CHICAGO

Evolutionary quirk unites humans, octopi

As the Chicago Field Museum’s Dr. Janet Voight watched a male octopus get rebuffed in his attempt to mate with a female, she noticed something striking: One of the sea creature’s eight arms was longer than usual.

This was noteworthy because the two-spot octopus uses the tip of one tentacle to pass spermatophores, or tubular packets filled with millions of sperm, to females during mating. Later study concluded that the arm was engorged because it contains erectile tissue — the first documentation, scientists say, of an invertebrate erection.

The discovery seems to demonstrate an evolutionary quirk that unites man and mollusk, said co-researcher Dr. Joseph Thompson, a biology professor at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

The study appears in a recent issue of the Journal of Zoology.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Progress reported in making artificial virus

Scientists announced significant progress Thursday toward creating an artificial organism that one day may have uses ranging from pollution control to clean energy production.

Scientists using commercially available DNA took only two weeks to build from scratch an artificial virus with the identical genetic code of a simple virus already known to infect and kill bacterial cells.

The research at the Institute of Biological Energy Alternatives in Rockville, Md., was detailed in a paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While the project was based on widely known molecular biology principles, the breakthrough was in the short time — days instead of months or years — it took to construct the virus, said institute founder J. Craig Venter, one of the lead researchers.