Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Italdesign has a history of building road-worthy concept cars, not fragile auto show machines best left to turntables and a gentle touch. Which is how we got to ride along in Italdesign’s2012 Geneva Auto Show concept, the Brivido hybrid, over elevated and often cold and snowy Alpine passes. There’s something special about sitting warm and cozy inside this hand-built automobile, riding in a famed designer’s look at the future while outside real-world snow falls and slush beats against the wheel wells.

CONTINUED at Road & Track.

Species: Mesodinium chamaeleon

Habitat: seawater around Scandinavia and North America, chowing down on a new generation of slaves

Many animals transform themselves almost beyond recognition in the course of their lives. Caterpillars become butterflies and tadpoles become frogs, and if we couldn’t watch them do so we might not even suspect that the two stages were the same creature.

Spectacular as these shifts are, they are only shape-shifting. A tadpole and a frog are both animals, so both must take in food from their surroundings.

Not so Mesodinium chamaeleon. This newly discovered single-celled organism is a unique mixture of animal and plant.

M. chamaeleon is a ciliate – a kind of single-celled animal covered in hundreds of tiny “hairs” called cilia. It was discovered in Nivå bay in Denmark by Øjvind Moestrup of the University of Copenhagen, also in Denmark, and his team. Other specimens have since been found off the coasts of Finland and Rhode Island.

Ciliates using their hair-like cilia to motor around rapidly in water. Most get their food by eating other organisms, rather than by synthesising the nutrients themselves. This marks them as quite animal-like.

Some Mesodinium species are different, though. They engulf other microorganisms, generally algae called cryptomonads. The two then form a partnership: the algae produce sugars by photosynthesis, while the Mesodinium protects them and carries them around.

Such hybrid organisms are animals and plants at the same time. One such species, M. rubrum, only eats red algae and is often found in the algal blooms that form the famous red tides.

These hybrids play merry hell with our attempts to classify organisms into neat groups. “The division between plants and animals is collapsing completely,” Moestrup says. Instead, many microorganisms may be animal and plant at once, or switch between the two, like M. rubrum.

The new M. chamaeleon breaks yet another barrier. It is halfway between a pure animal and a hybrid.

M. chamaeleon takes in algal cells, just like M. rubrum, but it doesn’t keep them permanently. Nor does it digest them immediately, as a hungry animal-like organism might. Instead, the cells remain intact for several weeks before being broken down, during which time they keep producing sugar by photosynthesis. M. chamaeleon also changes colour depending on whether it is hosting red or green algae or both.

“It is quite unusual,” says Moestrup. Other Mesodinium species either retain their captured cells for ages or digest them immediately.

The ability to take in other cells and put them to work is called endosymbiosis, and is one of the most important inventions in the history of life. Some 2 billion years ago, a single cell swallowed a bacterium and used it as an energy source. The descendants of the enslaved bacterium eventually became the mitochondria that now power all complex cells, including ours. Without endosymbiosis, there wouldn’t be any multicellular life.

While the first endosymbiosis may have been a lucky chance, the process now seems to be common, at least among the more complex single-celled organisms. Some are so good at taking in cells that over the years they have switched symbionts. “It happens quite regularly,” Moestrup says.

M. chamaeleon may offer a snapshot of how endosymbiosis developed: the organism is still on the road from simply eating other cells to keeping them alive within itself.

Source: New Scientist.

*Taken from the American Dream.

Crazed scientists all over the globe are “playing god” with the very building blocks of life.  Today, thanks to extraordinary advances in the field of genetic modification, scientists are now able to do things that were once unthinkable.  Part human/part animal hybrid monsters are being created by scientists all over the planet and it is all perfectly legal.  Scientists justify mixing the DNA of humans and animals by claiming that it will help them “cure diseases” and “feed the world”, but the reality is that all of this genetic modification is a tremendous threat to the human race.  It is only a matter of time before humans start allowing themselves to be genetically-modified in order to “fight illness” or to “enhance” their abilities.  The temptation to insert the genes of animals or plants into people in order to create “super soldiers” or a “superior race” will certainly prove to be much too tempting.  Unless something is done to hold all of this back, it seems almost certain that genetic hell will be unleashed on the human race.  Once genetically-modified humans start breeding with normal humans there will be no putting the genie back into the bottle.  Eventually, we could get to the point where there are very few “100% humans” left.

Most Americans have heard about genetic modification, but most of them don’t know a whole lot about it.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from Geekologie.

Seen here sporting the handsome visage of Mark Twain Sir Robert Borden, the Bank of Canada’s governor Mark Carney (who’s made out with the bearded lady before but won’t admit it) shows off the country’s new plastic $100 bill. The $100 will be the first of the bills (Canada’s — several other countries already have plastic/hybrid bills) to be rolled out in polymer form this November, with $50′s to follow next March, and the rest to be out by the end of 2013 (if we survive that long).

The polymer bank notes are more durable than paper money. The Bank of Canada expects the new bills to last 2.5 times longer than the paper ones.
They’re also harder to fake than paper money. Some of the security features built into the new notes include raised ink, hidden numbers and metallic images in see-through windows.

The bills feel smooth and slightly waxy. They don’t crumple easily, but they do crease when you try, and they don’t seem to tear in half.

They don’t tear in half?! But how am I supposed to perform my ‘ripped bill repairs itself’ magic trick? *calling manager* They’re on to me — cancel the Canadian portion of my magic tour, STAT!

Get ready for more plastic in your wallet; Canada switching to polymer bills[yahoonews]

Thanks to Ken, who’s pissed Canadian rappers won’t be able to rhyme about “gettin’ that paper” anymore. Wait — CANADA HAS RAPPERS?! “Yeah, Snow.”Ahhhhhh. A licky boom-boom down!