The 'show why science is awesome' thread:

That is such a fantastic article. The grad student involved in this has to be floating on cloud 9 being at the cusp of this research. The thing that’s amazing is this research on elephant anti-cancer (along with sharks) has been going on for 25 years. Long time to get to this point.

Progress!

This looks like a great opportunity to find things that will be useful on Earth as well as in terraforming Mars someday.

Don’t plants do that on a regular basis?

?thats the joke?

This is so awesome!

Yup, just controlling a killer drone swarm with my brain.

Octopuses get loved up on MDMA

Magnetron!

Is there a video there? I can’t get it to come up.

There’s not a lot there, just a few seconds of sparks and such. But why wouldn’t you want that? :)

Very cool. Next time they’ll have to have a camera looking at their doors too :)

Highly intelligent cephalopods probably haven’t evolved further because they breed once and die; they never pass on generational knowledge. Scientists have been studying this and have developed some interesting theories, and as this article details, it’s not pretty from a human point of view.

(I’ve wondered what the biological imperative might be for this reproduction strategy and some speculation on this point is offered:

Death in the octopus world

The scientific jury is still out as to why these clever, resourceful creatures meet such an ignominious end, but there are several theories. Octopuses are serious cannibals, so a biologically programmed death spiral may be a way to keep mothers from eating their young.

They can also grow pretty much indefinitely, so eliminating hungry adults keeps the octopus ecosystem from being dominated by a few massive, cranky, octopus versions of Baby Boomers. But maybe it’s not fair to impose our human perspective on the cephalopod world.

“It’s very strange to see as humans because we reproduce more than once and live way past our reproductive age,” Wang said. “But if the whole purpose of living is to pass along your genes, maybe it’s not so dark.”

Imagine some kind of Shelob-octopus, who never bore young and is somewhere on the ocean floor, indistinguishable from nearby seamounts.

In Disney’s the Little Mermaid, Urusula talks about the feasts she used to engage in, and that she has “wasted away” to her current size. The obvious implication is that in the old Golden Age, she was a monstrous Lovecraftian leviathan Octopus, and that the entire court was filled with similar nightmare beings from the deep.

Uh…in the interest of keeping things science-y, that’s basically how lobsters work, where the largest breeding females just keep growing, to some as-yet-undetermined maximum age and size.

Somewhere there is an article or three basically refuting the “immortal lobster” thing. Basically it comes down to the exoskeleton thing and not being able to scale-up beyond a particular size. Molting is an incredibly stressful and dangerous activity that becomes harder and harder to accomplish the bigger you get, so at some point a large/old lobster will simply not have enough energy to get all the way out of their old shell, and they become “stuck” some portion of the way through the process and simply die.