Thanks to everyone at Discover for their support during a great run, and I’m sure that the new folks, and the new bloggers like Keith Kloor, will continue the magazine and website’s great legacy.

In the meantime,  I hope that all of you will help me christen my new abode. The site has been built over the last week and the transition should be pretty seamless. All of my old posts have been ported over, as have all the comments bar those of the last few weeks. So, without further ado, here are the important details:

The new URL is: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/blog/not-exactly-rocket-science/

The new feed is: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/blog/not-exactly-rocket-science/feed/

Both of these links are not currently working – they’ll go live on tomorrow, Tuesday, probably at 9am ET.

Blog transitions are always annoying things, and there’s always a proportion of readers who get lost in the jump. If you’ve enjoyed what I’ve written here, could you please help by drumming up some interest in these first days and weeks. Update bookmarks and feeds, tell your friends and family… anything you feel happy to do. It’s all appreciated.

See you there.

Top picks

“Restless genes” by David Dobbs, about the genetics and other factors behind the human urge to explore, is one of the best science stories of the year, let alone the week. It’s beautifully written without sacrificing nuance. I know David personally, and I know how much he agonises about capturing the complexity of the science that he covers. And when someone does that, and puts in the work, you get results like this.

Giant crabs are marching on Antarctica. Douglas Fox narrates their invasion.

“Dear Cancer, I beat you aged 8 & today I got my PhD in cancer research” – By Vicky Forster

Great gut-wrenching piece of writing about the difficult decisions faced by parents of a 23-week-old baby

A very cool experiment: scientists transform fish fins into sort-of-but-not-really hands. By Carl Zimmer.

Alexis Madrigal, Becca Rosen, and Megan Garber tell you about the year in technology. Essential.

You may have heard about mirror neurons. That’s because they’re the most ridiculously hyped concept in neuroscience. Here’s the reality, from Christian Jarrett.

Jeff Ingram repeatedly gets total amnesia, but his wife is his memory. Amazing story.

NASA’s going to punch the moon with robots

Impressive: conservationists have eradicated all rats from Rabada Island in the Galapagos. By Henry Nicholls.

The Bizarre, Beetle-Biased World of Social Insect Exploitation

A superb post by Dana Hunter on Mt St Helens’ legendary explosion. And there’s apparently a “volcanal explosivity index“…

Here’s everything you need to know about the new coronavirus from the Middle East, by Maryn McKenna, Helen Branswell, and Declan Butler (with a great interactive) .

Scientist gets stung by box jellyfish, recovers after days in pain, then finds a treatment. By Christie Wilcox.

This piece by Brian Switek, on a hypothesis that puts life on land 65myrs early, is a great example of critical reporting. Also note: it’s a Nature news story that takes down a Nature paper. Editorial independence FTW!

When is grieving a sickness? Controversy over psychiatry’s new rules for bereavement and depression, ably covered by Brandon Keim.

Carl Zimmer: an example to us all. Check out his Reddit AMA on parasites and more.

Which comes first as we age: ill health or declining bacterial communities in our guts? Virginia Hughes investigates.

Remarkable! A 120-Year-Old Mechanical Device that Perfectly Mimics the Song of a Bird.

Stem cell scientists are taking the piss: brain cells made from urine

Parasites in your skin is the new Jesus on toast – a case of photoshopping parasites into existence? By Neuroskeptic.

“It’s like watching a natural Manhattan breaking apart in front of your eyes.” – birth of an enormous iceberg!

Science/news/writing

Western chimps are very different to eastern ones… but just how different?

Is the ocean really getting more acidic? Hannah Waters on why we can’t expect beautiful & clean science when talking about large-scale changes in the ocean

What’s that? Oh nothing, just one of the oldest things we have ever seen

Report confirmed that neglected tropical diseases are neglected, tropical

From one slow loris species to four! (2 are reclassified subspecies; 1 is new). Also doesn’t the loris in the photo look delighted about the news?

“The patient’s arms were peculiar and stiff because the elbows were actually knees.” Awesome mutation story from Ricki Lewis.

Phil Plait has a good piece on the death of Sir Patrick Moore, including the good and bad.

‘Made-for-TV experiments’ can make really bad science

Honey bees trained to stick out their tongues for science

The reconstructed face of the hobbit (no, not that one, the actual one)

Traces of the world’s oldest cheese: 7,500 years old and it would have tasted like mozzarella!

In Sri Lanka, attempt to save elephants through relocation fails and sews more human-pachyderm conflict

Great piece by Judy Stone on a psychiatric clinical trial, a participant’s suicide – and questions.

“The global illegal trade in wildlife is worth £12bn a year and is threatening the stability of some governments”

Day #9483: Squid land shock-troops still underperforming. Consider exoskeleton.

Elsevier editorial system hacked, reviews faked, 11 retractions follow

“I’ve decided to come out of the scientific closet, and openly declare my support of non-translational, basic research”

Videogamers beat surgeons at using surgical robots

A new, photo of the extremely elusive New Guinea singing dog

Connectomics – the video game

We eradicated the virus, but people think lab stocks should be destroyed. No, not smallpox. The other one!

