Nautilus
Today, Apr 10
ASTRONOMY
Light and sound waves from stars help astronomers chart stars' history more accurately. A new survey of 1,000 stars combines stars’ dimensions with information about their metal content and effective temperatures. Part of the Strömgren Survey for Asteroseismoloy and Galactic Archaeology, these 1,000 stars are the first images taken from the Kepler telescope data to be dated in this way. Arxiv
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Tracing our Sun's origin through the history of our galaxy.
MEDICINE
Parkinson’s Disease, which is marked by a deterioration in cognitive ability over time, commonly has symptoms like tremors and forgetfulness. A group of Parkinson’s sufferers given a set of Google Glass (which function much like a wearable, hands-free smartphone) said they thought the devices could help them retain some independence. The glasses displayed discreet reminders, like when to take medication, or to swallow instead of drooling, providing a less invasive care management system. YouTube
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Wearable technology could be the future of medicine, and human interaction.
ASTRONOMY
The European Space Organization’s Very Large Telescope captured this photo of a planetary nebula, Abell 33, at a fortuitous moment. The nebula is a glowing gas cloud that surrounds a small star (much like our Sun) that is on its way to becoming a white dwarf. Abell 33’s nebula is unusually circular: The star at the edge of the nebula is HD83535, giving the nebula the appearance of a diamond ring even though HD83535 is actually millions of light years in the foreground between Abell 33 and Earth. ESO Gems|ESO Images
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Astronomy depends on having just the right amount of light.
Yesterday, Apr 9
ECOLOGY
Nature reserves on the Crimean coast and the Ukraine and Crimea border are home to various endemic and endangered species of flora and fauna. But as political tensions rise and Crimea’s status as a part of Ukraine becomes more uncertain, so does the preservation of its wildlife. Russia and Ukraine use different standards to determine which species are on the “red” or endangered lists, meaning their management could change dramatically if Crimea were to separate from Ukraine. Nature
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When man and nature collide, hybrid ecologies can be born.
ENVIRONMENT
Each day, new objects are spotted floating in the Indian Ocean, but not one has turned out to be a piece of debris from missing Malaysian airlines plane Flight 370. Inadvertently, the search for the plane appears to be turning people’s attention to the garbage throughout our oceans, some of which collects together because of the current and forms “patches.” The Indian Ocean’s patch gathers on a current known as the Indian Ocean gyre, but very little is known about how big or precisely where it can be found. National Geographic
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Oceanographer Sylvia Earle tells Nautilus what "waste" means in oceanography.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
The Old Italian violins made by renowned 17th and 18th century makers, such as Stradivari or Guarneri “del Gesu,” are supposedly superior to all new violins. In a blind test of six new and six Old Italian violins, ten renowned violin soloists had an hour to play and choose their favorite instrument. Six chose a new violin as the best, illustrating how music can be influenced by cultural perceptions. PNAS
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There may be little point in putting our faith in past precedence—everything changes eventually.
ARCHAEOLOGY
A copper awl discovered in the southeastern Mediterranean coast suggests that the Copper Age arrived there as early as 7,000 years ago. Archaeologists discovered the elongated metal pin at a burial site in Tel Tsaf in the central Jordan Valley in Israel. The artifact predates all known metals in the region by several centuries, indicating that metallurgy probably spread to the region through trade with southeast Europe far earlier than thought. PLOS One
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The search for mankind's mark on Earth is on.
April 8
ORNITHOLOGY
Bar-headed geese are the highest-flying birds in the world, soaring across the Himalayas at up to 23,917 feet as part of their annual migration. Geese were made to run on a treadmill while the oxygen level in the air was reduced to test how well the geese ran with a greatly reduced oxygen supply. The geese were able to keep running at their top speed with only 7% oxygen, far below the 21% oxygen level that we breathe at sea level. YouTube
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Following the Northern Bald Ibis as it makes its own migration over the Alps.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
When playing slot machines, players tend to attach undue importance to so-called “near misses,” like when two in a row of three symbols are the same—a loss that is spatially close to the jackpot. By comparing both healthy people and those with various brain injuries, researchers found that people with damage to the insula area of the brain were unique in the desire to stop playing after a near miss. Reducing the insula’s function could be a key to treating problem gambling. PNAS
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The world is your casino, but bettors beware—the house always wins.
NANOTECHNOLOGY
Bladder cancer cells make too much of a protein called EGFR, which drives uncontrolled cell division and acts as a biomarker for the cancer cells. Scientists made gold nanoparticles that attach to proteins targeting EGFR. Next, they heated the gold with a laser, which destroyed EGFR and decreased the number of cancer cells in 13 mice. Science Codex
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Nanotechnology is helping us straight to the site of disease.
ANTHROPOLOGY
Ancient grains discovered in present-day Kazakhstan place the earliest interaction between traders from southwest Asia and ancient China at nearly 5,000 years ago. Archaeologists excavating campsites of Bronze Age nomads found domesticated crops like bread wheat, from southwest Asia, and broomcorn millet, from China, intermingled in central Eurasia by 2700-2500 B.C. Previously, archaeologists believed the crops didn’t come into contact until a couple thousand years later. Washington University in St Louis
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From ancient to modern trade: How shipping containers made the world a smaller place.
April 7
HEALTH
Telomeres, structures at the ends of chromosomes that protect cells from damage, are influenced by social disparity, according to a new report. In a study including 40 boys, researchers found that boys from disadvantaged backgrounds—like those whose mothers never graduated high school, for example—had 19% shorter telomeres compared to boys who came from more advantaged families. Shorter telomeres have been linked with cell damage and higher instances of chronic disease. PNAS
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The human body has changed over time as we respond to our environment.
ENGINEERING
NASA will release more than 1,000 software codes to the public as part of a free online software catalogue. The technologies featured in the catalogue range from project management systems to life support designs, and aeronautics to robot and autonomous systems, representing NASA’s best solutions to a wide array of complex mission requirements. When the catalogue goes online Thursday 10th April, it will be found here. NASA|NASA Technology
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Do we have any technology that could transport us to the stars?
ENGINEERING
Fifty years ago today, IBM unveiled its first mainframe computer: the System/360. It cost IBM more than $5 billion, which at the time was equivalent to two years' profit for the company—but the gamble paid off. Then-IBM chairman Thomas J Watson Jr said, "System/360 represents a sharp departure from concepts of the past in designing and building computers...This is the beginning of a new generation—not only of computers—but of their application in business, science and government." IBM
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As mainframes become smaller and more powerful, so do they become cleaner.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Cereal boxes are specially designed so that the mascot makes eye contact with the consumer. In a study of 65 cereals and 86 mascots, researchers found that while all mascots stared at a focal point four feet away, kids’ mascots’ eyes looked down at a 9.6 degree angle—perfect for making eye contact with a small child—and adults’ mascots looked straight ahead. The strategy works: Consumers were 16% more likely to trust a cereal brand when its mascot made eye contact.Cornell
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A boy's irresistible urge for Kellogg's brand cereal changes his life forever.
ENVIRONMENT
By 2017, half the world population is expected to be online, and by 2020, Internet users’ electricity demand will increase by 60% from current levels. In a new report from Greenpeace, 19 global IT companies and their data centers were ranked according to how clean their electricity was. The lowest was eBay, which uses 6% clean energy, while Apple was the greenest, with 100% of its electricity coming from renewable sources. Greenpeace
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Find out how Facebook is cleaning up its energy consumption, with Nautilus.
April 6
VISUAL ART
Corals and sponges aren’t thought of as dynamic creatures, but in this time-lapse clip from photographer Daniel Stoupin, they come to life. Stoupin took more than 150,000 extremely close-up shots of different corals and sponges found along the Great Barrier Reef. This kind of macrophotography has a very shallow depth of field, so to create shots that were fully in focus Stoupin layered 3-12 shots together, merging the different areas of focus to create a composite image. Vimeo
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How to photograph time, through time.
LINGUISTICS
Queen’s University professor Gregory Toner is to spend the next five years scouring through old Irish texts, from poems to letters, searching for lost words to add to a new Old Irish dictionary. The Dictionary of the Irish Language concerns itself with words from the 7th and 17th century, and is freely available online. Surprisingly, Toner has already found translations for the modern words, “alcohol-free,” “pampering,” and “trap,” enriching our understanding of this unique language. Irish Dictionary|Irish News
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In modern language, ultra-preserved words can reveal how our ancestors may once have spoken.
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
One of many overlooked women in science, 17th-century German entomologist Sibylla Merian changed the way we think about butterflies. In 1699 she traveled to Dutch Guiana (now Surinam) to document butterflies—a subject she became interested when South American specimens started arriving in Germany for the first time. Her opus, Metamorphosis Insectorium Surinamensiu, published in 1705, features 60 beautiful copperplate engravings, some of which can be viewed here. Brainpickings.org
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Speak, butterfly: How butterflies wove art and science together for Vladimir Nabokov.
COSMOLOGY
“The ‘bang’ in people’s mind is the idea that there had to be a beginning,” says theoretical physicist Gabriele Veneziano, “But we don’t know, really, what preceded inflation.” When people think about cosmic inflation, apparently confirmed by the discovery of gravitational waves by BICEP2, they think of it occurring after a defined beginning of time. In this interview with George Musser, Veneziano explains why gravitational waves offer a glimpse of the universe before the big bang. Scientific American
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Alan Guth, one of the first proponents of cosmic inflation theory, talks initial conditions with Nautilus.
April 5
GENETICS
In 1936, General Francisco Franco led a fascist military coup against the democratic Spanish Republic, and Spain erupted in civil war. During and after the conflict, Franco’s forces killed some 120,000 people, burying them in mass graves along roadsides and fields across Spain. Now, forensic scientists with the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory are beginning to recover victims’ bodies, analyzing their bones in order to confirm their identities and return them to relatives. Narrative.ly
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DNA testing is putting faces on the missing victims of the Bosnian War.
ENTOMOLOGY
Bearing more than a passing resemblance to their famous fossil namesake’s, trilobite beetles are a diverse group of beetles found throughout Southeast Asia and India. The female of the species has a brightly colored long, armored body, while the male is relatively tiny (5 mm to the female’s 6 cm) and nondescript. In fact, the males look so similar to each other, that trilobite beetles are hard to classify without using genetic testing. Scientific American
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Peter Ward talks to Nautilus about a "living fossil": the nautilus, our namesake.
ART
Sebastian Currier, artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies, composed “Deep-Sky Objects,” a cycle of songs for soprano, ensemble and electronics, bringing music and astrophysics together. Set in the distant future, the cycle features two lovers’ longing for each other, though entire galaxies separate them. Recently performed by the Argento Ensemble, Currier joins the Ensemble’s director for a conversation about the cycle, and about “spectral music”, in this video. IAS
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Science and art collide: Challenging our understanding of separation, and what it means to be home.
EPIDEMIOLOGY
Prion disease is caused by the misfolded protein PrP, or prion, which infects a healthy body, converting normal proteins into toxic prions, causing tissue damage and cell death. Mice that had been bred with bank vole PrP instead of mouse PrP were exposed to eight different species’ toxic prions and all eight caused the disease. Usually, prion disease is spread within one species and not species to species, but bank voles are an exception. PLOS One
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Why do creatures evolve with seemingly useless or potentially life-threatening traits?
April 4
NEUROLOGY
A protein called PCAF triggers genes that regenerate 65% of damaged nerves after spinal cord injury in mice, opening the door to new therapies for spinal cord injury. Mice were injected with a virus carrying PCAF, which normally turns "on" regeneration genes only in the peripheral nervous system (nerves outside the brain and spinal cord). However, when virally-driven, PCAF triggered nerve regrowth in the injured spinal cord, despite the fact that the central nervous system doesn't normally regenerate after nerve damage. Nature Communications
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For people with permanent nerve damage, brain-computer interfaces could help restore functionality using robots.
ASTRONOMY
Nicknamed “El Gordo,” or “The Fat One,” galaxy cluster ACT-CLJ0102-4915 is far more massive than first thought, clocking in at about 3 million billion times the mass of our sun. Using images collected by the Hubble telescope, astronomers measured the warping effect of El Gordo’s gravity on the stars they could see beyond the cluster. This allowed them to determine its mass, confirming that El Gordo is the most massive known galaxy cluster. Arxiv
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What can two galaxies merging reveal about our Universe, and our future?
ECOLOGY
Wild Pacific salmon life cycles negatively impact marine birds’ nesting habits in the North Pacific Ocean off the coast of Alaska, as both compete for the same food resources. The salmon live for two years and tend to mature on odd-numbered years, leading to an influx in adult salmon every odd year. Conversely, the birds produce fewer eggs at later dates as the salmon population booms, but in even-numbered years when there is less adult salmon, the birds have up to 15% higher breeding success. PNAS
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Clash of the tiny: Squirrels and the turf war for L.A.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
A survey of 456 homeless people living in shelters and hostels in London has revealed that a much higher percentage of them are problem gamblers than the U.K. gambling population as a whole. Homeless people were asked a series of questions about their gambling, rating each response on a scale of 0 to 4 points, with a score higher than 8 signifying problem gambling. The British Gambling Prevalence Survey says 0.7% of gamblers in the UK have a problem, while for the homeless it is 11.6%. Journal of Gambling Studies
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Why do we keep playing the lottery even if we know the odds aren't in our favor?
