Money and Finance
- Links
Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit Q&A with Warren Buffett (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK) The Spider Of Silicon Valley: Inside 'Zuck & Friends' Secret Billionaire Fund (LINK) The Power of Habit (LINK) Related book: The Power of HabitBase...
- Zombies Roam The Animal Kingdom — And Some Of Them May Be After Us
Found via the RDFRS: The zombies in "World War Z" are just actors — but in the animal world, zombies are a fact of life. Evolution can come up with some fiendish twists: For example, there are some species that bend other creatures to their will to...
- Spider That Builds Its Own Spider Decoys Discovered
A spider that builds elaborate, fake spiders and hangs them in its web has been discovered in the Peruvian Amazon. Believed to be a new species in the genus Cyclosa, the arachnid crafts the larger spider from leaves, debris and dead insects. Though...
- Playing God (bbc Documentary)
A big thanks to Serge for passing this along! Broadcast (2012) Adam Rutherford meets a new creature created by American scientists, the spider-goat. It is part goat, part spider, and its milk can be used to create artificial spider's web. It is part...
- "zombie" Fly Parasite Killing Honeybees
A heap of dead bees was supposed to become food for a newly captured praying mantis. Instead, the pile ended up revealing a previously unrecognized suspect in colony collapse disorder a mysterious condition that for several years has been causing declines...
Money and Finance
How to Control an Army of Zombies – by Carl Zimmer
Found via The Big Picture.
In the rain forests of Costa Rica lives Anelosimus octavius, a species of spider that sometimes displays a strange and ghoulish habit.
From time to time these spiders abandon their own webs and build radically different ones, a home not for the spider but for a parasitic wasp that has been living inside it. Then the spider dies — a zombie architect, its brain hijacked by its parasitic invader — and out of its body crawls the wasp’s larva, which has been growing inside it all this time.
The current issue of the prestigious Journal of Experimental Biology is entirely dedicated to such examples of zombies in nature. They are far from rare. Viruses, fungi, protozoans, wasps, tapeworms and a vast number of other parasites can control the brains of their hosts and get them to do their bidding. But only recently have scientists started to work out the sophisticated biochemistry that the parasites use.
“The knowledge that parasites can manipulate their hosts is old. The new part is how they do it,” said Shelley Adamo of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, a co-editor of the new issue. “The last 5 to 10 years have really been exciting.”
- Links
Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit Q&A with Warren Buffett (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK) The Spider Of Silicon Valley: Inside 'Zuck & Friends' Secret Billionaire Fund (LINK) The Power of Habit (LINK) Related book: The Power of HabitBase...
- Zombies Roam The Animal Kingdom — And Some Of Them May Be After Us
Found via the RDFRS: The zombies in "World War Z" are just actors — but in the animal world, zombies are a fact of life. Evolution can come up with some fiendish twists: For example, there are some species that bend other creatures to their will to...
- Spider That Builds Its Own Spider Decoys Discovered
A spider that builds elaborate, fake spiders and hangs them in its web has been discovered in the Peruvian Amazon. Believed to be a new species in the genus Cyclosa, the arachnid crafts the larger spider from leaves, debris and dead insects. Though...
- Playing God (bbc Documentary)
A big thanks to Serge for passing this along! Broadcast (2012) Adam Rutherford meets a new creature created by American scientists, the spider-goat. It is part goat, part spider, and its milk can be used to create artificial spider's web. It is part...
- "zombie" Fly Parasite Killing Honeybees
A heap of dead bees was supposed to become food for a newly captured praying mantis. Instead, the pile ended up revealing a previously unrecognized suspect in colony collapse disorder a mysterious condition that for several years has been causing declines...