Big UK push to integrate whole-genome sequencing into the healthcare system

What should we name the next NASA rover after Curiosity? Vote for the last option

Today I learned that your brain has an “itch matrix“. Like the Autobot one, presumably, but more irritating

Crayons named after the chemicals that burn with a similarly coloured flame!

Yale scientists name Obamadon, a slender-jawed lizard after the President. (It’s apparently so boring that the artist had to put it in a corner (it’s the blue one) and add dinosaurs).

An excellent interview with super-blogger NeuroSkeptic, ‘the James Dean of science blogging’

Paige Williams’ 15 steps to writing are spot-on

BMC has a new project to unlock the value of medical case reports

Toronto Sun misspells “correction” in “correction” note

Tongue of a Lorikeet. Wow.

How could Florida’s giant python hunting contest–open to all–go awry? Kate Wong counts the ways

On why we get most of our knowledge by relying on experts: John Kubie on “epistemic closure” in his new blog.

Tyger tyger burning white. A compelling case against keeping white tigers in zoos.

What is and isn’t a scientific debate by Dave Hone.

More from Deborah Blum on the radioactivity in cigarette smoke

Fast-folding DNA origami

It would take around 65,000 model rocket engines to launch an actual rocket into space

Heh/wow/huh

‘The Hobbit’ To Feature 53-Minute-Long Scene Of Bilbo Baggins Trying To Figure Out What To Pack

I love this picture of a Chinese zoo escape drill so much.

20 amazing infographics of 2012. I was all ready to be cynical, but these *are* actually pretty good

Amazing! A spider that’s doing this face: o_O

“Q: what did batman say to robin before they got in the car? A: get in the car.” Bad kids’ jokes.

Bane’s “outtakes” from The Dark Knight Rises. Man likes his fibre.

A study on the effect of Batman on a man’s body image

Journalism/internet/society

Curtis Brainard interviews Carl Zimmer and me about the ever-changing ecosystem of science blogs, and Deborah Blum talks about our new collective at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker

The best (and worst) media errors and corrections of 2012

Trek along with Brian Vastag as he follows a man who follows dinosaur footprints. Great tips on writing profiles

An international guide to laughing on the internet

The winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest, where people write the worst opening sentence of a novel, has been announced. And it’s about FACEMITES!

The Pope has started tweeting. The only people whom he follows are his international team of clones

The Oatmeal responds to a Buzzfeed hit piece. Wow.

Please welcome Keith Kloor to Discover’s blogging collective

Megasoma elephas, courtesy of Thomas Martin, Jean-Philippe Sobczak & Hendrik Dietz

Panama’s San Lorenzo forest reserve is around the size of Manhattan. For two years, this small area was host to 102 scientists, working together to count everything that crept and crawled. They came from 17 countries, and converged upon a half-hectare of the forest, about the size of half a rugby pitch. They dug into the soil, and ascended into the 40-metre-tall treetops with ropes, balloons, and a giant crane. They unleashed fogs, set up sticky traps, and hacked into pieces of wood.

Together, they were part of the largest ever systematic attempt to answer a disarmingly simple question: in a patch of tropical rainforest, how many species of insects and other arthropods are there?

After collecting the critters in 2003 and 2004, and analysing the material for eight years, they got an answer: 6,144 species in that patch of forest. Using computer simulations to scale that up, they estimate that the entire 6,000-hectare Manhattan-sized forest is home to around 25,000 arthropod species.

It’s the first solid estimate of its kind, and it reveals a surprising trend: every hectare of the forest contains almost two-thirds (64 percent) of all the arthropod species in the whole area. “That doesn’t mean that if you cut the forest to just one half-hectare, all those species can exist,” cautions Yves Basset from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who led the study. “But it’s good news. It suggests that if we do a good job of collecting species in small plots, from soil to canopy, we can get a surprising proportion of what’s in the whole forest.”

Arthropods are animals that are covered in a hard external skeleton and walk on jointed legs. They include the insects, arachnids like spiders and scorpions, millipedes and centipedes, and much more. Pick a land animal randomly, and chances are it’ll be an arthropod.

But how many are there? That’s not an easy question. By their nature, arthropods are small but numerous. Some groups like ants and butterflies are well-studied, but we don’t have good data for more obscure members, which require special techniques, and even more specially trained scientists.

The tropical rainforest, undoubtedly the richest of the planet’s arthropod hubs, poses an extra challenge: it’s very tall. The forest is like a gigantic cake, with each layer having its own character. The residents of the soil are very different from those in the canopy, and the latter is very hard to reach. Sure, you can climb, but if you wanted to do a survey, you need to reach the tops of many trees, and work there for hours.

The team solved that problem with a Canopy Raft, an inflatable platform shaped like a giant Venn diagram, which can be lowered onto the treetops via blimp. It’s light enough to avoid damaging the trees, and allows scientists to work in the canopy for days at a time. The team also used the Smithsonian’s huge construction cranes to lift and lower the researchers into spots of their choosing, along with more traditional tree-houses, helium balloons, and tree-climbing gear.

