Best and brightest (that's us!) kept dirt poor

A piece this week in The Age newspaper has revealed that this year's budget has done little to alleviate the financial woes of PhD students:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/clever-country-our-brightest-are-kept-dirt-poor-20090513-b3bz.html?page=-1
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"No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise"...

... But I bet Lewis Carroll didn't have these zany creatures in mind when he said this. This month, we have not one but two freaky new fish facts.

Up first is the recently discovered four-eyed spookfish. Despite the name and its appearance, this fish only really has two eyes, but each one has two parts (an upwards-looking one and a downwards-facing one). It uses a lens to focus light (from the sun) coming in from the 'top eyes' and a mirror to focus light (from bioluminescence of other sea creatures) coming to the 'bottom eyes'. This means it can focus images from above and below simultaneously!

Up next are the wacky Tapetail/Whalefish/Bignose fishes. The shallow-water tapetail has a long streamery tail. The deep-water whalefish has no scales but huge jaws. And the Bignose, which also lives in the deep sea, unsurprisingly has a large 'nose' and immobile jaws. They couldn't possibly be related, right?

Wrong! New mtDNA analyses have shown that these are in fact different stages in the life cycle of the same fish family (Cetomimidae). After museum specimens of the fish were reexamined, the researchers have also found intermediate forms of each stage, showing that a tapetail larva grows into a whalefish female or a bignose male.

“This is an incredibly significant and exciting finding,” says Dr. David Johnson, an author on the paper. “For decades scientists have wondered why all tapetails were sexually immature, all bignose fishes were males and all whalefishes were females and had no known larval stages. The answer to part of that question was right under our noses all along—the specimens of tapetails and bignose fishes that were used to describe their original families included transitional forms—we just needed to study them more carefully.”
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Get your hands off my chloroplasts

A kleptomaniac sea-slug brutally assaults a plant, assimilating parts of it into its own body to become a hybrid plant-animal intent on world domination. Sounds like science fiction, right?

Well, ok, I made up the world domination part. But the rest is true- see the video below! Thanks to Jerry for tipping us off about this.


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Sheep disappears in shock murder mystery

In a world exclusive, The Appendix today uncovers a hoax that will shock the nation. After five years, we reveal the unthinkable… Dolly the sheep is alive and well, and living in the Faculty of Veterinary Science.

Dolly, a Finn-Dorset sheep, was catapulted to fame after her birth fifteen years ago as the first animal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell. At first, she enjoyed the attention she garnered as she held press conference after press conference on the media circuit and dazzled fans lining the red carpet. However, her enthusiasm faded in the wake of a series of cruel smear campaigns implying that she had an eating disorder reported after a series of wild fluctuations in her weight. After a brief period of respite in the Betty Ford Clinic, Dolly returned home and quickly fell pregnant to a bad-boy Welsh Mountain Ram known only as Sanchez.

Five years after the birth of her triplets, she had disappeared into obscurity. Compromising photos of her dancing naked in a notorious Soho nightclub precipitated a second media frenzy. Dolly’s behaviour grew increasingly erratic. Unable to cope with the glare of the spotlight, Dolly cut her hair shockingly short and then disappeared into seclusion again. Shortly afterwards, she was reported dead from ‘progressive lung disease’.

However, a chance encounter in the sheep unit prompted intrepid investigative work by the Editors of The Appendix. “When I saw that woolly coat and yellow eyes, I just knew it had to be her. She has aged a little, but there’s no hiding a face that famous.” Dolly is, in fact, still alive, and currently living in hiding in the Faculty of Veterinary Science (Camperdown). Dolly refused to comment on this story, but sources close to her suggest that “She just wants to live her life as a normal sheep. After her disastrous relationship with Sanchez, Ryan [a merino ram, the love of Dolly’s life] really grounds her, and they have made their home here together.”

Dolly herself seems unaware of the implications of her choice. When we delved deeper into the “official story”, the truth became increasingly sinister. Not only was Dolly’s death faked, but the body displayed in the Royal Museum of Scotland may be that of a victim of this foul conspiracy. We have little doubt that this is the body of a sheep that tried to tell the true story.


The body of an unknown sheep was substituted for Dolly at the Royal Museum of Scotland.
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2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners!

The 2008 Ig Nobel prizes were held on Thursday, October 2. Read about the winners here. In the biology category, Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert and Michel Franc for discovered that fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than fleas that live on a cat.
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LHC to go off with a Big Bang

Somewhere in Europe, 100 metres underground, sits a supercooled, superbig science experiment ready to recreate the early moments of the Big Bang. No, it’s not the pet project of an evil genius intent on destroying the world- it’s the world’s largest particle accelerator, set to switch on in a few hours.

It’s known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a £2.6 billion, 27 kilometre tunnel loop, constructed underground at CERN on the border between Switzerland and France. Inside the vacuum of the LHC, streams of protons, steered by thousands of magnets, will make the 90 microsecond trip around the loop before being smashed together head-on. Four detectors situated in enormous underground caverns around the ring will record the results.

Physicists hope that collisions between the proton beams will produce new particles such as the elusive Higgs boson, which can explain why all other particles have mass. The data should help us to understand what is the universe is made of and how it was created in the first place- Big Questions indeed!
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