How Tiny Wasps Cope With Being Smaller Than Amoebas

How tiny wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas

Thrips are tiny insects, typically just a millimeter in length. Some are barely half that size. If that’s how big the adults are, imagine how small a thrips’ egg must be. Now, consider that there are insects that lay their eggs inside the egg of a thrips.

That’s one of them in the image above – the wasp, Megaphragma mymaripenne. It’s pictured next to a Paramecium and an amoeba at the same scale. Even though both these creatures are made up of a single cell, the wasp – complete with eyes, brain, wings, muscles, guts and genitals – is actually smaller. At just 200 micrometers (a fifth of a millimeter), this wasp is the third smallest insect alive* and a miracle of miniaturization.

The wasp has several adaptations for life at such a small scale. But the most impressive one of all has just been discovered by Alexey Polilov from Lomonosov Moscow State University, who has spent many years studying the world’s tiniest insects.

Read the full article here!

* The world’s second smallest insect is a close relative of M. mymaripenne called Megaphragma caribea, slightly smaller at 170 micrometers. The record holder is yet another wasp – Dicopomorpha echmepterygis. The males, blind and wingless, are just 130 micrometers long. The females are slightly bigger than M.caribea.

Fresh news from Hubble, and it's a real doozy this time: it found a runaway supermassive black hole.

Let me repeat that:

A runaway SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE.

Half the universe away, an immense object born of concentrated primordial chaos, so powerful it once bound an entire galaxy together, hurtles through the intergalactic void. Its flight through the cosmos so unfathomably violent that it leaves a stream of newborn stars two hundred thousand lightyears long whirling in its wake. Gas and dust in the space between galaxies is spread so thin a particle might never touch another for a million years, and yet this escaped galactic core has dragged the matter in its path into fusion.

What a universe we live in!

So I've gotten a lot of new followers in the last 48 hours or so, all of which appear to be very new to the site -they're blank apart from the following tab and occasionally some likes. Spam bot red flag, right? But I've noticed two strange things. The first is that almost all of them only follow a handful of blogs instead of successively following hundreds of random blogs. That's RPB (Real Person Behaviour). Second and more curiously, they have all followed myself either immediately before or immediately after following one well-known David J @prokopetz. My only conclusion, though I have yet to actually test its veracity, is that the goddamn Glock Function post and maybe last week's Hubble post netted me enough attention from whatever algorithms drive the blog recommendation feature to qualify me as something akin to "tumblr-famous" and place me adjacent to Mr. Prokopetz as a similar blog.

Huh.

oblivion is an abysmal game and everyone should play it

this one actually made me laugh pretty hard im not gonna lie

That was the first thing I thought about as well, but unfortunately I realized that's just not possible. For one thing, the oldest of these stars only formed about 40 million years ago, and it took a few hundred million years for Earth to form and cool enough to host life.

More to the point, though: none of those stars can host planets because there isn't enough planet-stuff around. See, most of intergalactic matter is hydrogen and helium. The intergalactic void simply does not have the same amount of heavier elements you find in galactic environments, because there hasn't been a long chain of prior stellar death to form them out there. However, that also means that this stellar strand is likely composed of some of the purest-fusing stars the universe has seen for eons.

Putting that all aside, if we imagine ourselves on an impossible world in this cosmic wake, the night sky would look very strange. Most of the heavens would be very dark, flecked with a handful of stars. However, there would be two opposing splotches of bright accumulated starlight, gradually fading outwards. How alien would that be to us, with our Milky Way?

Fresh news from Hubble, and it's a real doozy this time: it found a runaway supermassive black hole.

Let me repeat that:

A runaway SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE.

Half the universe away, an immense object born of concentrated primordial chaos, so powerful it once bound an entire galaxy together, hurtles through the intergalactic void. Its flight through the cosmos so unfathomably violent that it leaves a stream of newborn stars two hundred thousand lightyears long whirling in its wake. Gas and dust in the space between galaxies is spread so thin a particle might never touch another for a million years, and yet this escaped galactic core has dragged the matter in its path into fusion.

What a universe we live in!