Nature, the unparalleled science magazine, reports in their June 2, 2011 issue, about the discovery of multicellular life at subterranean depths which until recently were held to be too hostile for any life, and until last week, too hostile for any but the simplest life forms. The discovery is nematodes from the depths of a gold mine, and they are, says Nature, "the first multicellular organisms to be discovered in such a subterranean setting."
No doubt the details will inspire most to buy or subscribe to this periodical, so I will just quote one paragraph from an editorial in the same issue, which I find a touching tribute to the scientific imagination of the last century:
Zoologists of a certain age will remember with affection Animals Without Backbones, a classic 1938 elementary textbook by Ralph Buchsbaum that quotes a (sadly uncredited) researcher on the ubiquity of nematodes, or roundworms. Were all the matter on Earth, it says, to be made transparent apart from nematodes — the grass, the trees, the people, the animals, even the ground beneath our feet — the shapes of all these things would still be discernible, if ghostly, from their burden of worms.
No doubt the details will inspire most to buy or subscribe to this periodical, so I will just quote one paragraph from an editorial in the same issue, which I find a touching tribute to the scientific imagination of the last century:
Zoologists of a certain age will remember with affection Animals Without Backbones, a classic 1938 elementary textbook by Ralph Buchsbaum that quotes a (sadly uncredited) researcher on the ubiquity of nematodes, or roundworms. Were all the matter on Earth, it says, to be made transparent apart from nematodes — the grass, the trees, the people, the animals, even the ground beneath our feet — the shapes of all these things would still be discernible, if ghostly, from their burden of worms.
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