The Conservative Cave
Interests => The Science Club => Topic started by: Chris_ on February 05, 2014, 10:34:07 PM
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Animal Loses Head But Remembers Everything
This is a worm. It's called a planarian. It's about an inch long, and you'll find it gliding along the bottoms of rivers and ponds all over the world. It's very flat, like a moving bit of pasta — nothing special to look at, but it has a hidden talent that has made it famous. It can regrow its body parts better than almost any other animal on Earth. So if by some chance something bites its head off or removes its tail, or zaps its head and its tail simultaneously the dangling middle piece will, within a couple of weeks, grow both its front and its back to full size. Meanwhile, the severed head, if left alone, will also generate a full-sized new worm. The lonesome tail will do that, too, so where you started with one worm, you'll now have three. This worm likes to regenerate.
You can even remove a single, special cell from an adult planarian (not an infant cell, but a cell taken from a mature adult), and from that one cell, scientists discovered a few years ago, the worm can regenerate a whole new creature — the skin, guts, nerves, muscle, eyes, mouth, everything. It will be genetically identical to the donor.
NPR (http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/12/31/258399090/animal-loses-head-but-remembers-everything)
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Is that the one that can be killed and fed to others and they will know what the dead one knew? Too lazy to click the link, but I seem to recall something like that about them.