April 3
BIOENGINEERING
Tissue engineers have designed a “mini-heart” out of a cuff made from cardiac muscle cells that helps return blood to the heart when veins fail. Normally, blood makes the return trip from the legs to the heart through skeletal muscle contractions in the calves, which squeeze the blood upward, and valves in veins, which prevent the blood from flowing back down. Wrapped around a damaged vein segment in a leg, the mini-pump is designed to push blood upward with each throb. JCPT|YouTube
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Engineering the human body has been our forte for millennia.
PALEONTOLOGY
Several bones, including tooth bones, of a saber tooth cat were discovered in a German coalmine at the same depth as human spears had previously been found. Both finds come from the same layer of ground, which would have been exposed to the elements 300,000 years ago. The find shows that early hominids and saber tooth cats must have competed for food and territory, revealing more about how homo sapiens’ ancestor lived in Paleolithic Europe. Phys.org
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If we want to understand how early humans lived, we need to let go of our preconceptions.
PALEONTOLOGY
The preserved footprints of a carnivorous theropod dinosaur chasing a herbivorous sauropod have been digitally reconstructed in 3-D. Known as the Paluxy River tracks, the 45 meter-long trail of prints were excavated in 1940 in Texas, but some portions no longer remain. To reconstruct the site researchers scanned 17 photos of the site, developed a digital model, and compared it to maps drawn by the original excavators, creating an three dimensional representation that can be seen, here. PLOS One
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Theropods like T.Rex may not look much like a bird's ancestor, but their feathers tell a different story.
ENVIRONMENT
The Baltic Sea is one of the largest oxygen-starved, or hypoxic, areas in the world. Researchers analyzed the amount of oxygen in the water and the changing level of salt over time to reconstruct the different oxygen levels over the last 115 years. In that time, there has been a tenfold increase in the level of oxygen deprivation, which mirrors the rising temperatures as warm water carries less oxygen. PNAS
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Despite its salinity, the Dead Sea is teeming with microbial life.
April 2
ANTHROPOLOGY
When he was just a child, Pha Le’s father made the decision to escape from a life of persecution in Communist Vietnam. In exchange for agreeing to pilot a boat out of Vietnam, Le’s father got passage for only three people, forcing him to leave Le’s two younger brothers behind with a promise to send for them. In this audio recording, Le recounts his family’s escape and how deliverance can come in many different forms. The Moth
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One woman's deliverance comes in a form that goes against her religion, family, and life experience.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Humans often tell “white” lies or bend the truth to help themselves or others in their group. Sixty volunteers were given oxytocin, a hormone associated with social interaction, and then asked to toss a coin, with one outcome ending in financial reward. When on oxytocin, volunteers would lie about the coin toss more if it benefited the group, but not if it only benefitted themselves, demonstrating that oxytocin may shift an individuals’ interests to the group’s, even in the face of moral convention. PNAS
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Is it possible for something to be neither true or false?
MARINE SCIENCE
Squid control their body’s shine using a skin element called structural iridophores, which are highly reflective pigment cells. This skin element is partly controlled by something called the stelate ganglion, which is a collection of nerve endings outside the brain that help the squid react to its environment. If the wiring between the stellate ganglion and the brain is cut, the iridophores become transparent, dulling the squid’s iridescent skin. Journal of Experimental Biology
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We now know how squid shine, but how do they see?
ECOLOGY
Roe deer in the Champagne region of France have given birth at the same time each year for 27 years, despite warming climates. Spring now comes about two weeks before it did in 1985, but fawns are still born at the same time as they were back then. Researchers find that fawn survival rates are falling, and they suspect it might be because the fawns have less food during the briefer springtime, leading them to be undernourished. PLOS Biology
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Is there such a thing as hybrid ecologies, where man's industry and nature can intersect?
April 1
PSYCHOLOGY
Researchers asked a group of congenitally blind people, people who had gone blind later in life, and sighted people wearing a blindfold to say aloud the numbers one to ten. At the same time, they had to move their head, left and right, depending on how they saw the number order. People with visual experience all counted from left to right, while congenitally blind people went the opposite way, demonstrating that our tendency to visualize numbers from left to right is socially learned. Behavioral Brain Research
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Losing his sight, a scientist illuminates the path to a cure for a deadly disease.
ENVIRONMENT
Phytomining consists of growing certain kinds of plants on metal-rich soil, like old minefields, allowing them to absorb metal through their roots and concentrate it in their leaves. They can then be harvested and burned, and their ashes processed in a smelter to collect the metal. About 400 known “hyperaccumulators”—plants that absorb metals like nickel and gold—exist, with the most efficient being yellow alyssums, which can become 9% metal through absorption. New Scientist
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Nearly everyone and everything is partially made of discarded atomic elements.
ASTROPHYSICS
Earlier this month, the BICEP telescope at the South Pole detected what appeared to be gravitational waves left over from the Big Bang. Scientists kept BICEP at 4 kelvin (-452.47 F) by pouring liquid helium into the telescope’s casing, making the detectors sensitive to tiny amounts of energy. In this interview, electrical engineer Steffen Richter, the man who keeps BICEP cold, explains what life is like at the South Pole, and why the aurora makes the isolation all worth while. Science
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Alan Guth, who first proposed the theory of cosmic inflation, and Sean Carroll talk time for Nautilus.
BIOENGINEERING
Researchers at Duke University are testing a new bioengineered muscle by inserting it into a chamber with a glass “window” placed on the backs of living mice. The glass chamber provides the researchers with a window to check the muscle’s progress in the mice. The muscle’s fibers are genetically modified to produce fluorescent flashes during calcium spikes, which cause the muscle to contract and which will become brighter as the muscle grows stronger. PNAS
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Without a direct window, we have to use other creative strategies to monitor complex biological processes.
March 31
PSYCHOLOGY
Researchers photographed 230 people and mapped their facial muscles as they responded to verbal cues, such as, “You have unexpected good news. Most people expressed each emotion in the same way, with facial expressions interpreted to mean, for example, “happily surprised,” for 93% of the time. By plotting each emotion’s features into a computer program, researchers can use this tool to analyze the relationship between visible emotional responses and brain function. PNAS
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Understanding and displaying human emotion, on the machine level.
ENTOMOLOGY
Six new Dracula ant species have been identified in Madagascar using a novel technique that compares the ants’ behavior instead of their anatomy. Dracula ant species are very difficult to identify: Some species have queens that are smaller than workers, or large individuals that look like workers, but behave like queens. A queen in one species can look almost indistinguishable from a worker from another species; often confounding researchers’ attempts to catalogue them by looks alone. ZooKeys
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Meet the fire ant: traveler extraordinaire.
LITERATURE
In the Harvard rare book collection, there is a small French philosophical volume, “Des destinées de l’ame,” by essayist Arsène Houssaye. Houssaye gave the volume to a friend, Dr Boulard, in the 1880s, which Boulard had rebound in human skin because, according to a note included in the book, “a book on the human soul merited that it was given human skin.” Harvard’s collection contains three books bound in skin, a technique known as anthropodermic bibliopegy. The Crimson
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What it means to be human is defined by the metaphors we use to describe our world.
CHEMISTRY
Arranged in a sequential spiral, this beautiful rendering of the periodic table as it was in 1949 attempts to use art to explain the chemical similarities between elements. Elements are arranged in order of number of electrons, from the simplest – Hydrogen – at the center to the most complex – the as yet unknown Rutherfordium (atomic number 104). Elements that behave in similar ways are grouped together and colored with different shades of the same color. LIFE
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Some elements we take for granted, like carbon, are actually made of waste.
March 30
EXPLORATION
When Commander Chris Hadfield embarked on his first space shuttle flight, the odds of catastrophic disaster were one in 38. “You realize by the end of the day you’re either going to be floating effortlessly, gloriously in space,” he told the audience at TED2014 this month, “or you’ll be dead.” Watch his TED talk to learn how he kept calm when he went blind during a spacewalk—and to hear him perform 'Space Oddity'by David Bowie. TED
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Alexander Kumar describes the feeling of coming home from the deep emptiness of space.
LITERATURE
“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” This sentence, from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of ten great sentences from English language literature chosen by The American Scholar. It captures the great uncertainty of the creative process, the moment where the artist attempts to make sense of their world and to understand what the world means to those around them. American Scholar
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If we are to truly discover our world, we must come to terms with uncertainty.
EVENT | APR 14
The distance between Mars and the Earth shrinks by about 300 km every minute as the planets orbit’s align at their closest point,, reaching a peak minimum distance of 92 million km between the planets on April 14th. At this position known as an “opposition of Mars,” Mars and the sun sit directly opposite one another on either side of the Earth. April 14th is also a full lunar eclipse, so if it is a clear night both the moon and Mars should be visible red bodies in the sky. Phys.org
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An astronomer explains why we need to fall back in love with the dark.
GENETICS
Since 1948, the residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, have been subject to the longest running cardiovascular study ever: the Framingham Heart Study. Now in its third generation of participants, the study offers unique insights into the effect of modern medicine and lifestyle on the changing trends in physical health and lifespan. In a lecture at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns uses this data to explore how natural selection shapes contemporary man. Harvard
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As we learn more about our universe, our view of ourselves and our future is changing, too.
March 29
BIOCHEMISTRY
Non-profit paleontology organization PaleoQuest has teamed up with Lost Rhino Brewing Company to create Bone Dusters Paleo Ale: a beer brewed with yeast from fossil whale bones. Brewers collected the yeast (a subspecies of modern brewer’s yeast) from samples of a 14 million year old whale skull, which was a member of the Protocetidae family of ancient cetaceans. The first 650-gallon batch will soon be on sale at the Lost Rhino Brewing Company’s taproom in Virginia. Scientific American
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Beer could be the secret to human civilization.
MEDICINE
In the 1850s, Florence Nightingale drew one of the most famous medical data visualizations of all time, demonstrating that in the Crimean War (1853-56), more British soldiers died of poor sanitation than in combat. Her visualization demonstrated the value of improving hospital hygiene, her life’s great work. It is now on display as part of the British Library in London’s new exhibition, Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight. British Library
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For preventing disease, big data is the new drugs.
ORNITHOLOGY
In Aesop’s tale ‘The Crow and the Pitcher,’ a crow drops stones into a water jug until the water level rises to a level it can drink from. This may not be pure fiction: Researchers recently challenged six New Caledonia crows to choose from various kinds of stones to displace water in tubes for a food reward. All of the crows picked solid and sinking objects rather than floating or hollow ones, indicating that they had basic understanding of the causes of water displacement. PLOS ONE
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Understanding cause and effect is a human tendency, one of many we actually share with animals.
March 28
ORNITHOLOGY
Ornithologist John James Audobon’s Birds of Americais a collection of 435 life-size, hand-colored plates depicting a range of bird species. This weekend, the exhibit Audobon’s Aviary: Parts Unknown opens at theNew York Historical Society. It highlights the watercolor studies done by Audobon in preparation for the book, in which he illustrated the birds he had collected, stuffed, and arranged using wires to replicate “natural” poses. New York Historical Society
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Protecting the cathedral of biology in the Galapagos, beginning with a yellow warbler.
COSMOLOGY
A dwarf planet less than 250 km in diameter with two rings has been spotted among a collection of objects, called Centaur, between Saturn and Uranus. Known as Chariklo, the planetoid was identified by the European Space Organization at La Silla Observatory in Chile after it passed in front of a star. Made up of water ice and rocky matter much like it’s far larger neighbor’s rings, Chariklo’s rings are only 3-7 km wide, and no more than a few hundred meters thick. Nature
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An exciting discovery, but what happens when new planets turn out to be fakes?
MEDICINE
Finding the Root of Gulf War Illness
Veterans with so-called ‘Gulf War Illness’ can suffer from fatigue and muscle repair problems, but doctors don’t know what causes it. Levels of phosphocreatine, a molecule that regulates energy metabolism in muscles, was compared before and after an exercise test in seven affected veterans and matched controls. Sufferers of the disease didn't recover as quickly as the controls after the test: They had severely depleted phosphocreatine, which could be used as a diagnostic marker for the disease. PLOS ONE
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The trauma of war could be partially resolved with the help of technology.
GENETICS
An American cattle breed, the Texas longhorn, descended from two breeds brought to the United States by colonialists and immigrants. By reconstructing the genetic history of 134 cattle breeds from around the world, researchers found that the Texas longhorn is descended from Spanish cattle brought to America in the 1600s. These were then bred with Zebu cattle, a kind of Indian cattle that was introduced to the U.S. from Brazil on a new wave of immigration to the States in the 1800s. PLOS Genetics
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Human migration can help plot our own evolutionary history, too.
March 27
COSMOLOGY
A new dwarf planet, called 2012 VP113, has been found beyond the edge of the known Solar System. Thought to be part of the hypothesized inner Oort cloud (a cloud of icy objects about one light year from the Sun), the planet is 80 times further from the Sun than is the Earth. Previously, the dwarf planet Sedna, at 76 times the distance of Earth to the Sun, was considered the edge of the Solar System, but 2012 VP113’s discovery has expanded our horizons even further.Nature
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Our place in the universe is constantly shifting, rocking out of control.
