Peacock Mantis Shrimp

The peacock mantis shrimp calls the waters of Bali, Indonesia home (Odontodactylus scyllarus). The shrimp feeds by smashing open its prey until it can feed on its tissue.

Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

A team of biologists and chemists is close to bringing non-living matter to life.

A lab led by a Harvard Medical School molecular biologist is building simple cell models that can almost be called life. The protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe. The replication isn't wholly autonomous, so it's not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.

The below video shows a protocell forming from fatty acids:



Original article here.

Red-wing Blackbirds Riding on Red-tailed Hawk?

The pictures below were taken by a photographer in Minnesota. They show Red-Winged Blackbirds hitching a ride on the back of a Red-Tailed Hawk. He claims this is not terribly uncommon, as red-winged blackbirds are extremely protective of their nests. They will dive-bomb humans, and he claims it is reasonable that they were harass a hawk. The birds apparently only stay for a matter of seconds.

So are the pictures real or Photoshopped? You decide:

Water Bears can Survive in Space

Space is extremely cold (near absolute zero) and it is a vacuum with no oxygen, plus the additional threat of lethal radiation from stars. It is considered the most hostile of environments, where unprotected humans would last for a fraction of a second.

But new research shows that some animals - "water bears", properly known as tardigrades - can survive exposure to the open-space vacuum, cold, and radiation just fine.

This is the first time that any animal has been tested for survival under open-space conditions. Tardigrades are tiny invertebrate animals from 0.1 to 1.5mm in size that can be easily found on wet lichens and mosses. Because their homes often fall dry, tardigrades are very resistant to drying out and can resurrect after years of dryness. Along with this amazing survival trick comes extreme resistance to heat, cold and radiation —so tardigrades seemed like an ideal animal to test in space.

The dried-up tardigrades were aboard a spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency in September 2007 and were exposed to open space conditions in a low Earth orbit of around 168 miles altitude. After their safe return to Earth, it turned out that while most of them survived exposure to vacuum and cosmic rays alone, some had even survived the exposure to the deadly levels of solar UV radiation, which are more than 1000 times higher than on the surface of the Earth. Even more so, the survivors could reproduce fine after their space trip.

Below are a pair of videos with water bears in action:





Original article here.