Moselio Schaechter (Small Things Considered) describes some of the smallest eukaryotes in the world, the picoeukaryotes. These organisms are so small that they contain only one each of the major organelles (chloroplast, mitochondrion, Golgi body, etc.); however, they play major ecological roles by producing a large fraction of the photosynthetic output at the bottom of oceanic food chains.
Elsewhere on the web, Ed Yong reviews a Nature letter describing a virophage named Sputnik, which acts as a parasite on a larger mimivirus, hijacking the host virus' machinery to make copies of itself.
Finally, Mo (Neurophilosophy) describes kuru, a prion induced neurodegenerative disease characterized by loss of motor coordination and spread, in large part, by "ritualistic mortuary cannibalism". The article provides a great introduction to prion diseases (and other diseases caused by protein misfolding such as Alzheimer's). It also raises the question of whether we may see a sudden outbreak of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human manifestation of BSE or "mad cow disease"), given the discovery of the long incubation period (up to 50 years) of kuru and related diseases.
Now, go read.
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