CELL BIOLOGY
Scientists directed radiation at fruit fly larvae, damaging their cells' DNA and causing most of the cells to self-destruct. But before the cells died, they turned on a protein that activates a gene regulator named bantam, which has been linked to cell proliferation and maintenance. Surviving cells became increasingly less likely to self-destruct when exposed to further damage, despite the continued DNA damage. GSA
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Can we engineer bacterial cells to kill one another?
MEDICINE
A new study of children under three in 36 developing countries found that increasing per person Gross Domestic Product (GDP) had little affect on bringing down nutrition-related growth defects. The research measured the affect of a 5% increase of per person GDP on incidences of stunting, wasting, and being underweight. On average, the odds of being stunted fell by 0.4 %, underweight by 1.1%, and wasted by 1.7%, suggesting that increasing GDP does not mean equally improved health outcomes. The Lancet
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Why the current food aid policies may not be the best solution to world hunger.
ZOOLOGY
Ten species of tiny snails of the genus Plectostomahave been discovered in West Malaysia, Sumatra, and Thailand. Researchers used a micro-CT scanner to get 3-D X-rays of shells, identifying each species by shell shape, distribution, and genetic similarity. One of these, Plectostoma sciaphilum is already extinct and more are endangered as the limestone hills the snails live on are rare and isolated, making them a popular target for mining companies who want to use the limestone to make concrete. ZooKeys
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Nature is inconstant, but can we ever know this until it is too late?
March 26
PALEONTOLOGY
A new fossil reveals that not all anomalocarids, an extinct group of marine predators, grasped prey with spiky appendages near their mouths. The discovery of the anomalocarid Tamisiocaris reveals that it may have instead eaten as whales do., Rather than appendages,Tamisiocaris had a filtering apparatus that could be swept through the water like a net, trapping small crustaceans and other creatures. Nature
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What modern birds and an infamous Jurassic predator have in common.
PALEONTOLOGY
Paleontologists discovered this year that the lower half of a fossilized turtle’s humerus, the largest upper arm bone, uncovered on a New Jersey beach formed the missing piece of a partial turtle bone previously housed in the Academy of Natural Sciences archives in Philadelphia. The 70-75 million year old bone is from ancient turtle Atlantuchelys mortonis. Having a complete humerus has revealed that the animal was about 10 feet from tip to tail, making it one of the largest sea turtles recorded. YouTube
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It took paleontologists years to work out what our most famous dinosaurs really looked like.
VISUAL ART
The colors of the sunset in old paintings may show how much pollution from volcanic activity was in the air at the time of their creation. Researchers analyzed landscapes painted in the last 500 years and found that for a few years following a large volcanic eruption, red sunsets became popular features in European paintings. Large volcanic eruptions fill the atmosphere with ash and gas, which can travel for thousands of miles and scatter sunlight, making sunsets red across the globe. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
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If we want to preserve art for the future, we have to rely on science.
March 25
MARINE SCIENCE
A new study of bluefin tune, yellowfin tuna, and amberjack embryos has revealed that crude oil leaked from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill can cause serious heart defects in all three species. The fish embryos were exposed to crude oil collected from surface water and the damaged wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico. Because the spill occurred during these fish’s spawning season, the finding implies that the numbers of fish reaching maturity in the years following the spill will dip significantly. PNAS
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Is there ever any good to be had from waste in our oceans? For some creatures, it's home.
MEDICINE
Citrate, a derivative of citric acid, is a natural by-product of cell metabolism that helps deliver calcium to bones. Researchers found that when citrate mixes with water, the viscous mix becomes trapped between the nano-scale mineral crystals within bones. This fluid allows enough movement between the crystals to make bones slightly flexible and less likely to shatter under pressure. PNAS
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The body's natural resilience is amazing, but over time we have engineered them to become even better.
PALEONTOLOGY
Most mammals have seven neck vertebrae that can, in certain conditions, sprout a rib. Researchers compared modern elephant specimens with woolly mammoth remains from the late Pleistocene and found that they were 10 times more likely to have a neck rib than their modern relatives. In elephants, a neck rib is associated with inbreeding and a harsh environment during pregnancy, suggesting that mammoths may have suffered from a particularly adverse environment in the years leading up to their extinction. PeerJ
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Monsters and marvels are the genesis of science.
EVENT | MAY 26
In 1829, Harvard University student Joel Giles produced his thesis “Solar and Lunar Eclipse,” a collection of illustrated proofs of the mathematics behind the two different kinds of eclipse. It is one of 406 digitized theses collected by the university’s archivists, produced during the 1780s up to the 1830s. The thesis is now one of many curious archive items on exhibit at the university as part of the ‘From Code Books to a ‘Love Story’’ exhibit, as a piece of art as much as science. Harvard
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Wander through the Nautilus cabinet of curiosities.
March 24
BIOENGINEERING
Escherichia coli bacteria naturally produce biofilms made up long chains of proteins called CsgA, which help the bacteria stick to things. Scientists genetically engineered E. coli that produce biofilms tagged with clusters made up of the amino acid histidine, a building block of protein, but only when certain other molecules were present. The histidine tags latch onto gold nanoparticles, forming rows that can be used as nanowires— which could be used to develop living materials . Nature Materials
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Re-engineering bacteria can make it its own worst enemy.
BIOENGINEERING
Drug resistant tuberculosis (TB) appears to be spreading, with 450,000 patients suffering from the illness in 2012. In honor of World TB Day, tomorrow a documentary by PBS's Frontline draws attention to the danger of virulent drug-resistant TB strains, and the need for better medicines. Luckily, drug developers have a new tool at their disposal: 3D printed petri dishes. PBS
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Zach Zorich investigates how 3-D gelatin models could help find new therapies for TB.
EARTH SCIENCE
Volcanoes occasionally form in unexpected places, 100s of kilometers from the nearest rift valley, which are depressions in the Earth’s crust created by moving tectonic plates. In narrow, deep rift valleys, there are fewer large pockets between the crust and mantle that magma coming up from the mantle can pool into and then escape vertically through the ground. Instead, it is pushed horizontally away from the rift until it can find a point under less pressure to break the surface. Nature Geoscience
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In the Earth's crust, jewels are forming.
MARINE SCIENCE
The glasshead barreleye fish has a cylindrical eye pointing upward, allowing it to see other creatures above silhouetted in sunlight. But to see what lurks behind it and at its sides, the fish uses a mirror-like membrane on its eye that is lined with guanine crystals. This reflects the light given off by bioluminescent creatures and other reflective surfaces around the fish on to its retina, allowing it see the rest of its environment even though it is constantly looking up. Proc. Royal Soc. B
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How animals see their world.
MEDICINE
Scientists at Boston’s Northeastern University are developing an app called VocaliD that will let users donate their voice to those who can’t use their own. Software strips thousands of words spoken by a donor down to the tiny units of individual sounds. This is then blended with whatever sounds the recipient can make, matching both voices to create a personalized blend and convincing synthetic voice. VocaliD
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A computer that can not only read for us, but which could be better at it, too.
March 23
MARINE SCIENCE
North Atlantic right whales can be tracked using a telltale “gunshot” sound produced by adult males, according to new research. Scientists proved they could track the whales using the sounds by placing remote acoustic monitors at two whale breeding grounds for two years. They found that the timing of the sounds corresponded with the right whale breeding season in the late fall indicating that it’s used during courtship or to ward off competing males.PLOS ONE
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More seductive sounds the male of the species makes to find a mate.
VISUAL ART
Pink ribbons are a subtle way to show support for breast cancer, but a new collection of ball gowns inspired by the disease is quite the fashion statement. Each dress is decorated with cell patterns taken from images captured by researchers at the Naus Lab for cellular and physiological sciences at University of British Columbia. The collection, titled Fashioning Cancer: The Correlation between Destruction and Beauty, can be found here. UBC|Flickr
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High heels become a symbol of rebellion in one woman's struggle for freedom.
FILM
Samsam Bubbleman is an artist with an unusual medium: soap and water. He is a record-breaking professional bubble blower, which are created when two layers of soap molecules sandwich water molecules between them, blown up with exhaled carbon dioxide. In this short film, he explains how blowing bubbles can entertain, fascinate, and awaken childhood nostalgia in even the most adult of audiences. Aeon
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In art, we can find moments of brief and unexpected beauty.
MEDICINE
In the latest generation of Deep Brain Stimulator devices, two wires with four electrode contacts weave through the motor area of the brain, the subthalamic nucleus. The wires connect to a radio-controlled pulse-generating implant in the patient’s chest, which sends programed electrical pulses that quiet involuntary movements, like tremors. The implant records any abnormal neural patterns that may correlate with the tremors, something previously possible only when the brain was exposed during surgery. Nature
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Brain-machine interfaces are becoming increasingly sensitive, unlocking its secrets.
March 22
COSMOLOGY
In 2024, Mars One hopes to successfully land four volunteers on Mars to establish the first extraterrestrial human colony. A historic mission, but there is a condition: there will be no way to return to Earth. In this short film, five Americans explain their motivations for entering Mars One’s competition to find four suitable candidates, and why going to Mars is worth never coming home. The Atlantic
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When Alexander Kumar returned from Mars, he found his concept of home altered.
LITERATURE
Written in 1901, Thought-Forms by theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater features a sequence of beautifully colored images illustrating the book's central argument: that emotions, sounds, ideas, and events manifest themselves as visual auras. These auras are, the authors say, visible only to a gifted few. In this article, critic Benjamin Breen argues that Besant and Leadbeater believed they had a kind of spiritual synesthesia—a collision of the senses with the spiritual world. The Public Domain Review
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There may be a little synesthesia in all of us.
ENTOMOLOGY
The curator of invertebrate zoology at the The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has discovered nineteen new species of praying mantis found in tropical forests in Central and South America, and in international museum collections. All the species are bark mantises, which live on the branches and trunks of trees and have flat bodies to mimic moss and bark These mantises are fast runners, gliding swiftly from one side of the tree to the other to avoid detection by predators. ZooKeys
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Dedicating your life to the study of one animal can lead to greater discovery.
ZOOLOGY
On an expedition in New Britain, an island near Papua New Guinea, American geologist John Lane happened upon a tree kangaroo for sale at the side of the road. He posted photos of it online, prompting calls from biologists asking if Lane knew where the tree kangaroo, which wasn’t thought to be found on New Britain, had come from. So began Lane’s epic search for the rare and strange marsupial, as told by this article at The Atavist. The Atavist
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The tree kangaroo could be an introduced species gone native, like these Galapagos plants.
March 21
FILM
The 1968 short film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames is a lesson in mankind’s relative unimportance on the cosmos’ vast scale. We begin with a man having a picnic on the grass in Chicago: Seconds later, our view has zoomed out 10 feet, then a 100, then a 1,000. At the same time, we are told the relative distance a man, a cheetah, and an airplane can travel in 10 seconds, the film’s perspective constantly expanding by a factor of 10 until we find ourselves 100 million light years away. Youtube
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Science fiction films seek to disorientate us, taking us further from home.
PERCEPTION
The rise of digital journalism has blurred the line between real life journalists and software generated content, according to a new study. Readers were given a mix of articles written by journalists and machines and asked to rate their credibility, quality, and objectivity, as well as whether a human wrote it or machine. The machine-produced articles were perceived as more informative and trustworthy than those written by journalists, but they were judged as more boring and less pleasant to read. Journalism Practice
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If we have competent artificial writers, will there soon be artificial readers, too?
ASTROPHYSICS
Astrophysicist David Arnett has been modeling stars’ physical processes with computers for years—a subject he became fascinated with after he saw a supernova in 1987. For decades after, most computer models were in 2-D only, showing the supernova as a fluid process with one stage in its demise seamlessly leading to the next. Now, Arnett has developed a new model of a supernova’s collapse in 3-D, allowing researchers to far better recreate the turbulence and dynamism of a star’s final moments. AIP Advance
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Spotting supernovas may soon be a thing of the past, as the dark becomes a rare commodity.
ENTOMOLOGY
Three fossil stick insects from the early Cretaceous period (about 126 million years ago) have been found in Inner Mongolia. Parallel dark lines line the insects’ wings, and tongue-like shields protect their abdomens . These designs correspond to fossils found in the same region, from a relative of the gingko plant, which has tongue-shaped leaves with multiple, parallel lines.PLOS ONE
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Stick insects and other animals reveal the wandering path of evolution.
March 20
ECOLOGY
A tropical milkweed has weaponized pollinia, the sacs of pollen that attach to pollinators like bees and birds to be distributed elsewhere. The pollinia have an unusual horn-like that appears to physically prevent the sacs from becoming entangled with other parent plants’ pollinia once they are attached to a pollinator. The horn effectively bars other plants’ pollinia from attaching to a pollinator, giving the original plant a better chance of successful pollination over its competitors. New Phytologist
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Secrets of seduction from the animal kingdom.