Clockwise from top-left: the Canopy Raft, by Roger Le Guen; Maurice Leponce suspended from a balloon, by Maurice Leponce; Dawn Frame and Alexey Tischechkin in the Canopy Crane, by Jurgen Schmidl; Yves Basset climbing a tree, by Yves Basset

Besides gathering equipment, Basset and the other project leaders also gathered expertise. They congregated a huge team of colleagues, each with their own speciality. Basset himself focused on leafhoppers. Others specialised on flies, or crickets. There were four separate categories of beetle experts, who focused on the hunting, scavenging, plant-eating, and fungus-eating species. “We needed all these people because the methods for studying these groups aren’t the same,” says Basset. “You cannot get a good estimate unless you have all these experts working together.”

Experts like this often work in the same field site, but rarely do they coordinate their efforts. They worked as a team, using 14 different techniques to scour the forests for arthropods. They released insecticide fogs into the trees and collected whatever fell to earth. They used light-traps to lure insects at night. They dug pit traps. They laid pieces of wood as bait, waited for insects to lay their eggs inside, and then reared the eggs in cages to see what hatched.  They walked along the forest, breaking into every stray piece of wood in search for termites.

After all that effort, the team arrived at a count of 6,144, and used computer models to expand that figure to the entire forest. They used well-studied groups to check their figures and “ground-truth” their models, and eventually predicted that San Lorenzo is home to around 25,000 arthropod species. The most likely minimum is 22,000, and the full range of possible figures extends from 18,000 to 44,000.

Of these, Basset expects that a few thousand were new to science, but it’s hard to say exactly—collected species often languish for decades before being described, so these “new” species might have already been “discovered” elsewhere.

For now, the team’s data have shown that the richness of arthropods was strongly related to the diversity of plants in any given part of the forest. For every plant species, there are around 20 arthropod ones, and if you know the former, you can predict the latter to within 1 percent accuracy. There are also ties between arthropods and other animals groups. For every bird or mammal species, you can expect 71 and 270 arthropod species respectively.

“Again, this is good news,” says Basset. “It’s very difficult to collect arthropods, but far easier to have a good estimate how many tree species there are.” While some scientists have used plants to estimate arthropod diversity before, the assumption that these were accurately linked had never been thoroughly tested. “Our collections suggest that there is a good correlation,” says Basset. This means that a recent estimate of 6.1 million arthropod species around the world is probably about right. Or, in the team’s words, “does not require drastic correction”.

Of course, this study only applies to a small forest in Panama. It’s not a standard for tropical rainforests, nor was it meant to be. “But the methods could set up a standard,” says Basset. The team is already starting to run similar studies in Vanuatu, Australia and Papua New Guinea, using the same template. And Basset expects that an even wider selection of arthropods lives in the heart of the Amazon, or the jungles of South-East Asia.

Reference: Basset, Cizek, Cuénoud, Didham, Guilhaumon, Missa, Novotny, Ødegaard, Roslin, Schmidl, Tishechkin, Winchester, Roubik, Aberlenc, Bail, Barrios, Bridle, Castaño-Meneses, Corbara, Curletti, da Rocha, De Bakker, Delabie, Dejean, Fagan, Floren, Kitching, Medianero, Miller, de Oliveira, Orivel, Pollet, Rapp, Ribeiro, Roisin, Schmidt, Sørensen & Leponce. 2012. Arthropod Diversity in a Tropical Forest. Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1226727

But not for long.

Earlier, Kay Tye and Julie Mirzabekov altered the mouse so that a flash of light can activate a small part of its brain—the ventral tegmental area (VTA), near the bottom of the brain and close to the midline. A burst of light, and the mouse’s behaviour changes almost instantly. It struggles when held aloft, it explores open areas, and it regains its sweet tooth. A burst of light, and its symptoms disappear.

But on the other side of the country, at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dipesh Chaudhury and Jessica Walsh are doing the same thing to completely different effect. Their mice have been altered in a similar way, so that light can also switch on their VTA neurons. But these rodents have endured a shorter but more intense form of stress—10 days of being placed in cages with dominant, aggressive rivals. Because of the resulting attacks, some of them have developed depressive symptoms. Others are more resilient. But when Chaudhury and Walsh flashed the VTAs of these mice, resilient individuals transformed into susceptible ones.

Both studies used the same methods to trigger neurons in the same part of the brain… and got completely different effects. In Tye and Mirzabekov’s experiment, depressed mice resumed their normal behaviour. In Chaudhury and Walsh’s study, the resilient mice showed more depressed symptoms.

Many routes to depression

Both teams think that the apparently contradicting results are due to the different types of stress experienced by the rodents. Tye’s animals experienced chronic mild stress, like a human might when facing constant job insecurity. Chaudury and Walsh’s mice faced severe “social-defeat” stress over a shorter time, which is more like someone getting mugged. These contrasting experiences might influence the same parts of the brain, but they do so in different ways. “Everyone has their own life history, and experiences different stress or traumas,” says Ming-Hu Han, who led the second study. “This may be why if you compare the symptoms in two people with depression, they’re different.”

These results underscore the complicated nature of depression. It has many potential causes that could act on the brain in opposite ways, even if they’re influencing the same area, and producing a similar constellation of symptoms.

