in the last decades that show that life, even complex-multi-cellular life, can exist in places where we would never have thought. This makes a case for the possibility that life of some sort could exist yet on some bizarre ecosystem under the surface or Mars for example, or under one of the frozen moons of Jupiter. Life is pervasive.

The hole is an 8 inch hole and the site is about 12 miles from the open ocean. The arthropod, technically a Lyssianasid amphipod, is very distantly related to the shrimp humans enjoy. Here is a video showing he little orange bastard in action.

-FUPPETS- Loves Spiders

Spiders are the best. While they may be venomous, they keep the insect population in check, eating pesky mosquitoes and moths and all sorts of other creatures. Spiders and their relatives have been around on planet Earth for over 300 million years. In comparison, hominids like us have been around for around a million years, with modern Homo Sapiens appearing around one hundred thousand years ago.
Consider yourself lucky not to have been around during the age of the giant spiders! The proto-spider below, imaged from a fossil, is called Cryptomartus hindi. (click to enlarge)

Scientists at Imperial College London have created detailed 3D computer models of two fossilised specimens of ancient creatures called Cryptomartus hindi and Eophrynus prestvicii, closely related to modern-day spiders. The study reveals some of the physical traits that helped them to hunt for prey and evade predators.
The researchers created their images by using a CT scanning device, which enabled them to take 3,000 x-rays of each fossil. These x-rays were then compiled into precise 3D models, using custom-designed software. - ( Science Daily )

This is an amazing technique for imaging fossils that will continue to provide new data, even on old, previously studied fossils.
These creatures lived in what is now called the Carboniferous Period, before the rise of the dinosaurs. They were about the size of a 50 pence piece, or an American quarter. Here is a picture for size comparison. The 50 pence piece is on the left.

THE INNER LIFE OF A CELL

The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created in NewTek
LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students. Created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Hartford, CT, the animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli.
Nuclei, proteins and lipids move with bug-like authority, slithering, gliding and twisting through 3D space. “All of those things that you see in the animation are going on in every one of your cells in your body all the time,” says XVIVO lead animator John Liebler, who worked with company partners David Bolinsky, XVIVO’s medical director, and Mike Astrachan, the project’s production director, to blend the academic data and narrative from Harvard’s faculty into a fluid visual interpretation. ( Beth Marchant - Studio Daily )

This is a link to the website where the video is available in both HIGH and LOW bandwidth. You will not be disappointed.

HERE is a link to the narrated version of the video, which is a bit longer. Just click on the box that reads "for educational use only." It explains the processes you are witnessing in the video.

Species Discovery Continues! : Iguana Rosada

The Galapagos Islands continue to amaze and astound. In 1835, when naturalist and all-around -FUPPETS- hero, Charles Darwin, visited the Galapagos islands, he did not get to travel to all of the many tiny islands in the volcanic chain. He missed a very interesting reptile.
In 1986 these Iguanas were spotted by Park Rangers, who ignored them, thinking their stripes were just stains.

In a study published this week in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, scientists from Italy and Ecuador say blood and genetic tests on 36 pink iguanas found in an area Darwin never explored documented a new species, the IGUANA ROSADA. ("Rosada" means pink-colored in Spanish.) - ( Gabrielle Gentile - AP News)

Here is a story from CBCNews in Canada. Pink Iguanas! The world is a magnificent place capable of endless wonder and discovery. All you have to do is open your eyes and ears and shut the fuck up for a minute! People have been visiting the Galapagos Islands for over 250 years now, and no one bothered to take notice of the giant pink iguanas. Imagine the amount of bad-ass shit you regularly overlook in your day-to-day life!

Mekong Delta: Treasure Trove of Species

Over the past decade, biologists have been exhaustively searching throughout the Mekon Delta region of Southeast Asia, and have been finding undocumented species by the hundreds! Well over a thousand species new to science have been found. Some of these are very odd indeed, and some were thought long-extinct, like the Laotian Rock Rat pictured below which was believed extinct for the past 11 million years!
Here are a few of the new species. The pink millipede is called the Dragon Millipede, and produces vast amounts of cyanide.

Outer Space Sugars Are All The Rage

Glycolaldehyde. Interesting name. Glycolaldehyde is a "sugar" molecule, and the smallest possible molecule to contain the requirements for a sugar. It is the simplest possible sugar.

Why does this matter? This glycolaldehyde is a very crucial part of the processes that lead to the life we know and understand. This simple sugar combines with ribose to become a central constituent of ribonucleic acid (RNA). In essence, without this simplest of sugars, life as we know it would not exist.
What makes great waves is that this simple sugar has been discovered in a star-forming region of our Galaxy, and not too far away, relatively speaking.

An international team of scientists used the IRAM radio telescope in France to detect glycolaldehyde in a massive star-forming region of space, some 26,000 light-years from Earth. (One light-year is the distance light will travel in a year, or about 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion km.)
They looked for the emission of certain wavelengths within the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Molecules each emit a distinctive band of radio wavelengths, which can be used as a fingerprint for the molecules.

This sugar had been found nearer the center of our galaxy, but not in young, star forming regions of our galaxy. This seems to open up the possibilities that the ingredients for our form of life, which may be the only form of life there is, are quite common, in the astronomical sense.

Giant Deep-Sea Single-Celled Organisms!

Everyone knows about single-celled organisms such as amoeba, protozoa, and the like. To humans these creatures are usually microscopic. Composed of a single cell, these organisms are the most abundant life-form on earth and can be found in nearly every single conceivable niche on the planet Earth. They were around for BILLIONS of years, all alone with the algae and the lichens before multi-cellular organisms rose up out of the muck.
Protists, as single-celled organisms are called, come in three varieties, Protozoa (animal-like protists who have some form of locomotion, usually flagella, pseudopod, or cilia), Algae (plant-like protists with the ability to photosynthesize), and various strange protists that are fungus-like, in that they produce "spores."
On the ocean floor near the Bahamas, biologist Mikhail "Misha" Matz from The University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues have discovered a GRAPE-sized protist and the tracks this round single-celled organism makes on the sea floor! Here is the image of the organism making it's way towards some cup corals.

The creature, named Gromia sphaerica, is the first ever single-celled organism found to leave tracks/traces like a bi-lateral, multi-cellular organism. The scientists will go back to analyze this creature and to figure out exactly how it makes it's way across the ocean floor. Amazing stuff. There is so much we still do not know about life on earth and it is amazing that something so small by our standards and so freaking huge by single-celled organism standards can blow science minds in such a manner.

"We used to think that it takes bilateral symmetry to move in one direction across the seafloor and thereby leave a track," explains Matz. "You have to have a belly and a backside and a front and back end. Now, we show that protists can leave traces of comparable complexity and with a very similar profile." (ScienceDaily.com)

Isabella Rossellini's Got It Going On Bug-Style.

Credit to "atsonicpark," one of the bad motherfuckers over at the Sonic Youth Forum, for providing -FUPPETS- with these excellently freaky educational opportunities.
Here are Isabella Rossellini's GREEN PORNOS, short films, conceived, written, co-directed by, and starring Ms. Rossellini. So fine and yet so freaky.

House Fly



Praying Mantis



Snail



Earthworm