GENETICS
At almost 7 times larger than the human genome, the loblolly pine genome has approximately 20.1 billion base pairs (humans have about 3.2 billion). A large proportion of the genome consists of repetitive sequences of DNA. The main form of these repeats is called a retrotransposon: a chunk of DNA that appears to have little purpose other than to copy itself and then become re-inserted elsewhere in the genome without seeming to affect the trees’ evolutionary adaptability. Genome Biology
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Evolution is not so straight forward as we like to think it is.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
To smile, according to health and well being entrepreneur Ron Gutman, is to be human. Smiling expresses joy and happiness, but it according to various studies done over the last fifty years it can also help you live longer, influence the outcome of your relationships, and boost your academic success. In thisTED talk, Gutman reviews some of the more unusual and profound of these studies, demonstrating how simply smiling could change our lives for the better. TED
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The science of happiness: Expressing gratitude can boost your health.
ZOOLOGY
Researchers studying a group of Azara’s owl monkeys in Argentina for more than 18 years have confirmed that they are completely faithful to their mates by examining their DNA. They examined 14 areas of the genome in 35 offspring from 17 sets of parents, and found all of them only had genes from their parents, with no instances of cheating. Coyotes, sea horses and a kind of mouse are also known to be similarly faithful to their mates. Proc. Royal Society B
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Our capacity for love is a mark of human uniqueness, one that apes may share.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Bighorn sheep were deliberately introduced in 1975 to Tiburón Island in the Gulf of California as part of a strategy to repopulate the endangered mainland population. For nearly 40 years they’ve been considered invasive, but now, researchers have found 1,500-year-old dung that matches scat made by bighorn sheep in Tiburón. This was confirmed by sequencing the dung’s mitochondrial DNA, raising questions about whether the modern sheep are an invasive or a reintroduced species. PLOS ONE
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In the American South, an invasive species has made itself at home.
March 19
PALEONTOLOGY
A dinosaur called Anzu wyliei has been described for the first time from three specimens found in 66 million year old rocks at the Hell Creek Formation in North and South Dakota. Thought to be feathered like the species’ closest relatives, Anzu was 11 feet long, 5 feet tall at the hip, beaked, and had long, thin legs and neck like an ostrich. But the resemblance ends there: its forelimbs were tipped with large, sharp claws and it had a long, strong tail. PLOS ONE
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T Rex, Anzu's relative, was less bird-like but similarly feathered.
NEUROSCIENCE
A new study has found that chronic or repeated sleep deprivation in mice leads to neuron damage and permanent loss. When mice were sleep deprived for a short time, the locus coeruleus brain cells, essential for optimal cognition, produced more of protein called sirtuin type 3 (SirT3), which protects brain cells from metabolic injury. After longer periods of sleep deprivation, the SirT3 response halted, and within several days the mice lost 25% of these neurons. Journal of Neuroscience
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Maintaining our circadian rhythm could be the secret to happiness.
ENVIRONMENT
A common titanium compound used to whiten paint, food, and toothpaste becomes a photocatalyst when exposed to light. Thin titanium dioxide nanotubes were laid over a graphene sheet in order to trap impurities in water as it is passed over the two materials. Sunlight catalyzed the tubes, which causes them to oxidize and break down some of the impurities in the water, while the rest of the impurities remain trapped in the graphene to be removed later. American Chemical Society
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Our water is teeming with pharmaceuticals, but is it harmful?
GENETICS
A new study of lactose tolerance—the ability to drink milk—in various African populations has found a link to the domestication of cattle and other milk-producing animals. A variant for the gene that expresses for lactose tolerance commonly found in Europeans, called T-13910, was also found in central and North African pastoralist groups. The mutation arose between 5,000 and 12,000 years ago, coinciding with the development of cattle farming in the Middle East and North Africa. American Journal of Human Genetics
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It wasn't pastoralism, but beer, that domesticated man.
March 18
BIOENGINEERING
Protein hydrogels are used as scaffolds for cultivating organ cells like repair patches, but like gelatin, the gels fall apart easily, making them unsuitable for growing heart cells which need a strong foundation to withstand the heart’s beat. A new hydrogel developed from the protein tropoelastin has the elasticity and strength to give the cells proper support. 3-D printing patterns into the gel makes cells grow in a coherent pattern, creating robust colonies that can be used as repair patches in the heart. Nanowerk
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Sometimes, medical advancements come in unlikely forms.
COSMOLOGY
A rare kind of rainbow called a glory was spotted in Venus’ atmosphere by the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft. Like all rainbows, a glory is caused by sunlight filtering through cloud droplets, but glories can only be seen from above, and they look like colored concentric circles. According to the data collected, clouds of sulphuric acid droplets that were either coated with elemental sulphur or mixed with ferric chloride probably created the glory, but further research is needed. Icarus|ESA
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Peering at planets would be impossible without telescopes like Hubble.
MEDICINE
Researchers transplanted human stem cells into mice bearing humangenes. The genes encoded immune system proteins, which transformed thestem cells into white blood cells, lending the mice a human-like immune response. They learned that the mouse's system was indeed similar to human's when they grafted a tumor onto the mouse, and foundthat its immune cells attacked the invader in much the same way asthey would in a human body. Nature Biotech.
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Without test subjects, medicine would never advance.
ENERGY
Low-pressure pockets in subterranean shale rock could provide the perfect dumping ground for the nuclear waste from power plants. Glaciers squeezed the water from the rocks, and as they retreated, the rock sprang back into its original shape faster than water could seep back in, making them practically impermeable to water. This unique physical property means that the waste would have no opportunity to leak into the groundwater—the biggest argument against burying nuclear waste underground. ACS
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Our nuclear waste is a gold mine, but can we use it?
March 17
ASTROPHYSICS
The BICEP2 radio telescope on the South Pole has, if confirmed, found the most direct evidence of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime that travel outward from a source point as predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916. Detected in the Cosmic Microwave Background, the waves appear to have been created by the rapid inflation of the universe moments after the Big Bang. If proven, physicist Alan Guth's theory of cosmic inflation, proposed in 1980, will finally be validated. Nature|New York Times
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Sean Carroll and Alan Guth talk to Nautilus about trying to trace time's arrow in the cosmos.
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
A symbol of good luck, the four leaf clover is a rare find. Most commonly found on plants of the Trifolium repens, or white clover, variety, it is thought that a four leaf clover occurs once in every 10,000 clover shoots. This video explains how statistical analysis and other tactics can help you find the supposedly lucky charm. Scientific American
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Know your chances, with the help of math.
NEUROSCIENCE
Genes that determine the architecture of the inner ear may influence musical aptitude. Scientists sequenced 767 peoples’ genomes and tested their ability to differentiate between pitches and musical patterns. Genetic variations most strongly associated with high scores in the audio tests were found near the GATA2 gene, which is associated with the inner ear and inferior colliculus, the part of the brain that processes the ear’s signals into sound. Nature
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A musical genius' talent for code has given us one of our greatest mysteries.
ASTRONOMY
NASA launches the first of its Asteroid Grand Challenge competitions today, asking wannabe asteroid hunters to produce an algorithm that can spot asteroids in images collected by on-the-ground telescopes. The algorithm needs to increase asteroid detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, and ignore imperfections in the data. Sign up here to get involved, and find out how your work could be in the running for $35,000 worth of awards from NASA. Top Coder
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Mark your target, and begin your journey into space.
March 16
ENERGY
Geothermal Energy Gave Refuge to Life in Antarctica
Geoothermal sites like volcano craters, hot springs, and steam-carved caves provided refuge to Antarctic plants, fungi, and invertebrates during the last glacial period. The heat would have enabled the organisms to survive the cold, before diversifying and spreading across Antarctica. A new study has revealed that species continue to be most diverse and concentrated at these sites, highlighting the importance of heat to survival. PNAS
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Life in Antarctica, alone in the wilderness.
COSMOLOGY
As we settle in to watch the second episode of the revival of Carl Sagan’s epic series Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson, we cast an eye back to episode 9 from the original. In this segment from “The Lives of Stars, ” Sagan used the analogy of Alice’s fall into Wonderland to illustrate the distortion surrounding strong gravitational fields like black holes. When light enters, it bends towards the center of gravity, distorting the surrounding space. Youtube
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Is it possible to fall in love with the night sky?
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Conman George Psalmanazar beguiled the 18th Century European elite with his 1704 book, The History of Formosa, about an exotic island where priests sacrificed children and criminals were killed and eaten. He was eventually discredited after explorers started traveling to Formosa, modern day Taiwan. Until then, Psalmanazar was the foremost authority on the place, even constructing a fictitious alphabet and dictionary, which you can read here.Cambridge
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Is home where the heart is? Or is it a fiction we tell ourselves?
ENTOMOLOGY
Five new species of armored spider have been discovered in South East China. The armored spiders, so named for their complex plate pattern covering their abdomen, were found in caves in South East China’s Karst region. Two of the species had only 4 eyes (spiders have 8 on average), a possible result of their development in the dark cave environment. ZooKeys
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Evolution can take an unusual path depending on the environment.
March 15
GENETICS
This week, Aeon magazine published a discussion of science writer David Dobbs' essay, 'Die, Selfish Gene, Die,' which challenges the gene-centric explanation of evolution in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.Biologist Karen James reminisces about the enlightening effect Dawkins' text had on her younger self, while primatologist Robert Sapolsky laments the popular obsession with genes and DNA as the "Code of Code." As he told Nautilus, environment counts for more in our development than we think. Aeon
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Our immediate environment can chart the course of our development.
MICROBIOLOGY
By taking data from their studies in molecular biology, biochemists, computer scientists, and music technologists have come together to produce a new installation at the Kibbee Gallery in Atlanta, GA. CalledMolecular Music, the installation is designed to help the audience enhance their understanding of how molecules behave by hearing them as well as seeing them in action. The installation is part of the Atlanta Science Festival, which runs between March 22nd and March 29th throughout the city. Molecular Music
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Music can hijack our perception, changing how we experience the world around us.
ASTRONOMY
Tim Peake, a European Space Agency astronaut, is to embark on his journey to the International Space Station next year and the agency is taking suggestions for his mission's name. The first British astronaut to go to the International Space Station with ESA, Peake's mission will last for six months as part of Expedition 46/47. Enter the competition here for your chance to win the privilege of naming the mission and a mission patch signed by Peake. ESA
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We can all shoot for the stars, we just need to pick a way to get there.
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
In the early 1980s, Barry J. Marshall started drinkingHelicobacter pylori in order to find out whether the bacteria cause peptic ulcers. In 2005, he was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his selfless work. In this podcast, Marshall explains why risk-taking should lie at the heart of science experimentation, and why future generations will be better for it. Nobel
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Putting your family into genetic limbo for the sake of science.
March 14
COSMOLOGY
This striking composite image, taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2007, wouldn't have been possible without using a "Pi Transfer" to navigate a path around Saturn. As Cassini orbits Saturn, it flies by Saturn's largest moon, Titan, at opposite sides of its orbit, with Titan's orbital position differing by pi radians between the two flybys. When it flies by, Cassini uses Titan's gravity to change its perspective on Saturn, enabling it to take various images of the planet and its rings. NASA
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Navigating our way through space requires a craft, but we have to choose it first.
PALEONTOLOGY
A new fossilized species of ostracod, a class of crustaceans that includes shrimp, has been discovered in New York State. Measuring between 2-3 millimeters, the 450 million year old fossils were so well preserved that their eggs were still intact underneath them, providing evidence of ancient reproductive and brood care strategies. Researchers have named the ostracod Luprisca incuba, after Lucina, the Roman goddess of childbirth. Current Biology
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Mother's love, compassion, empathy—this animal has it all.
ECOLOGY
Dingo baiting to preserve livestock is having a deleterious affect on small native Australian mammals, according to a new study. Researchers compared unregulated sites in conservation reserves with those that had been setting out poison traps for dingoes, which threaten livestock. Removing dingoes meant the population sizes of their competition, foxes, and the large herbivores they preyed upon like kangaroos, increased, while small mammals, such as bandicoots, that the foxes ate were in decline. Proc. of Royal Society B
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In a hybrid ecology, nature is no longer held separate from man.
March 13
ZOOLOGY
Light pollution puts seed-dispersing fruit bats in the Amazon rainforest off foraging for their food, according to new research. A cage filled with fruit was divided into one dark compartment and one lit with a common kind of street lamp demonstrated that the bats would fly into the dark compartment twice as much as the lighted one. Once in the compartments, bats in the dark compartment ate almost twice as much fruit as bats in the light compartment. Journal of Applied Ecology|Youtube
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Our addiction to light may be about to overwhelm us.
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
On this day in 1855, astronomer Dr Percival Lowell was born. After studying the drawings of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli of canals on Mars he devoted much of his work to noting unnatural features on the surface of the Red Planet, which he claimed were markers of not only water, but of complex life. Although NASA's Mariner missions disproved the existence of canals in the 1960s, the question of whether there is life on Mars still fascinates. New York Times|NASA
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Life in space may have been carried there by us.
ENGINEERING
With a snap of its tail, a blue, rubbery-looking fish darts away in a stream of bubbles. But this is no fish, it is a robot: Carbon dioxide released from a canister in the fish's tail bends it quickly in the opposite direction, mimicking a real fish's fast escape maneuver. This short video from MIT demonstrates the advance in so-called soft robots: self-contained, autonomous, robots with soft exteriors and powered by fluid pumped through flexible channels. Youtube|MIT
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Video: Robot animals could take control of real-life nature.