This could also explain why there’s no one-size-fits-all treatment for depression. “Even the most effective drugs just work for a subset, and certain treatments work beautifully for some patients but make it worse for others,” says Tye, who now heads up her own lab at Massachussetts Institute for Technology. Research on antidepressants has been… well… a little depressing. Despite a five-decade history, very few advances have been made in the last decade. “Over the past half century, no genuinely groundbreaking progress has been made,” says Gal Yadid from Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

But these new studies, although they were done in mice, provide many clues that could lead to new treatments. They pinpoint parts of the brain that are involved in symptoms, they show that those symptoms can potentially be reversed very quickly, and they tell us more about the chemicals that are involved.

Most of the current wave of antidepressants, like Prozac, increase levels of the brain chemical serotonin, on the basis that low levels lead to depression. But this hypothesis can’t be entirely right. For a start, these drugs don’t work for everyone. And when they do, they can take months to kick in. If the drugs were working because they boosted serotonin levels, they should work within hours. As it is, it looks like they’re acting indirectly.

We can do better. Studies with deep-brain stimulation, where a implanted device electrically stimulates the brain, have shown that depression symptoms can be reversed very quickly. The same happens with some drugs like ketamine, albeit with severe side effects. So, it’s clearly possible to get an antidepressant effect in the brain very quickly; it’s just a case of targeting the right circuits. Based on the two new studies, it looks like those circuits reside in the VTA, and specifically in its connections to the nearby nucleus accumbens (NA).

Enter: dopamine

The VTA is a hub for neurons that secrete dopamine, another brain chemical that’s involved in feelings of reward. Dopamine is a relatively new player in depression research. Over the last decade, various groups have manipulated the dopamine neurons connecting the VTA and NA and produced symptoms of depression in mice.

Tye and Chaudhury’s groups have effectively done the same, but with far more precision than anyone has previously managed. Their ace card was a technique called optogenetics, which implants neurons with light-sensitive proteins that allows them to be controlled by optic fibres. With these proteins, scientists can turn neurons on or off with different colours of light. They can target specific parts of the brain, or specific types of cell. They can investigate the brain like never before (and it’s no surprise that one of the technique’s inventors – Karl Deisseroth – features on both papers).

Tye’s group used optogenetics to first silence VTA neurons, which immediately and reversibly made normal mice behave as if they were depressed. Conversely, when they made the same neurons fire in regular bursts (“phasically”), they reversed symptoms in mice that had been mildly stressed for weeks.

Han’s group used optogenetics to show the opposite effects in mice that had experienced extreme “social defeat” stress for days. When they made the VTA neurons fire phasically, resilient animals showed depression-like symptoms. When they silence those same neurons, the susceptible animals became resilient.

The two flavours of stress might be doing opposite things, but they’re both acting on the VTA, and their effects can both be reversed immediately. “It proves unambiguously the importance of the dopamine system to depression,” says Yadid. He suspects that our serotonin-boosting antidepressants work by indirectly affecting dopamine levels. And if that’s the case, then targeting dopamine circuits directly should produce stronger, faster effects.

“We see effects in the order of seconds or minutes,” says Tye. “That tells us that we are targeting the direct circuits that are immediately governing depression-related symptoms.” In both cases, it wasn’t just the VTA that mattered, but its connections to the nucleus accumbens (NA). Signals from the VTA control the release of dopamine in the NA, and that in turn affects depression-like behaviour.

“That’s the target right there,” says Tye. She hopes that controlling this circuit—either with drugs, or with electrical stimulation—could lead us to better ways of treating depression, which would work very quickly and carry few side effects. “At the moment, we don’t have drugs that target specific brain regions, but it’s not beyond imagining,” she says.

References: Tye, Mirzabekov, Warden, Ferenczi, Tsai, Finkelstein, kim, Adhikari, Thompson, Andalman, Gunaydin, Witten & Deisseroth. 2012. Dopamine neurons modulate neural encoding and expression of depression-related behaviour. Nature. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11740

Chaudhury,Walsh, Friedman, Juarez, Ku, Koo, Ferguson, Tsai, Pomeran, Christoffel, Nectow, Ekstrand, Domingo, Mazei-Robison, Mouzon, Lobo, Neve, Friedman., Russo, Deisseroth, Nestler & Han. 2012. Rapid regulation of depression-related behaviours by control of midbrain dopamine neurons. Nature http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1038/nature11713

Next week – most likely on Tuesday 18th December, but to be confirmed – Not Exactly Rocket Science will be moving to National Geographic, as part of a small and brand-new collective of science blogs called Phenomena.

Phenomena will include three of the most accomplished science writers working today: Carl Zimmer (The Loom), Brian Switek (Laelaps), and Virginia Hughes (starting a brand new blog, Only Human). I love these people and their work, and seeing this group come together behind the scenes has been like watching Nick Fury recruit the Avengers.

That’s just one of the reasons I’m excited about the move. National Geographic feels like a really good fit for this blog. They cover similar topics, and they have a wide reach, a strong international reputation, and a reputation for solid journalism. I’ve had many chats with Jamie Shreeve and others over there about their plans for the collective, and our values and ideas are very convergent.

