ANTS everywhere !

[niecy]

Hello everyone, I hope you all are doing well!!

I ran across this accidentally today. I thought some of you might find it interesting…..I have found some weird looking things in my home that look like ants, and I have also wondered what they might be disturbing in the rain forests’ that would probably be better left alone…..

Strange 'ant from Mars' discovered - LiveScience - MSNBC.com
Strange 'ant from Mars' discovered

Blind, subterranean predator likely a descendant of Earth's first ants

This new species of blind, subterranean, predatory ant, Martialis heureka, was discovered in the Amazon. It belongs to the first new subfamily of living ants discovered since 1923, and is a descendant of one of the first ant lineages to evolve over 120 million years ago.
View related photos

Christian Rabeling/ University of Texas, Austin

A newly discovered species of a blind, subterranean predator — dubbed the "Ant from Mars" — is likely a descendant of one of the very first ants to evolve on Earth, a new study finds.
Christian Rabeling, an evolutionary biology graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, found the only known specimen of the new ant species in dead plant material on the ground in the Amazon rainforest at the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaria in Manaus, Brazil, in 2003.
Rabeling and his colleagues named the ant Martialis heureka ("ant from Mars") because they'd never seen an ant like it before.

I just found this next thing to be very intriguing.

Niecy
xxxxxx

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Co...02.hmedium.jpg


World's largest flower is a smelly parasite

The plant that produces the largest – and perhaps most rank-smelling – flower on Earth is a parasite. That means rafflesia plants lack stems, leaves, and roots for capturing sunlight to make food and pull water and other nutrients from the ground. Rather, they suck life from the vines they latch onto in the rainforest floor. The big flowers – some measure three feet across – put off a rotting-flesh stench that attracts pollinators such as carrion flies. Scientists believe the girth may have evolved to boost the scent.

[Kritters]

Aaaaaaah, Nicey.........
A rose by any other name...........is still a............

grotesque, disgusting, repulsive, life sucking, parasitic, unforgiving display of an entitiy on this planet.

Other than that.....nice color.

Kath

p.s. by the way.... who was it that called this thing a 'flower'?

[Jo]

ahhh, good to see ya Neicy. THanks for the articles.

I'd never thought about the link between humans disturbing the rainforests and the spread of tropical diseases before.....makes perfect sense. All that wood going all over the world, with all kinds of amazing, undefined creatures hopping on for the ride.

That 'flower' looks a whole lot like a fungus to me. (Fine vocab that Kritts )

Jo xxx

[Sadsack]

Carla -
I think you nailed it. This Morg crap does replicate stuff it encounters...I had the kind of bird seed I was feeding my birds come out of my skin - 3 had even SPROUTED! I had some bugs come out, too....and TONS of "larva" that always had a dark head.
I think the black specks GROW this stuff. In June of 2007 my central a/c was working poorly. A workman opened it up and there was white fluffy stuff all over the coils. He sprayed orange oil cut with 50% water on the coils and the stuff INSTANTLY melted to nothing. When plain water was sprayed on them to rinse them, the water that came out through the tube was LOADED with BLACK SPECKS!!! I believe they were the residual that was left after all that other stuff was melted.
Some of the bugs/mites we find are pseudo bugs, replicated by the monster, but not actually "real" and they sure don't ACT "normal".
SS

[Kritters]

Glad you liked my vocab Joey!

PROFOUND thinking on morgs replicating what it encounters, IMO, Carls!

It could be that white sauce (or roux) serving as a base for any other creation I speak of. Hmmmmm. Now, what organism can do that? answer: TOO MANY.

I receive several newsletters and one today presented some info on synthetic biology and had a questionaire I didn't participate in. I googled synthetic biology, since I hadn't heard that exact term before. Tons o stuff popped up. Here's one:

Molecular Systems Biology

The goal of synthetic biology is to extend or modify the behavior of organisms and engineer them to perform new tasks. One useful analogy to conceptualize both the goal and methods of synthetic biology is the computer engineering hierarchy (Figure 1 ). Within the hierarchy, every constituent part is embedded in a more complex system that provides its context. Design of new behavior occurs with the top of the hierarchy in mind but is implemented bottom-up. At the bottom of the hierarchy are DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolites (including lipids and carbohydrates, amino acids, and nucleotides), analogous to the physical layer of transistors, capacitors, and resistors in computer engineering. The next layer, the device layer, comprises biochemical reactions that regulate the flow of information and manipulate physical processes, equivalent to engineered logic gates that perform computations in a computer. At the module layer, the synthetic biologist uses a diverse library of biological devices to assemble complex pathways that function like integrated circuits. The connection of these modules to each other and their integration into host cells allows the synthetic biologist to extend or modify the behavior of cells in a programmatic fashion. Although independently operating engineered cells can perform tasks of varying complexity, more sophisticated coordinated tasks are possible with populations of communicating cells, much like the case with computer networks.

HERE'S A NEWSFLASH TO THE DR FRANKENSTEINS OF THE FUTURE: YOU GUYS CAN'T EVEN FIGURE OUT HOW TO CURE HERPES. HOW THE HECK DO YOU THINK YOU HAVE A HANDLE ON MIXING AND MATCHING CHROMOSOMES, ATOMS AND ORGANISIMS?

It's going to be downright challenging for the best of the best to figure this out, I tell ya.



Kritts