METEOROLOGY
Scientists have mapped the evolution of Hurricane Sandy with the help of volunteers who collected 685 rainwater samples from sites ranging from North Carolina to New Brunswick, Canada. Oxygen and hydrogen isotope levels recovered from the water revealed when the storm met other weather systems. Over the mid-East Coast, levels of a hydrogen isotope increased as the storm collided with a continental cold front and picked up evaporation from the Atlantic, causing intense rain over the North East of America.Utah |PLOS One
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Never mind hurricanes - how can we insure against a rainy day?
March 12
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Twitter may seem like a cacophony of different voices and opinions, but new research shows that dominant majority opinions evolve quickly and are difficult to change once established. An analysis of 6 million tweets collected at random from the first 6 months of 2011 were sorted by topic to reveal the authors’ underlying sentiment as they developed over time. Opinions became established if increasingly large institutions endorsed them over time, demonstrating that social media is not free of market forces.CHAOS
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If a story is compelling enough, will we believe it even if the evidence says otherwise?
MICROBIOLOGY
Bacteria communicate with one another using chemical signals called quorum sensing. Researchers studied the function of quorum sensing inPseudomonas aeruginosa, finding that like humans and other animals with complex communication patterns, bacteria pass different combinations of signals to each other that depend on their social and physical context. That means the bacteria can change the function of these chemical signals as needed, letting them respond intelligently to their environment. PNAS
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Bacteria don't just communicate like humans: they live with us, too.
INTERNET CULTURE
Twenty five years ago today, computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web while working at CERN, bringing "www." into existence and fundamentally altering the way we share information. As it celebrates its silver anniversary, the Pew Research Center reports that 87% of Americans now use the Internet, up from a mere 14% when they were first surveyed in 1995. But while 76% of Americans think the Internet is good for society, 15% think it is outright bad for society. Pew Research Center
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Hackers rewrote the rules of the Internet, all from the comfort of an IRC chatroom.
March 11
THEORETICAL PHYSICS
In August 1984, theoretical physicists Michael Green and John Schwarz brought string theory into the mainstream of theoretical physics. Twenty years on, Green says that the outcomes of their research are still impossible to predict: In the meantime, he says, string theory "provides a constant stream of unexpected surprises." Watch this video to find out what was so surprising about Green and Schwarz's breakthrough, and why it made many physicists take string theory seriously. Phys.org
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As we seek to understand the universe, we must be comfortable with total uncertainty.
NEUROSCIENCE
In a new study in Sweden, a group of 84 volunteers were interviewed while wearing virtual reality goggles and headphones, once with the ability to perceive their body, and once without the ability to perceive their body. In a memory test a week later, participants recalling the “out of body” experience had very poor memories of the event. Follow-up fMRI scans showed that when people tried to recall the “out of body” event there was a lack of activity in the hippocampus, the part of the brain linked to episodic memory.PNAS
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There is a constant search in the brain for the heart of what makes humans unique.
ZOOLOGY
Research at the Tsaobis Baboon Project in Namibia has found that baboons copy other baboons’ demonstrations if they have bold personalities. Shy baboons watched a task demonstration for the same length of time as bold baboons, but when it came to completing the task themselves they were unable, or unwilling to do it. This could be because of the strict social hierarchy baboons have to abide by—one that Robert Sapolsky believes informs the human social hierarchy, too. PeerJ
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Primates are the source of our obsession with celebrity.
March 10
ENVIRONMENT
The Mongol Empire, begun by Genghis Khan in the early 12th century, may have risen on the back of unusually good weather. Tree rings in ancient Siberian pine trees growing on Mongolia’s Khangi Mountains show that between 1211-1225 AD there was significantly more rain and warmer weather than was normal. The good weather brought fertile pastures with it: enough grass, one presumes, to support an army’s worth of warhorses. PNAS
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Seeds can sow a revolution, in culture and science.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Until 1900, visitors to Stonehenge could remember their trip by taking a bit of the stone home with them. Visitors had been allowed to use chisels to chip off some of the 5,000 year old World Heritage Site, until the landowner decided to put a stop to the damage. Some didn’t pay heed to the new rules: Six years ago, conservationists noticed that one stone had been chiseled once more. Smithsonian
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Sometimes the closest we come to fame is in a place, not people.
MATTER
Diamonds that have been bombarded with nitrogen atoms can be used to detect the tiny magnetic fields produced by high temperature superconductors, materials that when kept at -280 F (-173 C) have almost no resistance to electricity. The nitrogen atoms pair with vacant spaces in the diamond to create so-called nitrogen-vacancy centers. The light emitted by these centers is highly sensitive to magnetic fields, allowing the superconductor’s miniscule field to be read using laser spectroscopy.Physical Review B
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Diamonds: the ancient relic with a violent history.
March 7
ASTRONOMY
New data from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a satellite that took more than 750 million images of our solar system and its immediate surroundings, shows that our sun lives in a crowded neighborhood. Astronomers identified 3,525 new stars and brown dwarfs within 500 light years of our own sun. WISE was retired in 2011, but the satellite was brought back to life in late 2013 to help hunt for potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. NASA
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Tracking down our sun's first home.
ECOLOGY
Bananas are plagued by round worms, which burrow into their roots, sap them of nutrients and moisture, and eventually cause the plant to fall over. Researchers compared the popular export banana, Grande Naine, with the Yangambi km 5 banana, which suffers less worm damage. They found that though both bananas have metabolites that can kill worms, the Yangambi variety has almost twice the load of the most potent, called anigorufone, than the more popular variety. Phys.org
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Once harvested, the banana's journey from tree to fruit bowl relies on science.
EARTH SCIENCE
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh are calling for volunteers across the UK to adopt a tree this spring to help track how climate change is altering natural processes. Once you pick your tree, you can log its basic information at TrackATree.org.uk along with information about the plants living beneath its canopy, like bluebells, updating as the season progresses. Researchers recommend a weekly pilgrimage from before it buds all the way to leafing. Track a Tree
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If we want to save endangered species, we need to start tracking them.
March 6
EVOLUTION
Adipose fins, seemingly useless fins located between the dorsal fin and the tail, are found in more than 6,000 species of fish. Researchers took the genetic information of more than 600 species of both living and fossil fish and reconstructed their evolutionary tree to pinpoint when and in what species these fins evolved, expecting to find that they had evolved in early fish but had lost their significance. Instead, adipose fins arise independently and repeatedly throughout the evolutionary tree. Royal Society
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Evolution's weave defies our understanding.
GENETICS
Revive and Restore, a U.S.-wide project, wants to bring back the passenger pigeon, hunted to extinction in 1914. By sequencing the genomes of passenger pigeon specimens and their still-living relative, the band-tailed pigeon, researchers hope to pinpoint the genes in the passenger pigeon that give it its unique characteristics. Band-tailed pigeons could then be bred together to amplify the genes that are key to passenger pigeon traits, eventually bringing the passenger pigeon back from the dead. Revive and Restore
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We are becoming less and less tied to the rhythms of natural time.
PALEONTOLOGY
By examining the abundance of dung and tree beetle fossils from the Last Interglacial (132-110,000 years ago) and the early Holocene (10-5,000 years ago), paleontologists have constructed a picture of early environments. In the Last Interglacial, 55% of fossil beetles were dung beetles, suggesting that there was lots of open pasture for large ancient herbivores to graze on, while depositing their dung. Meanwhile, in the early Holocene, 57% were tree-associated, suggesting an increase in woodland. PNAS
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The amazing cosmic capabilities of dung beetles.
March 5
ENERGY
A new nickel-gallium catalyst converts hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methanol, which we use to make different kinds of fuel, more efficiently than a conventional copper-zinc-aluminum catalyst. The new catalyst was found by comparing the chemical properties of the conventional catalyst with a database of 100s of compounds. At 200 C, nickel-gallium produced more methanol from the same amount of natural gas than the original catalyst, and less carbon monoxide byproduct. Nature Chemistry
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Advances like this help to explain why the combustion engine just won't die.
MARINE SCIENCE
Like a modern day Jacques Cousteau, marine architect Jacques Rougerie has created a fantastic floating marine research lab that will allow scientists to observe our oceans uninterrupted for months at a time. In blueprints, the Sea Orbiter stretches 27 m into the air and 31 m into the sea, uses solar and wind power for energy and a mini model has already been tested for durability in storms. Rougerie’s dream could become reality: it reached its $444,632 goal on crowdfund site Kiss Kiss Bank Bank. Sea Orbiter
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Peter Ward's wonderful and dangerous life, under the sea.
COSMOLOGY
The Milky Way Project wants citizen scientists to help analyze thousands of photographs of the Milky Way collected by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Users are given photos to mark if they see bubbles (dark gaps in a dust cloud), star clusters, Extended Green Objects (young stars with green-looking outflows), and galaxies. This narrows down the images that astronomers then study. Milky Way Project
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Starless planets could be fantastic rarities, or common as muck.
March 4
ARCHAEOLOGY
Oxygen isotopes preserved in snail shells embedded in a lakebed in Haryana, India, reveal a 200 year long drought about 4,100 years ago. The delta-18oxygen isotope value increases when evaporation exceeds rainfall, and 4,100 years ago the concentration of the oxygen isotope went up by more than four percent. Archaeologists suggest that the Indus civilization, spanning South Asia, began to deurbanize at the same time, possibly due to the devastation of rain-dependent crops. Geology
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Insuring your company against rain comes at a price.
NEUROSCIENCE
Sebastian Seung’s neuroscience lab at MIT has created a game where players score points by correctly coloring in the connection pathways between retinal neurons in 3D cube simulations of tiny chunks of the brain. So far, players have colored in more than 2 million of the 3D cubes, allowing the lab to map the connections in 90 brain cells. The researchers hope that by mapping the connections in retinal cells, they may uncover the connections essential to motion perception and other visual perception. Eyewire
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How eating a bar of chocolate unlocked one woman's neural sound system.
ECOLOGY
A New Guinea flatworm, one of the world’s 100 worst invasive species, has been found in a greenhouse in Caen, France. The worm is very flat, about 5 cm long, and a dark olive-black with a clear stripe running down its length, and a white belly. This is the first sighting of the worm in Europe, but conservationists are already worried: In Britain, the related New Zealand flatworm has already invaded and devastated the native earthworm population. PeerJ
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Are ants the ultimate invaders?
March 3
ENTOMOLOGY
Bumblebees buzz when foraging; they vibrate flower stamens to dislodge pollen. Scientists at Stirling University recorded 1,289 buzzes of female worker bees from various common British bumblebee families and found that each family has its own buzzing style. For example, bee Bombus pascuorum buzzes at 213 Herz (about an A note) for a second when foraging pollen, while Bombus terrestis buzzes for a mere ¾ seconds at 280 Herz (a solid D). Naturwissenschaften
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Hidden in Elgar's music, there are unbreakable codes waiting to be broken.
PALEONTOLOGY
To try and recreate how a bipedal dinosaur may have walked, scientists turned to their distant descendant: the chicken. Chickens with wooden tails weighted at 15% of their bodyweight strapped onto them developed a distinctive walk from their free roaming counterparts who tend to walk using just the section of leg below the knee. With wooden tails, their weight was thrust forward, and they used their thighs for movement, causing them to have big, heavy strides—like a dinosaur. PLOS One
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Behind every famous dinosaur, there are unsung heroes.
February 28
METEOROLOGY
In Darwin, Australia, climate scientists are flying into icy weather in order to find out how high altitude ice crystals form in clouds, mostly at altitudes above 22,000 feet. When flying through ice crystal clouds, the crystals get into airplanes' engines, slowly cooling them so that ice accumulates in the engine and makes it lose power temporarily. Pilots don't have onboard weather sensors that can detect the ice crystals, leaving it up to scientists on the ground to predict the weather for them. NASA|Youtube
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Getting up close and personal with winter storms for science.
CELL BIOLOGY
To protect against bad bacteria, our intestines are lined with mucus secreted by cells in the intestine lining. Scientists found that by inhibiting a molecular switch, called NLRP6 inflammasome, in mice, their intestinal wall’s cells don’t produce the mucus, leading to infection and inflammation from bad gut bacteria linked to obesity and metabolic diseases. If NLRP6 also guards against infections in humans, then inflammasome may become the target of new therapies for diseases influenced by gut bacteria like diabetes. Yale
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What if obesity really is nobody's fault?
ANTHROPOLOGY
In 1970, a local brujo, or wizard, in Catemaco, Mexico hosted a witchcraft convention. Since then, Noche de Brujas, The Night of the Witches, has grown to a mass cleansing ceremony, held on the side of Cerro Mono Blanco hill. The festival is held on the first Friday of March: a mere 100 pesos can buy a limpia, or cleansing. Lonely Planet
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Superstition and intuition have always been the frontiers of science.