From your perspective, not much will change. I will keep the same commitment to fun, engaging stories, and good, rigorous journalism. National Geographic will not exercise any editorial control over what I write about. And finally—and I’m sure many of you will be pleased about this—the blog will go back a wider design, and free commenting without any registration (although, as before, first-time commenters will join a moderation queue).

For the record, this move has been in the making for a couple of months, and isn’t a reaction to Discover’s redesign. Discover have been tremendously good to me during my tenure here, and it’s been a joy to blog alongside Phil, Sean, Carl, Razib, Sheril, Chris, Nikki, Val, and others. I’m very grateful to all of them, and to our former web overlord Amos Zeeberg, for their support.

I hope that those of you who have been with me right from the start, and those who’ve started reading this blog since my time at Discover, will follow me onward and upward to the Land of Yellow Rectangles. I’ll update you with the new URL and RSS feed for Not Exactly Rocket Science v4.0 next week.

In the meantime, everyone sing it with me: Der-der-der-DER-DER, der-der-der-DER-de-DER-de-de-DER BOOM BOOM.

A shorter version of this story appears at Nature News.

In August of this year, Allison Noles rushed her bulldog Bella Mae to the vet. The dog’s face looked like a pincushion, with some 500 spines protruding from her face, paws and body. The internet is littered with such pictures, of Bella Mae and other unfortunate dogs. To find them, just search for “porcupine quills”.

North American porcupines have around 30,000 quills on their backs. While it’s a myth that the quills can be shot out, they can certainly be rammed into the face of a would-be predator. Each one is tipped with microscopic backwards-facing barbs, which supposedly make it harder to pull the quills out once they’re stuck in. That explains why punctured pooches need trips to the vet to denude their faces.

But that’s not all the barbs do. Woo Kyung Cho from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that the barbs also make it easier for the quills to impale flesh in the first place. “This is the only system with this dual functionality, where a single feature—the barbs—both reduces penetration force and increases pull-out force,” says Jeffrey Karp, who led the study.

Karp has spent many years developing medical adhesives, and he constantly looks to nature for inspiration. In 2008, for example, his team developed a sticky tape based on the feet of a gecko. More recently, he started thinking about micro-needles—a recent invention that uses patches of tiny needles to painlessly penetrate the skin and, say, deliver vaccines. These patches aren’t inherently sticky, but if they were, they could provide an interesting and more stable alternative to mere tape.  And when it comes to sticky spines, what better animal to study than the porcupine?

Their quills are commonly used as jewellery by Native Americans, and they’re easily available. Cho ordered them off eBay in their hundreds. When they arrived, he painstakingly sanded their barbs off under a microscope. Each quill has hundreds of barbs and Cho removed them all with folded sandpaper, taking care not to reduce the quill’s own diameter.

By shoving both shaved and unshaved barbs into pig skin, Cho showed that the barbs halve the penetration force needed to impale the meat. The barbed quills also slide in with less force than a hypodermic needle of the same width, or than the quill of an African porcupine, which doesn’t have any barbs (see end of post). They also penetrate deeper with the same amount of force, and cause less tissue damage.

“This was quite surprising to us,” says Karp. He suspects that the barbs are acting like the serrated edges of a knife, concentrating forces at small points in the surrounding tissue. Think about how much easier it is to cut a tomato with a serrated blade than a flat one.

Cho also found that the barbs increase the force needed to remove the quill by four times. As the quills are pulled out, the barbs flare out and bend, snagging onto tissue fibres. When Cho created replica quills with barbs that couldn’t bend, they took less effort to remove.

Once the team had sussed out the quills’ secrets, they duplicated them by creating artificial versions—barbs and all—from a plastic polymer. These have all the same properties as the natural ones, and Karp sees many uses for them. For a start, they could be used as a replacement for surgical staples. “Staples typically need to penetrate into the tissue to great depth, and need to bend to grip onto the tissue,” says Karp. “The quills don’t need that to stick, and they could do a lot less tissue damage when removed.”

They could also be used for any device that stabs into flesh, from needles, to tissue tunnellers used in bypass operations, to the meshes used to repair hernias. “The more force you need to apply to them, the less tactile feedback you get,” says Karp. If a quill-inspired needle could be jabbed in more easily, surgeons might be able to place them more accurately.

Of course, you would then have to get those devices out again, and barbed porcupine quills would make that more difficult. So Karp’s team is now developing quills with degradable barbs, which could stick for a specified amount of time before being easily removed.

PS: So, why don’t African porcupines have barbs on their quills? “We’re not entirely sure although we have some assumptions,” says Karp. He wonders if African predators, like lions and leopards, are more aggressive than North American ones. Perhaps they’re more likely to run face-first into the spines? Alternatively, African porcupines are larger than North American ones, and have longer quills—maybe, that makes a difference.

Reference: Cho, Ankrum, Guo, Chester, Yang, Kashyap, Campbell, Wood, Rijal, Karnik, Langer & Karp. 2012. Microstructured barbs on the North American porcupine quill enable easy tissue penetration and difficult removal. PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1216441109

The fossilised insect of the larva of a lacewing. Around 1,200 species of lacewings still exist, and their larvae are voracious predators of aphids and other small bugs. They also attach bits of garbage to tangled bristles jutting from their backs, including plant fibres, bits of bark and leaf, algae and moss, snail shells, and even the corpses of their victims. Dressed as walking trash, the larvae camouflage themselves from predators like wasps or cannibalistic lacewings. And even if they are found, the coats of detritus act as physical shields.

