Scientist Creates "Super Soldiers" Out of Ants

We all (hopefully) know the origin story of Captain America: a scrawny, helpless Steve Rogers agrees to an experiment wich will create him into a "Super Solider" and allow him to serve his country.

Well now, that little piece of science fiction may not be too far away. An international team of scientists led by Dr. Ehab Abouheif have discovered a hormone treatment that allows a certain species of ants to increse rapidly in size.

The discorvery began when he and his team discovered an abnormality with some of the ants they had been discovering:

"We were collecting [the ants] on Long Island, New York, and we noticed some monstrous-looking soldiers," he said.

After several studies, it was discovered that their abnormal size was a mutatation, in which altared their hormones. This led to the discovery of the idea of introducing this hormone to other ants at a specific time during developoment, to forcefully create the mutation.

"If you treat any species at the right time in development, just with a hormone, you can induce the development of the supersoldier," he suggested. "The fact that you can induce it in all these different species [that don't naturally have that caste], means that one common ancestor of all these species had [supersoldiers]."

He also believes that this technique could eventually be used to discover hidden ancestral traits in other organisms.

"Who's to say that all of that crazy growth that occurs in cancer isn't the unleashing of some kind of ancestral potential," he said.

Perhaps we may not have to wait very long until the same process can be done on humans, ultimately leading to the Super Soldiers described in Captain America comics.

First we had engineers creating a real life Iron Man suit, now we have scientists creating Super Soldiers, who's the next hero that will be "created" in real life? Leave a comment...