February 27
MEDICINE
Patients with multiple food allergies may build up a tolerance to the food by ingesting tiny, increasing doses of it for several months. In a clinical trial, doctors found that injecting asthma drug Omalizumab, used to treat allergy-triggered asthma, for 8 weeks before starting food therapy and for the first 8 weeks of treatment sped the desensitization process up from 85 weeks to 18. By week 18, most patients could eat 4 grams of the different foods they were allergic to safely, the equivalent of 2 peanut M&Ms. Yale
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Five more unlikely breakthroughs in medical science today.
COSMOLOGY
NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed 715 new planets, 94 % of which are smaller than Neptune, bringing the total number of confirmed exoplanets—planets outside our Solar System—to nearly 1,700. Four of them 2.5 times smaller than the Earth. The multi-planet systems, all with flat, circular orbits, resemble our own Solar System's, indicating that this pattern is commonplace throughout the Milky Way. NASA
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The trials and tribulations of exoplanet hunting.
GAMES
The U.S. government recognizes players of the online game, League of Legends, as professional athletes, meaning they can travel to the US with P1-A visas for their extraordinary ability in sports. Each day, 27 million players battle on League of Legends. The championship finals, screened live in California in October 2013, attracted a crowd of more than 10,000 spectators. US Gamer
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Do we make gods of gamers?
February 26
MEDICINE
Treating smoke-exposed mice with diabetes drug ciglitazone reversed damage caused by early-stage emphysema, chronic lung inflammation that increases the lung’s volume and makes it difficult to breath. Mice were exposed to cigarette smoke for 3 months, giving them early-stage emphysema, and then treated with the drug twice a week for 2 months, while continuing to be exposed to smoke. After 5 months of smoke, untreated mice had almost 450 mm^3 lung volume, while treated mice had 350 mm^3 lung volume—the same as when the trial began. Journal of Clinical Investigation
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Can the body learn to fight its biggest health threats alone?
HISTORY
Cornflakes inventor and surgeon John Harvey Kellogg is oft quoted, “You cannot work with men who won’t work with you.” Children often think this of their parents, choosing instead to follow their immediate desires—like buying up boxes of Frosted Flakes—even if they know it could land them in trouble. In this piece by B.J. Novak, one boy finds out that his instincts to work against his parents may have been worth sugary cereal, after all. New York Times
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A box of Frosties could change your life.
MARINE SCIENCE
Horseshoe crabs are the sole source of Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL), a blood extract that is used to detect pathogen contaminators in drugs and medical devices that could cause hemorrhagic strokes and other severe complications. Pharmaceutical companies drain up to 30% of blood from several hundred thousand crabs each year. The cost of LAL is high for these living fossils: a new study into their survival rates found 10-30% of crabs died after bleeding. Biology Bulletin
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Modern medicine and its dramatic impact on our fish.
February 25
MEDICINE
Spectrin is a protein that helps form elastic lattices under the surface of red blood cells, helping them flex as they travel through the circulatory system. In a study of roundworms, scientists found that worms with impaired spectrin also suffered nerve cell damage and a disrupted sense of touch. The result indicates that the protein builds the same elastic lattices around these nerve cells. Nature Cell Biology
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Why lasered Jell-O is the perfect shell for pathogens.
NEUROSCIENCE
Scientists have identified the section of the brain in the hippocampus that allows animals to recognize another member of the same species. Mice tend to be naturally curious and spend more time investigating a new mouse than one they have met before, but if the brain section (called CA2) is nonfunctioning, they show no preference for novel or previously encountered mice. CA2 has high levels of a receptor protein for the hormone vasopressin, which is linked to social bonding in animals. Nature
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The intricacies of neuroscience, and what Robert Burton thinks it reveals about ourselves.
February 24
GEOLOGY
Sand dunes form when individual grains of sand accumulate through wind transportation, a process called saltation. Individual granules form ripples perpendicular to the wind's direction, eventually growing into sand dunes. This picture from NASAshows a Martian dune field in a crater near Mawrth Vallis: The dune's shape and spacing is determined by the size of the sand particles, wind speed, and ground topography. NASA
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The treasures that lie beneath the Earth's surface.
EXPLORATION
The Polynesian Voyaging Society plans to sail around the world in a 62”x20’ storied Hawaiian canoe, called Hōkūle’a. The canoe will be navigated almost entirely using “wayfinding,” which is a traditional Polynesian method of navigation relying on natural markers like the sun, stars, and waves. It will take about five years to complete the 47,000 nautical mile journey, with the first leg from Hawaii to New Zealand to be completed by the end of this year. National Geographic
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Man can journey round the Earth and far beyond it.
MICROBIOLOGY
The western black-legged tick, carried on the backs of the western grey squirrel, harbors a new species of the Borellia bacteria that has researchers worried. Out of 1,180 tick samples from San Francisco parks, researchers found 43 ticks with Borellia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, and the new strain Borellia miyamoti. People infected with B. miyamoti appear to suffer similar symptoms to Lyme disease, but it is still not known whether the bacteria cause long-term health problems. CDC
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Uncertainty in medicine may be on the brink of resolution.
February 21
ENERGY
Pomegranates have inspired a new silicon anode, which stores charge in a rechargeable electrolyte battery. Silicon nanoparticles are coated in a layer of carbon, and then grouped into larger clusters, which are then coated a second time. This protects the silicon from damage by a battery’s electrolyte fluid. The fruity-design results in batteries that retain 97% charge even after 1,000 cycles of charging and discharging energy. Nature
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The natural world could be our best resource for energy efficiency.
BIOENGINEERING
Using a lettuce seedling attached to two aluminum electrodes, scientists have created a bio-wire: a plant used in place of a wire to transfer electricity from one point to another. The lettuce tended to have a lower output voltage than input, with 12 Volts in and 10 Volts out, but this fluctuated. Scientists believe the fluctuations are caused by the plant’s cytoplasmic flow, which is the delivery system of nutrients and fluids keeping the plant alive. Arxiv
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Plants already have a fully fledged communication network.
MEDICINE
Many vaccines must be stored at 35 to 45 F, but MenAfriVac, a new meningitis A vaccine, is still viable at temperatures of 102 F or less, and can be kept out of a fridge for up to four days. If the vaccine heats beyond 102 F, a heat sensor label changes color to warn doctors that the vaccine is too hot. After vaccinating 155,000 people in Benin with either the normal meningitis A vaccine or MenAfriVac, doctors reported that there were no cases of meningitis A in Benin in 2013, including the areas were MenAfriVac was used. MenAfriVac|Vaccine
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Keeping things cold in transit can be hard, especially when they are time sensitive.
February 20
LITERATURE
Science fiction author Ray Bradbury said that he wasn’t predicting the future in his work, but trying to prevent it by exposing its flaws ahead of time. But science fiction authors actually have a good track record for predictions come true: Isaac Asimov predicted online education, Arthur C. Clarke predicted tablet computing, and Douglas Adams predicted eBooks. Watch this PBS episode to find out more about how science fiction told readers about their future selves. Youtube
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The time machine: where literature and science meet.
GAMES
Twitch Plays Pokemon is an online multiplayer game of Pokémon Red, originally released in the 1990s for Nintendo Gameboys. The game was set up a mere five days ago, but already has 80,000 players all vying for control of the hapless central character, Ash, as he navigates his way through the Pokémon universe. Follow this link to play, or to watch the chaos unfold as thousands of people try to play a single player game. Twitch|Kotaku
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Online sabotage can have dramatic consequences, on and off line.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Old lead is more pure, dense and less radioactive than the freshly mined metal, which means it is the ideal shielding material for sensitive physics experiments. But it is also of historical importance: Romans made pipes, coins, weapons and other everyday objects from lead, providing physicists with a large and easily accessible supply. Melting these down destroys the information they can give us about our past, but they could be the key to unlocking some of the secrets of our future, too. Scientific American
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One person's waste is another's goldmine.
February 19
ENTOMOLOGY
Stick insects have two separate pads on their feet, one sticky and one not, which they switch between depending on the direction of travel and terrain. When moving up a surface, stick insects don’t stick: instead they use the non-sticky pad, which is covered in lots of tiny hairs. The hairs generate massive amounts of friction with the surface the insect is climbing, allowing it to move upwards without having to unglue itself with every step. Royal Society|Phys.org
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Some more amazing animals who travel in strange and wonderful ways.
ASTRONOMY
NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is designed to pick out radioactive X-ray signals radiated from dying stars and their subsequent supernova. By training it on the supernova Cassiopeia A, astronomers found patterns of titanium-44, an element created when star’s explode, in the heart of the supernova, suggesting that when the star died it didn’t blow up uniformly. Instead, successive shockwaves probably ripped the star apart, leaving the titanium in random clumps near the center.NASA|Youtube
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We are all made of the remnants of an exploding star.
MATHEMATICS
A new proof of part of the Erdös discrepancy problem, which tries to find patterns in an infinite list of the numbers “1” and “-1”, by University of Liverpool mathematicians took up 13 gigabytes of memory. The proof is two gigabytes larger than the whole of Wikipedia, making it too large to actually go through and check. The proof begs the question: Can a computer be trusted to prove a math problem once and for all? Arxiv
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David Deutsch reminds us that for the truth to set us free, we have to challenge it.
February 18
ZOOLOGY
The Consolation of Elephants
Just as humans embrace and offer consoling words in times of sadness or stress, elephants appear to touch and vocalize in order to calm distressed elephants. Now, scientists have found empirical evidence for these consolations, by observing 26 captive Asian elephants for nearly a year. Elephants touched one another’s face, made high-pitched chirping sounds, and even put their trunk in the stressed elephant’s mouth in order to calm it after being spooked by a dog, and other stressful events.
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Elephants are not the only animal with empathy, apes have it too.
COSMOLOGY
A forgotten model of the universe has been brought out of obscurity by the first English translation of a little-known paper by Albert Einstein. Written in 1931, “On the cosmological problem of the general theory of relativity” features a universe that expands and then contracts back towards a singularity or end point, like a reverse Big Bang. The paper was published only a year before the widely accepted Einstein-de Sitter model, in which the universe constantly expands.Springer
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Another of Einstein's lost hypotheses.
MICROBIOLOGY
MreB, a protein found in bacteria, appears to be the key to how rod-shaped bacteria cells keep their unusual shape. The bacteria Escherichria coli (E.coli) cells have a rod-like shape, maintained by targeted bursts of MreB release along the longer, straight sides of the cell that build up the cell’s wall. Conversely, if MreB is inhibited, the cell loses its rod-like appearance and morphs into a spherical shape. PNAS
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Everyone knows E.coli, but these molecules are truly famous.
February 17
SENSES
Scientists have found a correlation between haptic feedback, which is information we get by touching things, and being able to move our bodies in a rhythmic and stable way. Using a virtual paddle and table tennis ball, researchers found that people performed far better juggling the ball if they felt it hit the paddle in their hand rather than just being able to see it. This improved a person’s timing, making them more able to repeat a movement successfully and with the right rhythm. Physiology
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Finding the right rhythm can be an algorithmic headache for transporters.
COSMOLOGY
In the early 1500s, Polish-born astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus adopted the heliocentric theory of the universe, which stated that the planets revolved around the Sun at a speed that was relative to the distance they were from it. His first writing on the subject, Commentariolus, was sent only to other philosophers, who discouraged him from continuing his work. Copernicus disagreed with the Bible’s model of the universe that placed Earth at its center, rupturing the marriage of religious dogma to science.Stanford|Commentariolus
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Searching for our own place in the universe is as challenging as ever.
February 14
HEALTH
Hospitalizations for strokes correlate with sharp changes in temperature. Doctors collected 157,130 discharge notes for stroke sufferers and the corresponding local temperature and dew point level for the year 2010-2011. Each 5-Fahrenheit change in temperature coincided with a 6% increased risk of hospitalization, but more research is needed to find out what role meteorological factors play in the risk of having a stroke. Live Science
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A chance correlation can yield more than a coincidence.
ALGORITHMS
Scientists at MIT wound flexible rubber tubes around a variety of column sizes, and then measured how the rods’ weight, length, stiffness and thickness varied their natural curvature. Based on their findings, they designed a computer algorithm that can take any of these variables and find the curvature of anything with a curl. Computer animators tend to avoid curls because the math involved is too difficult, but reducing them to a scalable algorithm could help bring more curly-haired characters to the big screen.MIT
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What braids can tell us about spacetime.
ZOOLOGY
There is no way to identify individual Australian sea lions without invasive techniques like microchipping or branding. To find a new method, researchers in Western Australia set up Whiskerpatrol.org to see whether people might tell sea lions apart lies based on their whisker spots, which is the markings made by the whiskers coming out of the sealion’s muzzle fur. Amateur photographers can upload photos of sea lions to help create a catalogue of identified individuals that can be tracked easily for further research.WhiskerPatrol
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Tracking endangered species, like honeybees, is essential for their survival.
February 13
ZOOLOGY
In Bahia state, Brazil, loggerhead turtles and hawksbill turtles congregate on the coast to lay eggs and find a mate, and a number of hybrid turtles result from the mix. Researchers charted the progress of 157 immature hawksbill turtles over a year, finding four hybrids that looked like hawksbills, but behaved like loggerheads. There is almost triple the number of loggerheads than hawksbill turtles known to nest along Bahia’s coast, the hybrids’ behavior reflecting the dominant population’s. PeerJ
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Organismal mergers and the symbiosis of species.