We now know that this strategy is an ancient one, because the lacewing in De la Fuente’s amber nugget—which is 110 million years old—also used it. It’s barely a centimetre long, and has the same long legs, sickle-shaped jaws, and trash-carrying structures of modern lacewing larvae. But it took camouflage to even more elaborate extremes. Rather than simple bristles, it had a few dozen extremely long tubes, longer even than the larva’s own body. Each one has smaller trumpet-shaped fibres branching off from it, forming a large basket for carrying trash.

De la Fuente called it Hallucinochrysa diogenesi, a name that is both evocative and cheekily descriptive. The first part comes from the Latin “hallucinatus” and references “the bizarreness of the insect”. The second comes from Diogenes the Greek philosopher, whose name is associated with a disorder where people compulsively hoard trash.

Hallucinochrysa presumably carried trash for the same defensive advantages as its modern relatives. But why carry so much? De la Fuente speculates that it might have needed to defend itself against a predator with a very long, piercing snout or sting, as many bugs and wasps do. This hypothesis may not be correct, but there’s a lovely feel about it—after all, when Darwin saw an orchid with a long tube, he correctly predicted the existence of a moth with a long tongue that pollinated it.

At the very least, we know that Hallucinochrysa hoarded trash because the larva in the amber still has thick bundles of fern hairs trapped in its bristles. De la Fuente could even tell which group of ferns the hairs came from—it’s a group that specialises in colonising land that has been recently scorched by fire. This supports the idea that Spain’s Cretaceous forests were swept by seasonal fires. Ironically, those same fires would have stimulated the trees to produce more resin, which would have trapped many an insect in liquid tombs that eventually fossilised into amber.

Hallucinochrysa may have blended into the forest of its time, but its beautiful remains tell us a surprising amount about what those forests were like. And the forests, in turn, set up the perfect conditions for Hallucinochrysa’s body to endure to this day.

Note: This is one of two wonderful stories about prehistoric insect camouflage in as many weeks. For the other one, about a hangingfly that mimicked a tree, head over to Brian Switek’s blog.

Reference: De La Fuente, Delcios, Penalver, Speranza, Wierzchos, Ascaso & Engel. 2012. Early evolution and ecology of camouflage in insects. PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1213775110

Images: Reconstruction by J.A.Penas, and others from de la Fuente et al.

Perfect match of writer and topic: Carl Zimmer on the science of zombifying parasites, following a new special issue on the topic (also summarised by Kathryn Knight).

Hilarious, depressing take by Vaughan Bell on the finalised DSM-V – the new manual for psychiatry. Meanwhile, ex-chairman Allen Frances unleashes a scorching response

Amy Shira Teitel is fast becoming a go-to person for space news. Here’s her take on NASA’s Mars plans and on Mercury—the closest planet to the sun, and loaded with ice!

David Quammen meets the President. No not that one. The world’s 2nd biggest tree. Gorgeous

“The editors decided to make a historically accurate, real scorpion bomb.” By Adrienne Mayor

What happens when a man has an extra Y chromosome? Not that much—XYY people say more about our beliefs about men.

A bizarre koala viral outbreak gives us valuable lessons about our own evolution. Excellent stuff from Carl Zimmer.

Hilarious. A study of the brain regions most likely to get you published.

“I’m all for replicating, and reporting null results, but what about the bees?” Great piece from a very promising new-ish neuroscience blog – The Magnet is Always On.

Our black marble – check out our impact on the night

Wired’s best scientific Figures of 2012, chosen by Brandon Keim. Lovely idea. Beautiful images.

Cells are often drawn as dots floating inside a circle. These paintings capture the reality

It’s great that neurobollocks is being discussed but there’s also this straw man of “abandoning neuroscience” (used in the NYT piece linked from this post. Meanwhile, SciCurious discusses why neuroscience won’t get a Newton, and doesn’t need one.

Jonathan Eisen lists more scientific lapses from the NYT’s immortal jellyfish story. See also: Paul Raeburn’s critique that I linked to last week, and a comment from one of the original authors on the paper that started everything. To me, this story epitomises a lot of problems in science writing: a generalist writer seduced by one man’s spiel, science suffering as a result, and (in some of the reactions on Twitter) people *still* calling it a “good story” because it’s nicely written. Just… no.

John Hutchinson did a Reddit AMA about dinosaurs, frozen body parts, and his awesome dissection research. Worth a read

Okay, “dive a coral reef with a UV light” just shot to the top of my list of things to do before you die.

Gary Marcus piece on Noam Chomsky’s infuriating contributions to linguistics

This is lovely. Darwin’s Tangled Bank in Verse, by Michael Eisen

News/science/writing

A lovely thing involving bubble wrap and bus stops, and Robert Krulwich musing on the psychology of “occupied time”

Great Rebecca Rosen piece on the invention that our electronics age depends on: the clean room

Antiseptics Used To Prevent Health Care Infections Might Cause Them. Oops.

