Siberian salamanders have compounds in their blood that enable them to survive temperatures of -45°C(-49F). They can stay frozen solid for years before thawing and reviving as good as new. (Wild Russia - NDR)
:3!
So, so cool! You can read about these little guys over at newscientist.com
Scientists by Tomas Muller
With the intention of depicting science as the true adventure and worthy pursuit it is, Tomas created this series as a promotion for the Charles University’s Faculty of Science in Prague. These Titans of ginormous stature are each a visual representation of an area of science: biology, geography, chemistry, and geology. I’ll let you figure out which Titan is which, after all, you should already know this stuff. But before you ask: the Titan representing the science of pizzamaking was, sadly, omitted.
A Melanoma Cell, with mitochondria in pink and endoplasmic reticulum in yellow, surrounding a dark nucleus. Donald Bliss and Sriram Subramaniam of the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine created the image by “sandblasting” the cell with ions of the element gallium.
Won an honorable mention in National Geographic’s Science Image of the Year, 2008.
Polychaetes, or bristle worms, are a very common and diverse class of worms with over 10,000 species described so far. Commonly overlooked, these mostly marine worms can be brightly coloured and are to be found in tubes and burrows in the sand and mud of the beach to the depths of the ocean or even just free-living in the water. They all have bristles on their segmented bodies - in fact ‘polychaeta’ means ‘many bristles’. They come in an impressive range of sizes from just 1mm to 3m long.
This is the saddleback caterpillar (Acharia stimuli), the larva of the saddleback caterpillar moth, native to eastern North America. Don’t be fools by it’s puppy dog-like looks, those spiky urticating hairs are full of venom and deliver a painful sting.
(Source : livescience.com)
Tiny coccolithophores have had a big impact on the planet over time. Though they are single-celled, these photosynthesising organisms are enclosed in a mosaic, or cage, of microscopic plates that make many very beautiful to look at. The plates are made of calcium carbonate, which the coccoliths pull from the surrounding water. As these small organisms live and die in their trillions, they bequeath their tiny plates to the ocean floor where they form rocks such as chalk. Over geological time, coccoliths have removed significant amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to keep Earth cool as the sun grew hotter.
Have you guys heard of the “Fairy Wasp” or “Fairy-Fly”? It’s smaller than some unicellular organisms!
Apparently, one of the tricks of its tiny size is that it shed the nuclei from the vast majority of its neurons.
All in all, pretty awesome.
P.s. Note that “fairy fly” is a name for the family, not this particular species (sub-species?).
Pps. Apparently it was also introduced to the US two years ago as a safe way to control for leafhoppers, a type of insect that can ruin crops. MNN report here.
Pictured above is the Harlequin Shrimp (hymenocera elegant). While their native environment is in the waters off of Indonesia, they are commonly found in fishtanks for their beautiful colorations. However they are extremely hard to care for, as they only eat live starfish and sea urchins.
Sundew plants are carnivorous, consuming insects by capturing them with small adhesive balls on the ends of their tentacles. The sundew’s adhesive has remarkable elasticity, stretching to 1 million times its normal size (most rubber bands can only stretch to six times their original size). Such elasticity would make the adhesive dew secreted from the plant an effective choice for coating replacement body parts, regenerating dying tissues, healing wounds and improving synthetic adhesives. It is also economical—it’s so sticky and elastic that less than a microliter (smaller than the period at the end of a sentence) would cover 25 millimeters squared (or the size of George Washington’s face on a dollar bill).
This leaf beetle (Stilodes sedecimmaculata) is found only in the Guyana Shield — a geological formation that underlies Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, as well as parts of Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil. More than 35,000 leaf beetle species exist in the world, many feeding only on a particular type of host plant. The beetles store toxic chemicals from the plants they eat, and advertise this toxicity with bright colors to warn off predators. This species, though not new to science, was seen in southwest Suriname during a 2010 Conservation International survey in August and September 2010.
(Source : livescience.com)