GENETICS
America’s first settlers may have been Asian, according to the genome of a boy that died 12,600 years ago in Montana. A member of the Clovis people that came to America 15,000 years ago, the boy’s skeleton is the oldest known human remains in the Americas. His DNA had strong similarities to DNA found in Asian Siberia, and to modern Native American DNA. Youtube|Cambridge
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Is it possible to trace our distant ancestors' first, human, home?
ENGINEERING
If we want to build structures in space, we need to bring our own resources with us. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Cal. welded a fragment of Arizona’s Canyon Diablo meteorite with an electron beam in a vacuum to mimic space. But the electron beam wasn’t innovative enough to weld the metal: the phosphorus and carbon impurities made the iron crack, putting our extraterrestrial building plans on hold. Sci. Tech. of Welding and Joining|Nature
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To build in space, we have to get there first.
February 12
ENGINEERING
The European Space Agency plans to protect its Solar Orbiter spacecraft with a Stone Age painting technique—using crushed burnt bone as black pigment. Launching in 2017, the probe will orbit the Sun at about a quarter of the distance to Earth, experiencing temperatures of 1000 Fahrenheit and 13 times the intensity of sunlight as on Earth. To protect the probe, it will have a titanium heat shield coated in Solar Black, a type of black calcium phosphate, which is made from burnt bone charcoal. ESA
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We examine stars with bone, but stars made our bodies.
NEUROLOGY
Scientists have identified one way that exercise may influence our mental health. Lactate is generated when we use our muscles, and it triggers astrocytes—non-neuronal cells in the brain—to release the chemical transmitters used by neurons to signal hormone release. Researchers now report that astrocytes use lactate (lactic acid) in one part of the brain to stimulate the release of norepinephrine, a hormone essential for mammals’ alertness, appetite, respiration, emotion, and sleep/wake cycle. Nature Communications
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The never-ending search for human uniqueness, hidden in the brain.
MEDICINE
It is easy to follow a strict vegetarian or vegan diet, but the same can’t be said of our medications. By listing the ingredients of the top 100 most-prescribed drugs in the UK, doctors found evidence of 3 animal-derived products—gelatin, magnesium stearate (produced from rendered animal or vegetable fat), and lactose—in 73 of them. Listen to this podcast to find out more about the study. Podcast|BMJ
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Pushing the boundaries of medicine is a gamble, but for some it pays off.
February 11
ALGORITHMS
Computer algorithms can solve problems by learning from past experience. But machine learning isn’t autonomous: each algorithm uses human-set protocols that prioritize one thing over another, like popular sites topping Google searches. Nicholas Diakopoulos at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism argues that when it comes to an algorithm’s decisions, we need to recognize that machines have human bias, too. Tow Center
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Machine learning could be a new well of human creativity.
BIOENGINEERING
A robot arm called MIT-Manus is used for physical therapy for people who have had a stroke and been left with motor skills damage or weakened muscles. Patients control the arm while playing a video game, which measures the patient’s arm speed, movement smoothness, and aim. As with all neural illness and injury, predicting long-term health outcomes can be difficult, but by measuring the minute changes in a person’s motor skills, doctors can judge the efficacy of stroke treatments more accurately. MIT
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Combining robotics with human awareness can take our level of perception to new heights.
February 10
FILM
In 1976, American filmmaker Jerry W. Leach releasedTrobriand Cricket, hailed as one of the most “interesting ethnographic films” by the Journal of American Anthropology. The film documents how cricket in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea became a unique expression of Trobriand cultural identity. British missionaries taught islanders how to play in the 19th century, but it evolved to become a very different spectacle from the British original: watch the film’s trailer, here, to see why. YouTube
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Adopting British standards affected more than sport: we measure time by them, too.
February 9
PHILOSOPHY
To call one’s self a genius, said poet Gertrude Stein, required long stints of sitting around and doing absolutely nothing. Only then could attention be entirely devoted to conscious and deliberate thought. In this article for Nautilus, Greg Beato disagrees: He demonstrates that in order to reach your creative potential, giving in to distractions and procrastination is the secret to success. Smithsonian
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Distraction and procrastination can help us reach our highest potential.
MEDICINE
By replicating the spread of breast cancer into bone cells on a 3-D microchip, scientists have uncovered a molecule in bones that appears to attract cancer cells. Researchers injected the protein binder molecule CXCL5, which is secreted by bone cells, into collagen-gel on the chip. The cancer cells invaded the collagen as if it were bone to bind with CXCL5, highlighting its potential role in why advanced breast cancers spread into the bones before other organs in nearly 70% of patients. Biomaterials|MIT
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Our cells' genetic codes are taking on a life of their own, out of our control.
February 8
ASTRONOMY
Astronomers have discovered a star dubbed SM0313 that could be the oldest star ever recorded. A star’s approximate age can be judged by its iron content: when the universe first formed, the only elements were hydrogen and helium, but as early stars exploded and generated new stars, they became more chemically complex with each generation. SM0313 contains no iron, which means it was among the first few generations of stars, formed just 200 million years after the Big Bang. Nature
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Can we measure anything before the Big Bang?
BIOCHEMISTRY
By using state-of-the-art computer simulations, researchers have discovered that melanopsin, a pigment in the retina that discerns minute changes in our environment’s ambient light, doesn’t help our vision. In contrast with retina visual pigments, melanopsin acts like an interface between physical light and the different physiological responses we have to light as it changes through the day. It is essential for regulating our circadian rhythm, optimizing our body’s response to day and night.PNAS
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Time and space are the secret of happiness.
MEDICINE
Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute discovered that Mycoplasma genitalium, bacteria that infects the genitals and respiratory tracts, appears to have a unique structure that lets it bind to any bacteria-killing antibody it encounters in the body. Once bound to the antibody, the bacterium effectively blocks it from reaching its target bacteria or virus. Researchers think this helps other bacteria and viruses evade the immune system’s response and thrive, establishing long-term infections. Science
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Your body has a microscopic purification system of its own.
February 7
GENETICS
Within three thousand years, natural selection has accelerated the process of evolution, giving Tibetans a higher expression of gene EPAS1 than their lowland Han Chinese neighbors, recalibrating the body to live in a high altitude, low oxygen environment. Despite having low hemoglobin levels, EPAS1 allows Tibetans to tolerate hypoxia to an extent that others would fall ill. The extremity of the unique environment of the Tibetan Plateau works in harmony with gene selection to create a unique physiology. Science|Guardian
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Human uniqueness lies in the homes we choose.
ENTOMOLOGY
Exposed on a leaf or stem sits what looks like a flesh fly: It has the coral red eyes, filmic wings, and striped body, and it is making the same tell-tale jittery and skittish movements. But the timorus sarcophagoides is not a fly at all: it is a weevil. Red spots on its thorax mimic the eyes, and the weevil's hardened forewings, or elytra, mirror the markings on the fly's body that can change their texture to look transparent, allowing the insect to fool predators successfully.Guardian|BIF
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Why trusting our senses may be the wrong choice.
GEOLOGY
Diamonds found in the world’s oldest zircons, a mineral found in igneous rock, are actually laboratory contamination, according to a new analysis of the Jack Hills zircons. The zircons date to the Hadean Area, about 4,200 to 3,000 million years ago, which is the earliest period in Earth’s history. Two recent papers had shown diamond structures embedded in the zircons, but in reality, they were residue left from the diamond abrasive paste used to prepare the zircon samples for analysis under microscope. Science Direct
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Uncovering others' mistakes makes for the best science.
February 6
MEDICINE
We use color to signify particular characteristics of ourselves: we can get the blues, be rednecks or even yellow-bellied cowards, but these metaphors could have a new physical meaning. Shooting silver particles in hydrogel with a laser causes it to form hologram structures: as the hydrogel comes into contact with different compounds in the blood, it shrinks and expands, causing the holograms to change color. The bolder the color, the more the compound is in the blood; let's hope the nurse isn't colorblind.Cambridge|RSC
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If we know the color, what is the sound of personhood?
MEDICINE
France approved a heart built with satellite technology, called the "Carmat Heart," for human trials. Using the same electronics and motors as a satellite scaled down to a human scale and encased in animal pericardium membrane, the machine is masked from the body. Body and space are inaccessible, hostile places where failure is not an option: Satellites give us the uninterrupted information flow we need to forge on in space exploration, and now, a steady heart beat.Reuters|Carmat
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Encounters with the Post-Human
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
People that take risks may seem like thrill-seekers, but in fact they may be more motivated by a lack of willpower. Neuroscientists scanned people’s brains while they played a game that forced them to choose between taking a risk to get more points, or playing safe and getting an average score. When they opted for the safer choice, the neural networks that controlled executive functions like memory and cognition were more active than when they decided to take the risk. PNAS
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For some, ignoring the risk of playing the lottery is a weekly event.
February 5
SOCIAL SCIENCE
Do you know what solar radiation sunscreen is, or what red blood cells do in the body? The Pew Research Center is conducting a survey of people’s science and technology knowledge with this 13-questioninteractive quiz. Click the link and find out if you have more science savvy than the average American. People Press|Pew Center
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Having some base knowledge is good, but uncertainty plays a starring role in physics.
ASTROPHYSICS
A new Neptune-like planet called Kepler-431b has been found orbiting an orange and red dwarf in a binary star system. The planet wobbles wildly on its spin axis, tilting as much as 30 degrees over 11 years, far more than Earth’s own wobble of 23.5 degrees tilt every 26,000 years. As Kepler-431b orbits the binary stars, its orbit tilts, making it look as if the planet’s path is continuously moving up and down as it crosses the stars’ faces. NASA
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Our own home in the universe is rocking out of control, too.
ALGORITHMS
New company Eterni.me wants to use your digital paper trail to create an artificial intelligence “chat bot”. An algorithm uses your instant messages, emails, and other online traces to create a bot that can talk to your loved ones from beyond the grave. Chat bots are increasingly common interfaces between companies and customers: soon they could be the interface between memories shared between two people, even when one is no more. Fast Company
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A purely mathematical structure already informs each moment of your life.
February 4
MARINE SCIENCE
Microscopic plankton build their shells in uniform layers, forming daily bands composed of chemicals filtered out from seawater. The concentration of magnesium in a plankton shell increases in warmer water, replacing the calcium usually found in the shell. By analyzing the ring patterns in plankton shells dating back tens of millions of years, scientists get a glimpse of the changing temperatures of the world’s ancient oceans. Science Direct
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How to predict the ever-changing weather.
MEDICINE
A common anti-fungal treatment called itraconazole appears to disable the “hedgehog signaling pathway,” a molecular pathway involved in cell division and growth. When the pathway malfunctions, it can cause diseases such as basal cell carcinoma, which is the most common skin cancer in the U.S. In a small clinical trial of the anti-fungal’s effect on the cancer, researchers found that it decreased tumor size by an average of 23 percent. Jrnl of Clinical Ontology
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Discovering the unexpected, right under your nose.
GEOLOGY
The Moon’s oldest rocks have extremely similar hydrogen isotopic composition to the Earth’s water and carbon-rich meteorites. This affinity is the strongest evidence yet of a common source for the Moon and the Earth’s water. Either primordial water survived the supposed impact that separated the Moon from the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, or both were seeded with water not long after the Moon’s formation. Science Direct
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How man's trips to the Moon took terrestrial science into space.
February 3
MICROBIOLOGY
Distinct and earthy, the black truffle, or tuber melanosporum, packs a punch on the nose and on the wallet. The truffles can fetch more than $1,200 per kilo, leading Chinese suppliers to try and pass off the supposedly inferior and far cheaper tuber indicum, as the real thing. Scientists at the National Institute for Agronomic Research in France are analyzing the olfactory qualities of both truffles, so that suppliers can detect when a fungus is a fake. Guardian
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Sino-science thinks fame is a mark of success, but is it?
GENETICS
The hormone thyroxine increases in concentration in our blood when we get hot, increasing our metabolic rate far above its normal state. Aboriginal Australians have a unique pair of mutated genes, called A191T and L283P, which regulate thyroxine. Together, they inhibit the release of thyroxine at high temperatures, keeping the body functioning normally despite living in an extremely hot environment. Royal Society
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Did beer cause man to domesticate himself over time?
MEDICINE
Acoustic neuromas, or vestibular schwannomas, are tumors that grow in the skull and typically cause hearing loss and tinnitus. The tumors are typically treated with surgery and radiotherapy, but a new study of more than 600 patients found that tumors grew slower in participants who took aspirin. Aspirin’s anti-inflammatory properties are well documented, but more research is needed to see if and how the aspirin halted tumor growth. Otology and Nuerotology
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More medical breakthroughs that came from unlikely places.
February 2
MATHEMATICS
When a player with the ball makes a break for the end zone, defenders have to chase him at the ideal “angle of pursuit” if they want to stop him in his tracks. Taking a defender’s running speed into account, Pythagoras’ theorem can be used to find the angle he needs to run at: the path of the defender is the hypotenuse of a triangle drawn between the end zone and the players’ starting positions. Because there is no time for math on the pitch, players judge the angle by instinct alone. Science 360
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The secret of the perfect game of tennis.