TED to TEDx organisers after a monumental failure of vetting: “It’s not your audience’s job to figure out if a speaker is offering legitimate science. It is your job.”

Report finds vast majority of UK research with monkeys produces scientific or medical benefits. And yet, this headline

The NYT says that bedbugs in libraries are a big problem. Except that’s not true and several sources were misinterpreted. And here’s Brooke Borel’s good take.

“Why I’m feeling so crabby about cancer conspiracy theories“, by Cath Ennis. The infantry battle line is golden.

Redder than red: scientists tweak eye pigment so it can detect reds that we cannot see.

What Ebola means for the great apes

Heart cells coaxed to divide and conquer

Okaaaay… this guy is suing the Nobel committee for awarding the Gurdon/Yamanaka prize; he says he got there first (PDF)

A company is selling tickets to the Moon at $750 million per seat.

What do bison and koalas have in common? Hint: it involves sex. And shouting.

Snake on a plane! Man smuggles Egyptian cobra on board; it bites him.

Thoughtful writing from medicine’s frontlines: “Being Sorry” by Shara Yurkiewicz

The (former) world’s oldest person died aged 116 this week. When she was born, Victoria I was queen, the US only had 45 states, X-rays had just been discovered, and the first modern Olympics had occurred.

Climate buffoon Lord Monckton banned for life by UN after pretending to be a Myanmar rep at the Doha talks.

The biosphere’s biggest ever change: evidence found for the origin of photosynthesis

Confronting the ‘sloppiness’ that pervades science, by Suzi Gage and Pete Etchells

Expert tours his own exome: “most detected genetic “variants of interest” are either not variants or not interesting”

Cancer Research UK invites volunteer citizen scientists to help analyse its data

Yassar Arafat and the Radioactive Cigarette – Deborah Blum on the radioactive secret inside tobacco smoke.

This BBC “binge-drinking gene” story is so poor it doesn’t even have a byline. Here’s a much better interpretation from Suzi Gage

New science writing competition for European scientists – an interesting move to restrict topic to 1 of 9 possible articles

“Good scientific theories are the closest things we humans can have to facts.” Great response to a silly Nicholas Wade op/ed

The toughest eggs in the world are laid by a wee shrimp

Prehistoric artists better at depicting the gaits of four-legged animals than some artists today

City birds lining nests with material from discarded cigarettes may help keep out parasitic mites.

Ever heard of a “meteotsunami“? It is, apparently, a thing.

The first dinosaur. Or not… Dave Hone on Nyasasaurus

Astronauts will spend a year in space testing effects on body and mind. I wonder if they’ll get along

A new study says being a good listener has a stronger effect on people’s influence ratings than being a good talker

Swimming robot reaches Australia from the US, becoming 1st thing in Australian waters that won’t kill you

Maths paper retracted because some of it makes “no sense mathematically”. Yeah, that’ll do it

Becoming Batman: What can a real human body take before injury occurs and how long till recovery?

€50 million project aims to produce 1,500 stem cell lines for drug discovery

Are nitpicking experts making Wikipedia harder to read?

“James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron IS James Cameron.” Here’s what his deep dive uncovered.

Black market fossil crackdown – US customs officials seize Tarbosaurus skull from Wyoming home

The folks behind Spaun, the most sophisticated brain simulation yet, did a Reddit AMA

Researchers ruffled by US plan to subject H5N1 bird flu studies to special review

Should you do a Masters in science writing to get into science writing?

“A remarkable study from 1938 where researchers hid under the beds of students to record their conversations.”

Spiders that live in cities tend to grow bigger, fatter

Stephen Curry gets irate about reporting screw-ups around some cool microscope images of DNA

An agency that matches jobs to the particular talents of autistic people

A new fish named after Obama

Pop-up self-assembling robotic honeybees.

WIN! SO MUCH WIN! All free schools in England must teach evolution – or lose funding

Jack Gilbert will take your sh*t. He craves it in fact. He wants it through the post.

Heh/wow/huh

Beautiful mini dioramas created by cutting tiny bird shapes out of feathers

The EU spent £80k on the abominable “Science: It’s a Girl Thing” vid. Bristol scientists made a funnier one for £7.66

MIT makes little tiny steampunk transformer

A steampunk ant, and some interesting discussions on tracing photos for art.

The top ways in which we injure our genitals. The physician’s notes are amazing.

“A functional ectopic vaginal anus: a rare clinical entity.”

Onion: “What we’ve discovered is that cancer cells are little pricks that think they’re the king of the f**king world”

Journalism/internet/society

A masterclass in science writing from Rebecca Skloot, Jad Abumrad & Mary Roach

Every bomb dropped on London during the Blitz

“Oil and troubled waters” – British universities’ links with repressive, anachronistic autocracies.

If you get nothing out of Twitter, maybe “your friends and associates are terrible and boring.”

A critique of Clay Shirky’s view on the Internet’s capacity to revolutionise education.

Amazing trip: reporter will walk from Africa to South America over 7 years, reporting as he goes.

30 words that journalists should stop using.

Tracking what major websites pay writers.

