Head, sides of the head, occiput, and hind-neck brilliant metallic golden green, the feathers of the occiput bright blue, narrowly edged with the golden green. Back shining velvety purple ; rump and upper tail-coverts, sooty black. Chin and throat bluish green with an oily gloss. Between the throat and
ear-coverts is a narrow line of fiery crimson, running down into the crimson patch on the upper breast. Feathers of the lower neck greenish purple, edged with crimson in a certain light, and followed by a broad semicircular patch of deep fiery crimson.

…and so on.

It’s better known as the splendid astrapia, a New Guinea bird known for flashy feathers and flashier courtship rituals, involving hopping from branch to branch and croaking like a frog. The males will sometimes do this in large groups, or “leks.”

You know. Leks parties. For birds.

The post Science Art: Astrapia Splendidissima, 1895 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

“The big story is in line with what’s told by archaeologists and historians,” says Erika Hagelberg, an ancient DNA expert at the University of Oslo who was not part of the research team. “It’s the small details of particular sites that are really compelling.” The Estonian site, for example, offers powerful evidence that the crew was a tight-knit group from the same village or town. “Four brothers buried together is new and unique … [and] adds a new dimension,” says Cat Jarman, an archaeologist working for the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, who was not part of the research team.

Over the course of almost 10 years, a team led by geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen assembled samples from across Scandinavia dating to the Viking Age, from about 750 C.E. to 1050 C.E., as well as some earlier and later samples. The team also gathered human remains from burials elsewhere in Europe and beyond that had Viking grave goods or burial styles. “We approached every place where we could see there should exist somehow an association with Vikings,” Willerslev says. Ultimately, the team was able to sequence 442 Viking Age genomes from as far afield as Italy, Ukraine, and the doomed Viking settlements of Greenland.

…

Viking-style graves excavated on the United Kingdom’s Orkney islands contained individuals with no Scandinavian DNA, whereas some people buried in Scandinavia had Irish and Scottish parents. And several individuals in Norway were buried as Vikings, but their genes identified them as Saami, an Indigenous group genetically closer to East Asians and Siberians than to Europeans. “These identities aren’t genetic or ethnic, they’re social,” Jarman says. “To have backup for that from DNA is powerful.”

The results also settle a centuries-old argument about the geography of raiding. Sagas written down centuries after the first expeditions suggest Vikings from certain regions favored specific destinations, but other scholars suggested the Viking command of the waves made them equal-opportunity raiders and traders.

…

The DNA has raised new questions, too. Study co-author and National Museum of Denmark archaeologist Jette Arneborg says DNA recovered from burials in Greenland shows a mix of Scandinavian men from what is now Norway and women from the British Isles. Yet the artifacts and burials look completely Scandinavian. The women “have British genes but we can’t see them in the archaeology,” she says. “The DNA is going to make us think more about what’s happening here.”

—
You can read more about the survey here, in Nature.

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“NASA realized the collaboration that a long-duration mission, like sending a team of humans to Mars, goes far beyond just the members of the crew on the spacecraft. The astronauts have to continue to collaborate with many people on Earth,” Carter said. “To do that effectively requires a large, collaborative—or ‘multiteam’—system.”

To conduct this study, [Michigan State management professor Dorothy R.] Carter and her team collaborated with research volunteers living and working inside NASA’s human exploration space analog, or HERA, capsule at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Participants in the Kesseler Team Leadership Laboratory at Michigan State University acted as Mission Control for the HERA ‘astronauts’ in real-time simulations with different degrees of communication delays. The team then ran the data collected through the simulations through a computer model to mimic a larger sample.

The Project FUSION research team identified “collective attention”—when multiple people from different disciplines focus their attention on the same issue at the same time—as the key mechanism for large, complex, multi-team organizations to solve problems effectively. Carter’s research, recently published in the journal Personnel Psychology, is the first study to directly position collective attention as the central link between communication delays and team performance.

