Not Exactly Rocket Science

Fire-chasing beetles sense infrared radiation from fires hundreds of kilometres away

Ed Yong — Sun, 27 May 2012 13:00:29 +0000

In the 1940s, visitors watching football games at Berkeley’s Californian Memorial Stadium would often be plagued by beetles. The insects swarmed their clothes and bit them on the necks and hands. The cause: cigarettes. The crowds smoked so heavily that a cloud of smoke hung over the stadium. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And where there’s fire, there are fire-chaser beetles.

While most animals flee from fires, fire-chaser beetles (Melanophila) head towards a blaze. They can only lay their eggs in freshly burnt trees, whose defences have been scorched away. Fire is such an essential part of the beetles’ life cycle that they’ll travel over 60 kilometres to find it. They’re not fussy about the source, either. Forest fires will obviously do, but so will industrial plants, kilns, burning oil barrels, vats of hot sugar syrup, and even cigarette-puffing sports fans.

The beetles find fire with a pair of pits below their middle pair of legs. Each is only as wide as a few human hairs, and consists of 70 dome-shaped sensors. They look a bit like insect eyes. In the 1960s, scientists showed that the sensors detect the infrared radiation given off by hot objects. Each one is filled ...

I’ve got your missing links right here (26 May 2012)

Ed Yong — Sat, 26 May 2012 16:00:43 +0000

Top picks

This is beautiful. Alexis Madrigal watches an eclipse by turning his fist into a pinhole camera, entrances passers-by

Must-read piece on the NSABB – the board that assessed the risk of those mutant flu papers – by Brendan Maher

Do Plants Smell Other Plants? This One Does, Then Strangles What It Smells. By Robert Krulwich. Love the diagrams!

The ultimate counterfeiter, who fancies himself an artist. A brilliant piece of narrative journalism by David Wolman.

For all the concern about Fukushima, did you know that tobacco smoke contains radioactive polonium? The tobcco industry did.

Deathtraps so beautiful you could cry (and I did). Jennifer Frazer on glow worms.

I love this piece so much. 10 science concepts that would make awesome supervillains

The CIA’s fake vaccination campaign to get bin Laden: still undermining state relations, polio eradication

Human water use on land accounts for 42% of sea level rise between 1961 and 2003; climate change, the rest.

Report about questionable research practices practises questionable research practices

Cancer risk from Fukushima radiation is very low but the mental health risks are high. “I’ve never seen PTSD questionnaires like this.” Essential reporting from Geoff Brumfiel

How One Flawed Study Spawned ...

Neurons transplanted into mouse spines reverse chronic pain

Ed Yong — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:10:35 +0000

Several neural diseases, including chronic pain and epilepsy, involve a lack of restraint. That is, damage to nerves in the spine reduces the levels of a signalling chemical called GABA, which silences excitable neurons. The result: too much neural activity.

There are drugs that can restore GABA, but they don’t always work, they are only temporary and they have unwanted side effects like sedation. There is another option: transplant GABA-producing neurons directly into the spine. Scientists have now done this in mice, with successful results.

I covered the story for The Scientist. Check it out.

Photo by Nanny Snowflake

Virtual resurrection shows that early four-legged animal couldn’t walk very well

Ed Yong — Wed, 23 May 2012 18:00:38 +0000

In a small office north of London, Stephanie Pierce from the Royal Veterinary College is watching a movement that hasn’t been seen for 360 million years. On her computer, she has resurrected the long-extinct Ichthyostega – one of the earliest four-legged animals to creep about on land. By recreating this iconic beast as a virtual skeleton, Pierce has shown that while it looked like a giant salamander, it couldn’t possibly have walked like one. It had some of the planet’s earliest bony legs, but they weren’t very good at taking steps.

Ichthyostega hails from the Devonian period, a time in Earth’s history when swimming transformed into walking. Fish invaded the land and evolved into the first tetrapods—four-limbed animals that include amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Muscular fins used for steering and balance evolved into legs for walking.

Since its discovery over 50 years ago, Ichthyostega has been an icon of this pivotal transition. Some 300 specimens have been found but many are incomplete, flattened or distorted. Pierce’s new model provides the best look yet at the animal’s skeleton. “It makes Ichthyostega a bit more tangible,” she says. “It’s not ...

New sense organ helps giant whales to coordinate the world’s biggest mouthfuls

Ed Yong — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:00:03 +0000

The world’s largest animals have been hiding something. The bodies of the giant rorqual whales—including the blue, fin and humpback—have been regularly displayed in museums, filmed by documentary makers, and harpooned by hunters. Despite this attention, no one noticed the volleyball-sized sense organ at the tips of their lower jaws. Nicholas Pyenson from the Smithsonian Institution is the first, and he thinks that the whales use this structure to coordinate the planet’s biggest mouthfuls.

