Like the vampire-eating supervampires in Blade II, a soul-sucking nudibranch that feeds on the sun-sucking organelles of plants has proved that being an animal doesn’t mean that you can’t be born with plant genes that somehow got mixed up in your nuclear DNA zillions of years ago, or that keeping part of your victim alive inside your gut is beyond the powers of the ‘lowly’ sea slug.
Plantnimal, NASA hijinks and a compelling physiological explanation for why we sleep comprise the third installment of Grand Unified Weekly, up now at SlateV. If you’re not watching, you need to turn in your AAAS membership card.
Awesome theme song Comrade Elvis courtesy Hilotrons and Kelp Records, awesome co-host Christie Nicholson courtesy Scientific American
0301 - Swamp Sea Thing is part plant, part animal
- The original PNAS paper (and the full text pdf of same) on the emerald green sea slug that feeds on sunlight (and an older paper from the same group, unraveling a different part of the story)
- The stunning photo of Elysia chlorotica on the cover of the Nov. 18 PNAS
- New Scientist’s writeup on this slug
- Downloadable video of the slug doing its thing
- Dr. Mary Rumpho-Kennedy has been studying this thing for a while, and has the flash-based pedagogical website to prove it
0302 - Sleep: the brain’s anti-backup software
According to Dr. Chiara Cirelli, conductor of this research, everything from fruit flies to humans sleeps in pretty much the same way, which suggests that sleep performs a physiological function so basic that no creature can elude it.
- Is Sleep Essential? - Dr. Cirelli’s stellar (and open-access!) roundup of the evidence for and against, and how this data points to the ultimate function of sleep
- Science News reports on the presentation at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting on which this segment is based
0303 - NASA news, courtesy of Dunder Mifflin
- Video of astronaut H.S. Piper losing the grease-spattered toolbag, with color commentary!
- Tons of coverage of the lost toolbag, the new International Space Station module, and that whole urine sitch
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O.k., like, anyone else think the photosynthesizing nudibranch is way creepy? Then again, “green men from the future” might mean photosynthesizing people. See, it’s already going to happen!