…

Carter and her team are producing a set of countermeasure recommendations to help large, complex organizations such as NASA deal with disruptions in collective attention more effectively. They found that interventions that target someone’s experience level with a task (capacity), address message simplicity (clarity) and create a sense of shared leadership among team members (connectivity) can help preserve collective attention in situations with delayed communication.

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This is an ad for the Du Mont Type KC2515 CRT, a screen with a resolution of 0.0015 inches, as it appeared in the July/August 1966 issue of the Journal of the Society for Information Display, which I found on archive.org.

The post Science Art: Ever See This Before?, 1966. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

As the heat punishes sun-crisped Australian woodlands, the adult birds make a rapid, peeping “heat call”. That signal kicks off genetic changes in unhatched baby zebra finches’ brains, researchers report June 11 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The tune appears to give developing finches a physiology-bending forecast, giving them a leg up once they emerge into the broiling conditions on the other side of the eggshell.

…

But it was unknown how hearing a simple song could trigger these kinds of physical and behavioral changes in the young. [Behavioral ecologist Mylene] Mariette, of Deakin University in Waurn Ponds, Australia and Julia George, a neuroscientist at Clemson University in South Carolina wanted to know if the songs might initiate changes in the hypothalamus, a small region of the brain heavily involved in regulating metabolism and responses to heat.

The researchers raised developing zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) at a consistent temperature, but exposed about half to playback of an adults’ heat call and the other half to a different control call for a few days. The team removed the embryos from the eggs and euthanized them. They cut out a small sample of the hypothalamus and extracted the RNA from the tissue. RNA is the messenger that DNA sends to carry genetic information to the protein-making components of the cell. So, by comparing levels of different RNAs, the researchers can see how certain genes are ramped up or down in their production of proteins.

The team thought there would be changes in hormonal genes within the hypothalamus in response to the heat calls, says George. But instead of hormonal genes, the heat calls dampened genes that regulate the contraction and dilation of blood vessels in the brain. The researchers think this helps the chicks dissipate heat in their brains.

—
You can read more of the hypothalamus-transformation research here, in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

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Together, these traits make up the deepest and largest collection of whale fossils and falls found to date in the ocean.

“These findings reshape our understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep-sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time,” study author and marine biodiversity researcher Xikun Song said.

…

The whale graveyard was found during an expedition by the Chinese research vessel Tan Suo Yi Hao in March, 2023.

RV Tan Suo Yi Hao is often used for the Global Trench Exploration and Diving Program, a collaborative endeavour between China’s Institute of Deep Sea Science and Engineering (IDSSE) and several countries, including New Zealand.

…

A human-piloted submersible vehicle, Fendouzhe, capable of reaching depths of 11,000m, was used during the expedition to explore the zone.

These depths ranged from 4,200m to 7,002m, with the first fossils found in a geological feature called Dordrecht Deep.

…

Among the fossils was a skull fragment from an unknown species, which the new study named Pterocetus diamantinae.

Study author and palaeontologist Giovanni Bianucci, from the University of Pisa, said there was enough anatomical difference to distinguish the fossil from other species.

…

But [study author Dr. Xikun] Song said the high concentration of beaked-whale species among the fossils could also be behaviour-related.

“Deep-diving beaked whales exceeding 3,000m may reach physiological limits, increasing the risk of fatal exhaustion or decompression sickness,” Dr Song said.

The V-shaped topography of the Diamantina Zone may also have helped funnel carcasses to the sea floor.

[Institute of Deep Sea Science and Engineering geologist Dr. Peng] Zhou said the preservation of the fossils for so long could come down to a combination of factors.

The first reason was that the fossils were mostly beaked whale rostra (noses), which were hyper-dense and mineral-rich, making them resistant to degradation.

“Second, the sedimentation rate here is extremely low … third, over time, ferromanganese oxide coatings form a protective crust on the bones,” Dr Zhou said.

“[And] fourth, the deep-sea environment is cold and stable, so physical and chemical weathering are minimal.”

