Australia (continent) Australia (continent) The continent of Australia, sometimes known in technical contexts by the names Sahul, Australinea or Meganesia to distinguish it from the country of Australia, consists of the land masses which sit on Australia's continental shelf. This includes mainland Australia, Tasmania, and the island of New Guinea (comprising Papua New Guinea and two Indonesian provinces). Situated in the geographical region of Oceania, it is the smallest of the seven traditional continents in the English conception. The continent lies on a continental shelf overlain by shallow seas which divide it into several landmasses—the Arafura Sea and Torres Strait between mainland
Smallest organisms 3.5 kilo base pairs (kb) and particle diameters of 80 nanometres (nm). The smallest double stranded DNA viruses are the hepadnaviruses such as Hepatitis B, at 3.2 kb and 42 nm; parvoviruses have smaller capsids, at 18-26 nm, but larger genomes, at 5 kb. It is important to consider other self replicating genetic elements, such as satelliviruses, viroids and ribozymes. The genome of "Nasuia deltocephalinicola", a symbiont of the European pest leafhopper, Macrosteles quadripunctulatus consists of a circular chromosome of 112,031 base pairs. "Nanoarchaeum equitans"'s genome is 490,885 nucleotides long. "Pelagibacter ubique" is one of the smallest known free-living bacterium