Yes, it’s Friday the Thirteenth, the most dreaded day in a triskadecaphobic calendar. I suggest you celebrate like I do, by finding yourself a black cat, and petting it.

Shouldn’t be too hard for you, Felicity.

And speaking of things which are black, check out this bit of news about black holes.

The skinny : some of the black holes we can currently observe in the universe may have been around since before the Big Bag.

Wrap your brain around that concept for a second. When I first read the headline, I did a full on “Whaaaa?” kind of reaction. I think I probably did at least a triple take. Mouth open, the whole deal.

This is what I love about astrophysics. Just when you think you have a grip on things, they come up with yet another way to completely blow your mind.

The idea of black holes so ancient that they were around since before the Big Bang is obviously grounded on a cyclical view of the nature of the universe, once in which the Big Bang was just the latest stroke in a never ending series of expansions and contractions of the Universe.

Big Bang, the Universe expands till the momentum imparted by the initial Bang is not enough to counteract the attraction of gravity between every object with mass in the Universe, then everything reverses direction and contracts into one massive super dense Big Ball, which explodes again. And so on.

Except for some black holes, apparently.

Shifting from the macrocosmic to the microscopic, it turns out that flatworms (planarians) can do a trick where they regenerate their entire bodies from only a single cell.

It’s long been known that flatworms have amazing regenerative powers. A basic schoolroom experiment shows off how if you cut a flatworm in half, both halves will regenerate into fully functional adult flatworms.

Pretty amazing, huh? Might not be the sexiest way to reproduce, or the most fun, but it does the trick. Well, now it turns out they can do that even if there’s only one cell of them left. You could theoretically make millo0ns of them from a single individual and a lot of time and Petri dishes.

Not all of their cells can do this trick, just certain specialized ones. Still, with a fairly amazing trick like that in their tiny arsenal, it does make me wonder why half the world isn’t flatworms by now, and why we aren’t they ones being sliced in half to see what happens by them.

We human beings are very interested in this trick because we are hoping that we can learn to do it for ourselves. Not that anyone is looking to grow entire new human beings from a single cell (that would be weird), but just the part where a whole something is regenerated from a single cell…. like say, a liver or a heart. If you could trick the body into making its own replacement organs, right there in your body, it would make the organ donor system obsolete and save millions of lives.

And speaking of people who need organs, let’s talk about zombies. Specifically, ZOMBIE ANTS.

This is by far my favorite bit of completely fucked up creepy science news in a long time. Turns out, there is this fungus that turns ants into its mind controlled zombie slaves!

Here’s all the gory details :

The fungus, called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, causes ants to leave their colonies and head for a leaf which provides the ideal conditions for the host to reproduce.

When it gets there the ant goes into a ‘death grip’- biting down very hard on the major vein of a leaf. This means that when the ant dies, its body stays put so the fungus has time to grow and release its spores to infect other ants.

Is that creepy or what? It’s very easy to imagine ants shambling out of their anthills and heading right for that special leaf and then clamping down on it with a literal death grip. It seems like a complex behaviour to be caused by a fungal infection, but ants already have the necessary programming to go in search of specific things when the colony needs them. The fungus just needs to activate this “search” routine and places the plant it needs in there, and hyper-stimulate the “acquire” part so that the ant latches on and never lets go.

It’s a cruel way for even so simple an organism as an ant to die, starving to death but unable to let go.

Nature is truly more horrifying than we can imagine. It’s things like this that reinforce my belief in civilization.

Nasty, brutish, and short does not begin to properly describe the state of nature. How about brutal, nightmarish, and horrifying, for a start?