AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 12 -- The University of Texas at Austin issued the following news release:
So many algae do incredible, weird things. But it is probably Acetabularia, which people call maiden's wineglass. It looks like a flower. It has a stem and a cup on the end, and it grows to be 7 or 8 centimeters long. But it is still just a single cell. They were very popular for many years in research because you can remove the base where the nucleus is and the cap will live on, because of its incredible messenger RNA. There's another one I like called Valonia ventricosa, resembling a ping pong ball. They have a very thick cell wall on the outside, but the organism itself is just a thin sphere of protoplasm surrounding an empty space filled with...