Science writing: ‘When a kid is excited about ideas, that feels good.’ Six great writers talk about the craft

Want to know what to get a writer for Christmas?

Lord Leveson copies out of Wikipedia. Brilliant

Moving, important piece on sexual assault: What Can’t Be Published

Sean Carroll leaves Discover & sets up his own indie blog (Cosmic Variance will still continue)

The highway robbery of prison phone rates

That breathless Guardian story about OED editor deleting foreign words? Not really true.

Other aquatic hunters strand themselves in a similar way, including bottlenose dolphins from South Carolina, which drive small fish onto beaches, and Argentinian killer whales, which swim onto beaches to snag resting sealions. The behaviour of the Tarn catfishes is so similar that Julien Cucherousset from Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse describes them as “freshwater killer whales”.

Alerted to the fishes’ behaviour by local fishermen, Cucherousset watched them from a bridge overlooking the island. Over the summer of 2011, he filmed 54 attacks, of which 28 percent were successful.

Catfish get their name for the long, sensitive whiskers (or ‘barbels’) on their upper jaws, and the Tarn fishes would erect theirs when they were hunting pigeons. This, combined with the fact that only moving pigeons were ever attacked, suggests that the fish are sensing the vibrations of birds that approached the water.

Chucherousset collected samples of the catfish, as well as the three animals that they eat—pigeons, crayfish, and smaller fish. All of these prey have different levels of carbon and nitrogen in their bodies, and Chucherousset used these to show that individual catfish varied in whether they hunted pigeons, and those that did ate fewer fish.

For the moment, this stands as an interesting example of unusual behaviour. Chucherousset doesn’t know why these particular catfish started stranding themselves to kill pigeons, or whether they particularly benefit from doing so.

The European catfish is an alien, introduced into the Tarn in 1983, and currently flourishing there. Is it possible that these invaders have eaten too many local fish and are forced to seek sustenance elsewhere? Does this explain why it seems to be the smaller catfish that go after pigeons? Or is it that the smaller individuals are less likely to be permanently stranded on shore, or expend less energy in wiggling back into the water? Why, essentially, is a bird in the mouth worth being a fish out of water?

Reference: Cucherousset, Bouletreau, Azemar, Compin, Guillaume & Santoul. 2012. ‘‘Freshwater Killer Whales’’: Beaching Behavior of an Alien Fish to Hunt Land Birds. PLOS ONE http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050840

Leeches and earthworms secrete cocoons of mucus and lay their eggs inside. After a few days, the mucus hardens into a hard protective capsule that’s remarkably resistant to changes in temperature and chemical attacks. These cocoons fossilise very well, and palaeontologists have found many made by prehistoric leeches, dating right back to the Triassic period when dinosaurs first appeared.

To Benjamin Bomfleur from the University of Kansas, these cocoons are a goldmine of information into the past. In one specimen, 200 million years old, he has found the remains of a microscopic soft-bodied creature that would normally be impossible to fossilise. In the leech’s cocoon, it found a way into the present.

It’s cocoon’s resident is a ciliate, one of a group of microscopic single-celled creatures found in water all over the world. The ciliates have a proud scientific heritage. The first one was seen in 1674 by Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, who peered at it with his hand-made microscopes. It was then named in 1767 by Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, who called it Vorticella.

Vorticella looks like an inverted bell that attaches to surfaces with a long stalk. The stalk can coil up to rapidly reel in the bell, which otherwise sits in the open sifting particles from water. In rare circumstances, it can break off its stalk and swim around freely. Van Leeuwenhoek described it as an “bell animalcule” and Bomfleur’s paper unhelpfully calls it a “bell-animal”. That name invites confusion—ciliates are protozoans and belong to a completely separate kingdom of life to animals.

We know that much, but also very little about how they evolved. Partly, that’s because ciliates are soft-bodied, with none of the hard components like bones and teeth that fossilise well. In this, they join the majority of life on this planet, whose frail bodies disappeared when they died, and left a huge gap in the fossil record. On the very rare occasions when scientists find ancient remains of such squishy life-forms, it’s because they fell into “conservation traps”—things like tree sap that rapidly entomb them before their cells decay.

A leech’s cocoon is one such trap. Bomfleur was looking at several such cocoons that had been collected in 2005, from a coal seam beneath an Antarctic mountain. They’re similar to those produced by the modern medicinal leech, but around 200 million years older.

And within the inner wall, Bomfleur found a microbe that “agrees in every observable detail with the living [ciliate] Vorticella.” It has the same bell-shaped body, the same coiled stalk, and the same big C-shaped nucleus. It’s hard to classify it exactly though, since many modern ciliates look like Vorticella. But it’s definitely a ciliate, and one of only a few that have been found in the fossil record. In the deep past, it anchored itself to the wall of a freshly deposited cocoon, and became trapped.

Bomfleur thinks that leech cocoons could be a valuable source of other soft-bodied prehistoric life. Indeed, other specimens have contained other single-celled creatures and a Cretaceous worm. They’re not as beautiful as a hunk of amber, but they’re no less valuable.

Reference: Bomfleur, Kerp, Taylor, Moestrup & Taylor. 2012. Triassic leech cocoon from Antarctica contains fossil bell animal. PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1218879109