For the new study, a team led by evolutionary biologist Anna Karnkowska, a postdoc, and her adviser, Vladimir Hampl, of Charles University in Prague, checked another candidate, a species in the genus Monocercomonoides. The single-celled organism came from the guts of a chinchilla that belonged to one of the lab members. The team decided to test it because it belonged to a group of microbes that scientists posited had lost their mitochondria.

When the researchers sequenced Monocercomonoides’s genome, they found no signs of mitochondrial genes (the organelles carry their own DNA). Digging deeper, they determined that it lacks all of the key proteins that enable mitochondria to function. “The definition of eukaryotic cells is that they have mitochondria,” says Karnkowska, who is now at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in Canada. “We overturn this definition.”

Monocercomonoides may not need mitochondria because of where it lives—in the intestines of chinchilla hosts, which it doesn’t appear to harm. Nutrients are abundant there, but oxygen, which mitochondria require to produce energy, is scarce. Instead of relying on mitochondria, the organism likely uses enzymes in its cytoplasm to break down food and furnish energy, the authors suggest. But energy production is not the only problem that Monocercomonoidessolved. Mitochondria provide another cellular service: synthesizing clusters of iron and sulfur that are essential helpers for a variety of proteins. It turns out that Monocercomonoides has come up with a workaround by borrowing some bacterial genes that perform the same function, the scientists reveal online today in Current Biology.

Source: First eukaryotes found without a normal cellular power supply

Photographer Jeannot Kuenzel trains his lens on the ocean’s unseen: most of his subjects are less than ten millimetres long, about the same length as two grains of rice.

Source: ‘Super macro’ photos reveal the magical world of the tiniest creatures in the sea | oceans | Earth Touch News

[You want to hear this. -egg]

For his project Velocipedia, artist/designer Gianluca Gimini asked friends and strangers to draw a men’s bicycle from memory. Then he digitally mocked up the designs.

Source: Amazingly weird results when people draw a bicycle from memory / Boing Boing

[Don’t try to tell me you haven’t wondered the same thing! -egg]

There are two main reasons why ancient Greek statues have small penises:

Firstly, they’re flaccid. If you compare their size to most flaccid male penises, they are actually not significantly smaller than real-life penises tend to be.

Secondly, cultural values about male beauty were completely different back then. Today, big penises are seen as valuable and manly, but back then, most evidence points to the fact that small penises were considered better than big ones.

[…]

All representations of large penises in ancient Greek art and literature are associated with foolish, lustful men, or the animal-like satyrs. Meanwhile, the ideal Greek man was rational, intellectual and authoritative. He may still have had a lot of sex, but this was unrelated to his penis size, and his small penis allowed him to remain coolly logical.

“Why do all old statues have such small penises?” | How To Talk About Art History

Marine biologists with a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expedition in the Mariana Trench encountered a luminous red-and-yellow jellyfish in April, Scientific American reports.

It is believed to be the first time a human has ever seen this species. The scientists will continue searching the extreme ocean depths through June 10.

From the NOAA video description:

This stunningly beautiful jellyfish was seen during Dive 4 of the 2016 Deepwater Exploration of the Marianas expedition on April 24, 2016, while exploring the informally named “Enigma Seamount” at a depth of ~3,700 meters.

Scientists identified this hydromedusa as belonging to the genus Crossota. Note the two sets of tentacles — short and long. At the beginning of the video, you’ll see that the long tentacles are even and extended outward and the bell is motionless. This suggests an ambush predation mode. Within the bell, the radial canals in red are connecting points for what looks like the gonads in bright yellow.

Scientists view never-before-seen glowing jellyfish in Mariana Trench ocean depths

http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/143888807081/death-by-gps-ars-technica-what-happened-to-the

Rich people live longer than poor people. No big news there — we’ve known that health tracks wealth for quite some time now.

But here’s what we haven’t known: The life-expectancy gap between rich and poor in the United States is actually accelerating.

Since 2001, American men among the nation’s most affluent 5 percent have seen their lifespans increase by more than two years. American women in that bracket have registered an almost three-year extension to their life expectancy.

Meanwhile, the poorest five percent of Americans have seen essentially no gains at all.

Now a three-year gain in average lifespan might not, at first glance, seem earth-shakingly significant. But consider this: If doctors could by some miracle suddenly cure all cancer, federal health officials tell us, the average overall American life expectancy would increase by just three years.

In other words, as MIT’s Michael Stepner puts it, the changes in life expectancy we’ve witnessed over the last 15 years rank as “the equivalent of the richest Americans winning the war on cancer.”

The Death Gap

[I really love this guy’s work. -egg]

Jeremy Mann (previously here and here) paints cityscapes set during the low-lit moments of the early morning or evening, just when natural light has begun to creep in or fade from a city’s car-lined streets. Using oil paints, Mann applies and wipes away areas of the canvas to recreate these hazy environments, adding layers of paint back on top of the slightly smeared works with more detailed strokes. This layered effects makes the works appear like double exposed images, two scenes gently blurring into one.

Source: New Oil-Based Cityscapes Set at Dawn and Dusk by Jeremy Mann

[The author makes the common mistake of believing that Deep Learning Is Magic (flavor of the day: regret-based learning is magic), but it’s still a very interesting post. -egg]

Swarms of real life, human trolls have already been able to achieve some remarkable things.

For example, there’s the well-known incident where Time’s Man Of The Year Poll met 4chan. Twice.

But real-life trolls have to sleep. They have to eat. Whilst it might not look like it, they get tired, and angry, and dispirited.

Chatbots don’t.

And the only limit to the number of trollbots you can control is the amount of processing power they require. That might initially look like a pretty major limiter, given that machine-learning applications tend to require at least a single graphics card of some power each. But a), thanks to cloud computing that’s actually pretty affordable – an Amazon GPU instance on Spot Pricing will cost you $0.13 an hour or a little over 2 dollars a day – and b) there’s no reason that one instance of the trollbot software can’t control hundreds of social media accounts all posting frantically.

So what does this mean?

Source: Rise Of The Trollbot – Charlie’s Diary