The rorquals sieve tiny prey from the water with a unique hunting technique called lunge feeding. They surge forwards, open their mouths and swallow everything in front of them. This seemingly simple tactic is one of the most extreme in the animal kingdom. In one move, a lunging fin whale can engulf a volume of water that’s bigger than its own body. Its bigger cousin – the blue whale – can swallow half a million calories in one gulp.

Here’s what happens in slow-motion prose. A hunting rorqual detects the movements of their prey with pressure-sensitive whiskers on the underside. It accelerates to high speed and opens its mouth to almost a right angle. The ...

Here’s where all the magic happens

Ed Yong — Wed, 23 May 2012 14:11:11 +0000

And by magic, I mean mixed metaphors, endless hours on Twitter, and tears.

The Open Notebook has a series called Natural Habitat, which looks at the space in which science writers work. I, perhaps foolishly, agreed to take part in it. You can find the resulting video and photos here, featuring the local pub, treelancing (TM), and a cuddly giant squid.

Blind mice regain sight after scientists persuade their optic nerves to grow

Ed Yong — Mon, 21 May 2012 19:00:41 +0000

A mouse optic nerve with new axons (in red) running all the way along it.

A blind man sees his fiancée’s smile for the first time. Another walks around at night, navigating via streetlamps and headlights. Yet another reads his own name (and spots a typo). All three had lost their sight years before, as an inherited disorder destroyed the light-sensing cells of their retinas. But they had since been fitted with retinal implants that took over from the broken cells, sensing incoming light, and converting it into electrical impulses delivered to the brain. The devices are a long way from 20/20 vision, but they have nonetheless restored sight to those who had lived without it for years.

These retinal implants seem miraculous, but they have a major drawback: they rely upon a working optic nerve. This is the main communication line between the eye and the brain. If it’s damaged, no amount of retinal techno-wizardry will help. And that’s bad news for people with glaucoma, the world’s second leading cause of blindness, which wrecks the optic nerve.

But even for those people, there is hope. Silmara de Lima ...

I’ve got your missing links right here (19 May 2012)

Ed Yong — Sat, 19 May 2012 16:00:52 +0000

Top picks

Manta rays depend on forests. Carl Zimmer on top form.

The evidence for precognition was staring us in the face all along. Hilarious satire of psychology’s problems.

How a professor who fooled Wikipedia got caught by Reddit – implications for ”truth” online. Great story by Yoni Applebaum.

Not allowed to have a small heart: great long read from Greg Downey on Tourette Syndrome

Living photography. This is as cool as it sounds

Committee assesses ethics of trial, in which kids would get an anthrax vaccine unlikely to ever be necessary. But Project “Dark Zephyr”?? Are you kidding me? With a straight face? What about Project “Shadow Mistral”. Or “Hot Air”

My BBC column “Will we ever….?” now has guest stars. First up: John Pavlus on the Turing test.

Helen Pearson talks to The Open Notebook about her seriously good profile of protein-resurrector Joe Thornton

Doctors ‘rewire’ hands of paralysed man. Great story by Ian Sample

This tiny sphere is all the world’s water. (And as usual, America is hoarding it ;-p)

“Not all neurons are exactly alike. The brain contains multitudes.” – a new series on neurons by Ferris Jabr, which continues, with a look into the

Meet the paralysed woman who commandeered a robotic arm

Ed Yong — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:00:29 +0000

Cathy Hutchinson has been trapped in her frozen body for 14 years, after a stroke disconnected her brain from her spinal column. Recently, however, she commanded a robot arm to bring a thermos of coffee to her lips. This story has been all over the news, but for the ultimate telling of the tale, you need to read Jessica Benko’s amazing story over at The Atavist.

I reviewed it for Download the Universe – a review site for science e-books, where a bunch of us writer types are having tremendous fun writing about writing for the sheer joy of it. A sample of the review follows to whet your appetite. Go buy the e-book. You can thank me later. And do read the review too.

Throughout the history of neuroscience, we have gained an inordinate amount of knowledge by studying people with severe brain damage, and watching how they manage to live. HM’s surgically altered brain revealed secrets about how memories are formed – after his death, he was revealed to be an American man called Henry Molaison. KC, a Canadian man whose real name is still unknown, also taught us much about how memory works, following ...

Deep-sea bacteria redefine life in the slow lane

Ed Yong — Thu, 17 May 2012 18:05:45 +0000

Your laziest days are positively frenetic compared to the lifestyle of some deep-sea bacteria, buried in the sediments of the Pacific Ocean. These microbes are pushing a slow-going lifestyle to an extreme. They subsist on vanishingly low levels of oxygen, in sediments that have not received any new food sources since the time of the dinosaurs. And yes, they survive.

Not only that, but these microbes could make up 90 per cent of those on the planet. “We’re looking at the most common forms of life on this planet, and we know almost nothing about them,” said Hans Røy, who has been studying them for many years. Now, Røy has finally measured just how slow their metabolism really is.

I’ve written about this discovery for The Scientist, so head over there for the full story.

Image by Shelly Carpenter, NOAA Ocean Explorer