—
You can see video of submarines coasting over the whale necropolis here, on Nature Video.

The post Whale graveyard reveals unknown prehistoric species. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

The description from there reads:

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) took this photograph of the partial disc of the Sun just as it began to rise, creating a sheet of light across the horizon. Silhouetted clouds give the sense of a jumbled mountain range. Numerous individual layers of the atmosphere appear above the Sun from this perspective.
The photo was taken when the ISS was located over the coast of Vietnam. But as seen from about 400 kilometers (250 miles) above the surface of the Earth, the sunrise was actually rising over the Philippine Sea, far to the east of the Philippine archipelago.

Astronauts see sixteen sunrises every 24 hours. While it is never a good idea to look at the Sun directly without proper eye protection (either on Earth or from space), digital camera images such as this allow us the luxury of seeing this spectacle as the astronauts do.

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The new species, Jian changmaensis, belongs to a clade within the dromaeosaur family called microraptors. Microraptors tend to be small; the most well-known species is about the size of a crow. “Jian is one of the biggest microraptor specimens that has ever been found,” says [study author Jingmai] O’Connor [of the Field Museum in Chicago]. “The piece of its upper arm bone that we have is about 4 inches long, so the entire dinosaur probably had something like a four-foot wingspan, around the size of a barn owl.”

And while scientists only have Jian’s arm, they suspect that Jian, like its fellow microraptors, had long feathers on both its arms and its legs, giving it the appearance of having four “wings” that it used to glide. “Jian and the other microraptors probably weren’t capable of true, powered flight, but they could probably glide like a flying squirrel,” says O’Connor.

The new dinosaur’s name, Jian changmaensis, is a reference to its bird-like appearance and its place of origin. Jian is a winged creature in Chinese mythology, and the fossil was found in the Changma Basin in China’s Gansu province.

“Jian changmaensis reveals that non-avian dinosaurs lived in what is now the Changma Basin, an area famous for its fossil birds,” says Matt Lamanna, corresponding author of the study and Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Mary R. Dawson Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and senior dinosaur researcher. “Our team has recovered more than a hundred bird fossils at Changma, but only this single non-avian dinosaur specimen. Jian provides critical new insight into the biological history of the Changma region and the ecological context of the ancestors of today’s birds.”

—
You can read more about this prehistoric predator here, in Annals of Carnegie Museum (pdf).

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I found this in the public domain collections of the Paris Museums, specifically the Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris.

The post Science Art: Égouts de Paris, by Jules Ferat. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

The brain connects new and old information to make inferences through a cognitive process called integration. For example, if you have a memory of your friend wearing a bright green jacket, and you see a bright green jacket on a park bench, you might integrate your memory and the visual input to infer that your friend is at the park. This ability can be impaired in individuals with some mental-health conditions, such as anxiety disorders and psychosis.

The brain area called the hippocampus is essential for integration. Since it is also particularly vulnerable to stress, Lars Schwabe, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany, and his colleagues decided to test how acute stress would affect the brain’s ability to integrate information and make inferences.

…

On the experiment’s first day, 121 participants were asked to memorize a series of paired images, each containing one image of an animal and one image of either a face or a scene.

The next day, roughly half of the participants underwent a mock job interview that required them to defend their suitability for a hypothetical role and perform complex mental mathematics. Participants in the control group, meanwhile, were asked to give a speech about a topic of their choice and complete a simple mental maths task.

Afterwards, participants were presented with another series of paired images, with each pair containing a picture of an animal and of a 3D shape.

Then, the participants were shown, one by one, the 3D shapes that they’d seen previously alongside a collection of various faces and scenes. They were asked to select the face or scene most likely to be associated with each 3D shape.

For example, an individual might hypothetically have memorized a pair containing a cat and a forest scene on the first day and a pair with a cat and a blue cube on the second. If the person’s brain had successfully integrated the memories from the two separate days, then they should associate a blue cube with a forest scene.

—
You can read more of the memory-testing here, in Science Advances.

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