In honor of the upcoming 200th birthday of Charles Darwin (Feb. 12, 2009) Nature has published 12 very elegant examples of evolution.

If you have a Nature subscription you may go here: Darwin's enduring legacy

Otherwise it is summarized at Wired magazine: 12 Elegant Examples of Evolution

There are some cool examples listed such as the intermediate ancestor to whales, dinosaur feathers, competing epochs of water fleas and more.

And as an added bonus to our vast readership here at techRivet, here is the wikipedia article on Charles Darwin for your elucidation: Charles Darwin

Not only does Amoeba dubia have the largest known genome of any organism, at 670 billion base pairs, which is 200 times larger than the genome of humans, it's also a monster protozoan.  A. dubia can grow to be as large as a millimeter in length, and can be visible to the naked eye.  If you are a single celled organism, that's Godzilla, but even the monster A. dubia isn't the largest member of the amoebozoans.  Multinucleate amoeba of the genus chaos, such as Chaos carolinensis, can grow up to 5 mm in length.

...why space poop of course.

This cute short video actually has one of the most succinct explanations of how a space toilet works.

Once again the relentless advance of science continues.  You may say neat, but so what.  Well if they can produce type O blood in bulk from this process then an emergency blood supply can be produced ON DEMAND.  Eliminating shortages as well as the possibility of diseased blood.

This is a big deal.

While a few red blood cells have been created from embryonic stem cells before, the ACT team is the first to mass-produce them on the scale required for medical use. They also showed that the red cells were capable of carrying oxygen, and that they responded to biological cues in similar fashion to the real thing.

I am curious if this has any impact on other treatments such as cancer.  What if you could clone someone's blood that has shown resistance to cancer growth?  There could be a source of Reverse-Typhoid-Mary blood supply.

This is a remarkable story: Cancer patient recovers after injection of immune cells

The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure.

...and change keeps moving faster and faster.

Here's the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's webpage discussing the same case.  Not much more information.

21-leaf clover - World record.

I'm not sure if this should count though as it was "discovered" by a food researcher in Japan who has been cross-breeding clovers as his hobby for years.  He held the previous record at 18 leaves also.

As we relentlessly march into the future scientists continue to discover stuff about stuff.  And you know what we don't forget the stuff we already knew about stuff.  That is the law of accelerating change in a nutshell.

Some of the stuff we learn about stuff we had to already know about some other stuff before we could figure out the new stuff about stuff.

You follow?

Now some fairly bright scientists at Harvard have come across a technique for "starving" cancer cells and thereby curbing their growth. 

When the researchers forced cancer cells to switch to the other form of pyruvate kinase in the lab by knocking out production of PKM2, the cells' growth was curbed.

The paralysed finger

Try this...it is impossible to lift your ring finger.

Essentially your index finger and pinky have independent extensor tendons whereas your middle and ring finger share one.

The index and small finger each have independent extension function through the extensor indicis proprius and extensor digiti minimi.

There you go, now you know.  Maybe you can win some bets at a bar now...

I know you've been curious.

Well here is a fascinating article that talks about how huge Baleen [called Rorqual] Whales feed.

I mean we all know that they open their mouths and let the water flow in and then squeeze it out through the baleen and trap the krill.  But the latest research fills in the details.

Essentially they cruise along at 600 feet below the surface and then open their mouth, dropping their jaw perpendicular to their body.  This causes their whole mouth to act like a giant parachute and stops the forward motion of the whale completely.

What the whale does next came as a complete surprise to the scientists. “It was still swimming, but it was slowing down really fast,” Mr. Goldbogen said. Even as the whale pumps its powerful tail, it comes to a compete stop in three seconds.

And the amount of water that they capture in their mouth during a gulp is truly gargantuan.

Mr. Goldbogen and his colleagues calculate that in just three seconds, the mouth of a 60-foot fin whale fills with more than 18,000 gallons of water. That’s the same volume as a school bus, and weighs more than the whale itself.

Go read the whole article.  It's a fascinating read.