Octopus: Stranger than any "Sci-fi Alien"
The octopus is a creature so weird that author Sy Montgomery says “no sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange”. It has 3 hearts, parrot like beaks, 8 arms that can taste (yes, taste) the world, squirt ink, is poisonous, and can change both texture and form. (Google up videos for the kinds of spaces through which it can squeeze through, thanks to its ability to change form. It will blow your mind). As if such physical capabilities weren’t enough, an octopus at a genetic level, is “really weird”, writes Ed Yong . But first, a recap of how DNA works: “Genes encode instructions in the form of DNA—in the sequence of four building blocks represented by the letters A, C, G, and T. For those instructions to be used, the DNA must first be transcribed into a similar molecule called RNA, which contains roughly the same building blocks. The RNA is then translated and used to build proteins—the molecular machines that carry out all the important jobs inside our cells. So DNA stores informa...