HENRY - The human evolution news relay

Congratulations to ScienceDaily for this, um, baffling introduction:

“Cornell researchers are studying bacterium big enough to see — the Shaquille O’Neal of bacteria. Well, perhaps not quite Shaquille O’Neal. But it is Shaq-teria.“

Uh. ok. Anyway, they’re reporting on this paper: “Extreme polyploidy in a large bacterium“, which does sound interesting, and really didn’t deserve that pun. The authors have discovered a gigantic bacteria Epulopiscium, which is around the size of a grain of salt. Bacteria visible to the naked eye? So why is Epulopiscium so big? all the better to hold tens of thousands of copies of its genome, of course.

The press release is worth reading if you ignore the shaq-ing introduction, and the paper is here.

Edit: and hey, I know one of the authors. Hi Kendall!