This is incredibly interesting

Multicellular anoxic marine life. Entirely anaerobic conditions but still multicellular. God damn I'd like to see one of these in a scope myself. The cellular structure must be made of crazy. Provisional paper here, and there are lots of lovely figures!

Um, if none of this means anything to you; anaerobic bacteria - bacteria which don't use oxygen - have been around forever, dominated the earth for billions of years, turned the atmosphere from CO₂ into mostly oxygen, wiped most of themselves out in the process. Like they say, "oops." They're still around, hiding out in places without much oxygen, which is for them poisonous. (To, um, oversimplify.)

These little guys are multicellular. There's been no evidence for this before but these guys are tiny animals. This is crazytalk! And yet: apparently real! They don't have mitochondria, they have what the paper describes as "hydrogenosome-like organelles" similar to some found in some unrelated single-celled eukaryotes but...

Anyway, it's neat, and a big surprise, and the paper is really quite readable, so go take a look.

"very proud"

"As [Obama supporting journalist] Richard Wolffe said in the second Olbermann segment below... the White House is "internally... very proud" of its presidential assassination program, which is likely why they decided to leak it to the NYT and the WP yesterday."

Even some people at National Review are a little nervous about this. That takes something. But the more authoritarian are totally onboard, as you'd expect.

Embrace and extend in action.

I finally made a flickr account

Please enjoy some concert photos and also some pics from Norwescon and I'm kinda at my quota already so that's about it for the moment. I have room for a few more tho'.