Squid aren't picky about where they put their sperm: Inhabitants of the deep sea are spread pretty thin, so many of the species there take extreme measures to make sure they take full advantage of a mate when they find one. Now, researchers have studied a deep-sea squid in its native habitat and found that these animals don't even bother to check whether their fellow-species members are eligible mates or not. Using remotely operated vehicles, the authors found that both males and females carried equal numbers of sperm packets, indicating, "male squid routinely and indiscriminately mate with both males and females."
On the plus side, it could also delay being arrested: Lots of diseases have formal names that are quite different from those by which the public knows them. The disease adermatoglyphia has got to have one of the weirder public ones: "immigration delay disease." That's because individuals with the disorder fail to develop fingerprints. Researchers have now identified a gene that causes these immigration delays, and found it has a global effect on an essential cellular process (RNA splicing), but is only expressed in the skin. The ability of a general factor to produce such an oddly specific defect certainly fits the Weird Science staff's definition of weird.
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