Don't you love those fantastic coincidences, where you have to chuckle at the improbability? I just had one of them, in which I read about a species of worm I'd never heard of before -- and then read about it again within 20 minutes in a totally unrelated article.
First, I ran across this post at Althouse, linking to the story "Scientists invent microscopic operating table."
Now a special microchip that can immobilize the one millimetre long transparent worm Caenorhabditis elegans so that scientists can perform laser nanosurgery to sever individual nerves and study their regeneration is reported in Nature Methods, a technique that will be a boon for spinal repair in humans since the worms have many things in common with the scientists who study it.
Horribly constructed sentence, but that's not the point. The point is that I read about the worm C. elegans for the first time.
Next, I followed a rabbit trail of links starting with this post at Dad29, about P.J. O'Rourke's take on the "new" seven deadly sins, leading to this one at Provincial Emails on the same topic, with a hat tip to Arts & Letter Daily -- which had a completely unrelated and intriguing link to this article about the brain and use of psychotropic drugs.
And guess what? There's that worm again!
“We still don’t understand how C. elegans works,” Wiesel said, referring to a small worm often used by scientists to study molecular and cell biology.
Why yes, I know that worm! And now I know that they've invented an itty-bitty operating table just for it!
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