Midichlorians Discovered in Australia

You might have thought the spurious introduction of "midichlorians" into the Star Wars mythology was stupid and weirdly racist. But now it turns out that the little doodads in your blood that make you Jedi or not have been discovered -- sort of -- by a graduate student in Australia. Reports LabLit:

Australian post-doc Nate Lo turned to Hollywood when he couldn'tcome up with a name for his newly discovered life-form, a bacteriumthat lives happily inside the mitochondria of female tick egg cells.
Apparently the first of its kind, the bug infects the space between themitochondria's inner and outer membrane and devours theenergy-producing organelle from the inside out.

After much soul-searching and web surfing, Lo and colleagues dubbed the bug Midichloria mitochondrii after 'midichlorians', fictitious life-forms invented by George Lucas as part of the back-story for his Star Wars
world. The midichlorians, according to Lucas, live inside the cells ofall living things and "communicate with the Force". Fortunately, Lucasunleashed his blessing, not his copyright lawyers, on the newappellation prior to publication in The International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. "As far as we know, it's the first species to be formally named after anything in the entertainment industry," Lo also said.

I guess that means female ticks are the most Jedi of all. I can't wait for somebody to do a mashup of The Tick and Revenge of the Sith.

"There's plenty of science in Star Wars, but not enough Star Wars in science." [Via LabLit]