"Thousands of ducklings deemed unfit for human consumption following China's latest bird flu outbreak are being sold as live snake food. Poultry farmers have resorted to selling truckloads of the newly-hatched ducklings to snake farms for a few pence each after 14 deaths in China were blamed on the lethal H7N9 virus. One duck farmer said of the creatures' unpleasant fate: 'It's either this or we just gas them all'."
"Death will come for us all one day, but life will not fade from our bodies all at once. After our lungs stop breathing, our hearts stop beating, our minds stop racing, our bodies cool, and long after our vital signs cease, little pockets of cells can live for days, even weeks. Now scientists have harvested such cells from the scalps and brain linings of human corpses and reprogrammed them into stem cells. In other words, dead people can yield living cells that can be converted into any cell or tissue in the body." —All I can say about this is "Fire bad."
"It’s a project 500 million years in the making: Using a process called paleo-experimental evolution, Georgia Tech researchers have resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria and inserted it into modern-day Escherichia coli(E. coli) bacteria. This bacterium has now been growing for more than 1,000 generations, giving the scientists a front row seat to observe evolution in action." [Via]
"Scientists at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say they have created a virus that generates electricity. The research is described as a first step toward using genetically engineered viruses to build devices that convert the body’s motion into electricity."
