Amazing Facts

I was reading my latest Ludlum when I came across a couple of "facts", which I would have normally read and forgotten as some of his fiction. Today, I decided to check it out instead, and was surprised to find he wasn't kidding at all!

The Lancet Liver Fluke: These flukes get themselves excreted by snails and is then eaten by ants, which likes the snail's excreta, and once inside the ant, it "programs" the ant to go and climb blades of grass and just stay there all day attached to the blade or leaf by it's mandibles, so that it then gets eaten by a sheep, inside which the fluke reproduces heavily, and when the sheep takes a dump, you get millions of them out in the world! Inside each host, the fluke goes through one of the phases of it's complex life cycle!
For more, check out this link

Kopi Luwak: Kopi (the Indonesian word for coffee) Luwak comes from the islands of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi which form part of Indonesia. It's the most expensive coffee in the world, and sells for almost 300 USD per pound. It's not the exotic location that makes it so expensive - it's the way it is processed. On these Indonesian islands, there's a small marsupial called the paradoxurus, a tree-dwelling animal. They climb among the coffee trees eating only the ripest, reddest coffee cherries. The beans come through the digestion process fairly intact, still wrapped in layers of the cherries' mucilage. The enzymes in the animals' stomachs, though, add something unique to the coffee's flavor through fermentation.
For more, check out this interesting article.

A couple of years earlier, I had read one of his spy-cum-science fiction novels, the Covert One series. One of these had this fictional account of a "genetic computer", built using DNA, and much much more powerful than any of the US government's computers - and you can guess the rest of the story. Checked out DNA computers on Google, and this is what I found, reported by National Geographic almost 4 years back!

Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. The secret: It runs on DNA.
A year ago, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, unveiled a programmable molecular computing machine composed of enzymes and DNA molecules instead of silicon microchips. Now the team has gone one step further. In the new device, the single DNA molecule that provides the computer with the input data also provides all the necessary fuel.
For more, check out this link.

Truth is stranger than fiction? You bet!