Word: protoplasmal
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...menacing form depicted in this dramatic photograph is not some giant glob of man-eating protoplasm from a science-fiction film. It is actually a hamster's kidney cell magnified 15,000 times by a scanning electron microscope. Such scientific snapshots taken by Caltech Biologist Jean-Paul Revel may offer an important clue to a mystery that has long puzzled scientists: how a living cell moves across a surface. The cell's perambulations, Revel says, are apparently made possible by a strange phenomenon called "ruffling...
...John Calhoun's white mice. A psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C., Calhoun started with eight mice in an null cage; within a little more than two years, they had multiplied to 2,200, but they were hardly alive-mere "passive blobs of protoplasm, frozen in a childlike trance." Summing up the sentiments of many population experts, Stanford Biologist Paul Ehrlich (who has had himself sterilized) concludes that "if we don't do something dramatic about population and environment, and do it immediately, there is just no hope that civilization will persist...
...maintain balance, all ecosystems require four basic elements: 1) inorganic substances (gases, minerals, compounds); 2) "producer" plants, which convert the substances into food; 3) animal "consumers," which use the food; and 4) "decomposers" (bacteria and fungi), which turn dead protoplasm into usable substances for the producers. As the key producers, green plants alone have the power to harness the sun's energy and combine it with elements from air, water and rocks into living tissue?the vegetation that sustains animals, which in turn add their wastes and corpses to natural decay. It is nature's efficient reuse of the decay...
Much of it is due to shortsighted overselling of the possibilities of evolutionary progress. Darwin's theories showed that man had evolved from primordial protoplasm. But that evolution from a lower to a higher form of life had taken some two billion years. (Biologist H. J. Muller has graphically illustrated how long it took by imagining the span of time since life first appeared on earth as a trip along a tape running 90 miles from beyond New Haven to the center of a desk on Wall Street. Man appears 7 ½ feet from the center.) Darwin...
While experimenting in 1948, Geneticist Hannes Laven of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz discovered that common mosquitoes from Paris that were mated with members of the same species from Hamburg would not produce offspring. The reason for this sterility, he determined, was a difference in the cytoplasm (the protoplasm surrounding the cell nucleus) between the Paris and Hamburg strains of mosquitoes. Because of this difference, the egg cells of the females of one strain could not accept the sperm cells from males of the other strain, causing the female to lay infertile eggs. This Franco-German incompatibility...