ECONOMICS
Most stock trading takes place in public, but about 10% is hidden in so-called “dark pools.” These are private stock markets where trades are anonymous, meaning big financial players can make trades without impacting the market. Despite the attraction of trading without public scrutiny, the dark pools often attract under-informed investors that won’t be able to take up the other side of the trade fast enough for the big traders who rely on deals that go down within nanoseconds, keeping the biggest deals out in the open. MIT|Oxford Journals
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We put our money down on blind faith even when we know the stakes.
GEOLOGY
Seven years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed in a report that the world was getting warmer. The authors said that the most likely cause was the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. In a new article linked below, Lee Billing’s explores mankind’s effect on the geological record. BBC|IPCC
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Join the search for mankind's mark on Earth.
February 1
SOCIOLOGY
By 2050, the number of people over 65 is expected to triple, and East Asian countries have some of the most rapidly aging populations in the world. Their largest demographic group will be citizens over 65 by then. This is causing some anxiety: 9 out of 10 Japanese, 8 out of 10 South Korean and 7 out of 10 Chinese people say aging is a major problem in their country. Pew Center
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How we imagine ourselves in time is very personal.
ENVIRONMENT
This composite radar image of Zambia’s Zambezi River’s flood plain combines three images taken at different points of time in 2011. Every spring, the flood transforms the land into one of the largest wetlands in the world, supporting diverse populations of fish and animals and nourishing grasslands. The image shows the river in lime green snaking from top left to bottom right, and the flood plain in deep blue coming right to the edges of a city, picked out in white. ESA
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How do you know if the constants of nature change through time?
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Life Before It Even Happens
Children believe they are alive before their parents have even conceived them, but only in spirit. Most of those surveyed said that they felt emotion and desire before being born, usually because they believed their prelife self would anticipate their birth. It seems that even at a young age, people believe that the mind, not the body, is at the core of personhood.
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What is our personal beginning of time?
January 31
ANTHROPOLOGY
In La Paz, Bolivia, people prepare for the coming year during the ancient harvest festival Alasitas, which celebrates the Andean god of abundance, Ekeko. People buy miniatures of things they want, whether it is a new car, a house, or a divorce certificate. In a confluence of Christianity and folk tradition, Andean and Roman Catholic priests bless the objects, before the goods are offered to Ekeko. BBC
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The ancient texts that may hold modern cures.
ZOOLOGY
Dogs may know how to sit, lie down, and roll over, but their cousins, the wolves, learn from each other. They pay close attention to demonstrations from other wolves in order to learn how to behave in a close-knit pack. This habit guarantees better cooperation, something domesticated dogs no longer have to worry about. PLOS One
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Why we need social hierarchies.
ENTOMOLOGY
Many insects co-opt ants to defend them in return for food rewards, but ants are picky about what species they will serve. To get their attention, Narathura japonica caterpillars excrete the same hydrocarbon mix on their bodies as ants do. The ants recognize the smell and enter into partnership with the caterpillar, protecting it while supping on nutritious droplets leaked by the caterpillar’s dorsal nectary organ. PLOS One
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To speak to plants and bugs, you need to smell right.
Today, Apr 10
ASTRONOMY
Light and sound waves from stars help astronomers chart stars' history more accurately. A new survey of 1,000 stars combines stars’ dimensions with information about their metal content and effective temperatures. Part of the Strömgren Survey for Asteroseismoloy and Galactic Archaeology, these 1,000 stars are the first images taken from the Kepler telescope data to be dated in this way. Arxiv
Tracing our Sun's origin through the history of our galaxy.
MEDICINE
Parkinson’s Disease, which is marked by a deterioration in cognitive ability over time, commonly has symptoms like tremors and forgetfulness. A group of Parkinson’s sufferers given a set of Google Glass (which function much like a wearable, hands-free smartphone) said they thought the devices could help them retain some independence. The glasses displayed discreet reminders, like when to take medication, or to swallow instead of drooling, providing a less invasive care management system. YouTube
Wearable technology could be the future of medicine, and human interaction.
ASTRONOMY
The European Space Organization’s Very Large Telescope captured this photo of a planetary nebula, Abell 33, at a fortuitous moment. The nebula is a glowing gas cloud that surrounds a small star (much like our Sun) that is on its way to becoming a white dwarf. Abell 33’s nebula is unusually circular: The star at the edge of the nebula is HD83535, giving the nebula the appearance of a diamond ring even though HD83535 is actually millions of light years in the foreground between Abell 33 and Earth. ESO Gems|ESO Images
Astronomy depends on having just the right amount of light.
Yesterday, Apr 9
ECOLOGY
Nature reserves on the Crimean coast and the Ukraine and Crimea border are home to various endemic and endangered species of flora and fauna. But as political tensions rise and Crimea’s status as a part of Ukraine becomes more uncertain, so does the preservation of its wildlife. Russia and Ukraine use different standards to determine which species are on the “red” or endangered lists, meaning their management could change dramatically if Crimea were to separate from Ukraine. Nature
When man and nature collide, hybrid ecologies can be born.
ENVIRONMENT
Each day, new objects are spotted floating in the Indian Ocean, but not one has turned out to be a piece of debris from missing Malaysian airlines plane Flight 370. Inadvertently, the search for the plane appears to be turning people’s attention to the garbage throughout our oceans, some of which collects together because of the current and forms “patches.” The Indian Ocean’s patch gathers on a current known as the Indian Ocean gyre, but very little is known about how big or precisely where it can be found. National Geographic
Oceanographer Sylvia Earle tells Nautilus what "waste" means in oceanography.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
The Old Italian violins made by renowned 17th and 18th century makers, such as Stradivari or Guarneri “del Gesu,” are supposedly superior to all new violins. In a blind test of six new and six Old Italian violins, ten renowned violin soloists had an hour to play and choose their favorite instrument. Six chose a new violin as the best, illustrating how music can be influenced by cultural perceptions. PNAS
There may be little point in putting our faith in past precedence—everything changes eventually.
ARCHAEOLOGY
A copper awl discovered in the southeastern Mediterranean coast suggests that the Copper Age arrived there as early as 7,000 years ago. Archaeologists discovered the elongated metal pin at a burial site in Tel Tsaf in the central Jordan Valley in Israel. The artifact predates all known metals in the region by several centuries, indicating that metallurgy probably spread to the region through trade with southeast Europe far earlier than thought. PLOS One
The search for mankind's mark on Earth is on.
April 8
ORNITHOLOGY
Bar-headed geese are the highest-flying birds in the world, soaring across the Himalayas at up to 23,917 feet as part of their annual migration. Geese were made to run on a treadmill while the oxygen level in the air was reduced to test how well the geese ran with a greatly reduced oxygen supply. The geese were able to keep running at their top speed with only 7% oxygen, far below the 21% oxygen level that we breathe at sea level. YouTube
Following the Northern Bald Ibis as it makes its own migration over the Alps.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
When playing slot machines, players tend to attach undue importance to so-called “near misses,” like when two in a row of three symbols are the same—a loss that is spatially close to the jackpot. By comparing both healthy people and those with various brain injuries, researchers found that people with damage to the insula area of the brain were unique in the desire to stop playing after a near miss. Reducing the insula’s function could be a key to treating problem gambling. PNAS
The world is your casino, but bettors beware—the house always wins.
NANOTECHNOLOGY
Bladder cancer cells make too much of a protein called EGFR, which drives uncontrolled cell division and acts as a biomarker for the cancer cells. Scientists made gold nanoparticles that attach to proteins targeting EGFR. Next, they heated the gold with a laser, which destroyed EGFR and decreased the number of cancer cells in 13 mice. Science Codex
Nanotechnology is helping us straight to the site of disease.
ANTHROPOLOGY
Ancient grains discovered in present-day Kazakhstan place the earliest interaction between traders from southwest Asia and ancient China at nearly 5,000 years ago. Archaeologists excavating campsites of Bronze Age nomads found domesticated crops like bread wheat, from southwest Asia, and broomcorn millet, from China, intermingled in central Eurasia by 2700-2500 B.C. Previously, archaeologists believed the crops didn’t come into contact until a couple thousand years later. Washington University in St Louis
From ancient to modern trade: How shipping containers made the world a smaller place.
April 7
HEALTH
Telomeres, structures at the ends of chromosomes that protect cells from damage, are influenced by social disparity, according to a new report. In a study including 40 boys, researchers found that boys from disadvantaged backgrounds—like those whose mothers never graduated high school, for example—had 19% shorter telomeres compared to boys who came from more advantaged families. Shorter telomeres have been linked with cell damage and higher instances of chronic disease. PNAS
The human body has changed over time as we respond to our environment.
ENGINEERING
NASA will release more than 1,000 software codes to the public as part of a free online software catalogue. The technologies featured in the catalogue range from project management systems to life support designs, and aeronautics to robot and autonomous systems, representing NASA’s best solutions to a wide array of complex mission requirements. When the catalogue goes online Thursday 10th April, it will be found here. NASA|NASA Technology
Do we have any technology that could transport us to the stars?
ENGINEERING
Fifty years ago today, IBM unveiled its first mainframe computer: the System/360. It cost IBM more than $5 billion, which at the time was equivalent to two years' profit for the company—but the gamble paid off. Then-IBM chairman Thomas J Watson Jr said, "System/360 represents a sharp departure from concepts of the past in designing and building computers...This is the beginning of a new generation—not only of computers—but of their application in business, science and government." IBM
As mainframes become smaller and more powerful, so do they become cleaner.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Cereal boxes are specially designed so that the mascot makes eye contact with the consumer. In a study of 65 cereals and 86 mascots, researchers found that while all mascots stared at a focal point four feet away, kids’ mascots’ eyes looked down at a 9.6 degree angle—perfect for making eye contact with a small child—and adults’ mascots looked straight ahead. The strategy works: Consumers were 16% more likely to trust a cereal brand when its mascot made eye contact.Cornell
A boy's irresistible urge for Kellogg's brand cereal changes his life forever.
ENVIRONMENT
By 2017, half the world population is expected to be online, and by 2020, Internet users’ electricity demand will increase by 60% from current levels. In a new report from Greenpeace, 19 global IT companies and their data centers were ranked according to how clean their electricity was. The lowest was eBay, which uses 6% clean energy, while Apple was the greenest, with 100% of its electricity coming from renewable sources. Greenpeace
Find out how Facebook is cleaning up its energy consumption, with Nautilus.
April 6
VISUAL ART
Corals and sponges aren’t thought of as dynamic creatures, but in this time-lapse clip from photographer Daniel Stoupin, they come to life. Stoupin took more than 150,000 extremely close-up shots of different corals and sponges found along the Great Barrier Reef. This kind of macrophotography has a very shallow depth of field, so to create shots that were fully in focus Stoupin layered 3-12 shots together, merging the different areas of focus to create a composite image. Vimeo
How to photograph time, through time.
LINGUISTICS
Queen’s University professor Gregory Toner is to spend the next five years scouring through old Irish texts, from poems to letters, searching for lost words to add to a new Old Irish dictionary. The Dictionary of the Irish Language concerns itself with words from the 7th and 17th century, and is freely available online. Surprisingly, Toner has already found translations for the modern words, “alcohol-free,” “pampering,” and “trap,” enriching our understanding of this unique language. Irish Dictionary|Irish News
In modern language, ultra-preserved words can reveal how our ancestors may once have spoken.
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
One of many overlooked women in science, 17th-century German entomologist Sibylla Merian changed the way we think about butterflies. In 1699 she traveled to Dutch Guiana (now Surinam) to document butterflies—a subject she became interested when South American specimens started arriving in Germany for the first time. Her opus, Metamorphosis Insectorium Surinamensiu, published in 1705, features 60 beautiful copperplate engravings, some of which can be viewed here. Brainpickings.org
Speak, butterfly: How butterflies wove art and science together for Vladimir Nabokov.
COSMOLOGY
“The ‘bang’ in people’s mind is the idea that there had to be a beginning,” says theoretical physicist Gabriele Veneziano, “But we don’t know, really, what preceded inflation.” When people think about cosmic inflation, apparently confirmed by the discovery of gravitational waves by BICEP2, they think of it occurring after a defined beginning of time. In this interview with George Musser, Veneziano explains why gravitational waves offer a glimpse of the universe before the big bang. Scientific American
Alan Guth, one of the first proponents of cosmic inflation theory, talks initial conditions with Nautilus.
April 5
GENETICS
In 1936, General Francisco Franco led a fascist military coup against the democratic Spanish Republic, and Spain erupted in civil war. During and after the conflict, Franco’s forces killed some 120,000 people, burying them in mass graves along roadsides and fields across Spain. Now, forensic scientists with the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory are beginning to recover victims’ bodies, analyzing their bones in order to confirm their identities and return them to relatives. Narrative.ly
DNA testing is putting faces on the missing victims of the Bosnian War.
ENTOMOLOGY
Bearing more than a passing resemblance to their famous fossil namesake’s, trilobite beetles are a diverse group of beetles found throughout Southeast Asia and India. The female of the species has a brightly colored long, armored body, while the male is relatively tiny (5 mm to the female’s 6 cm) and nondescript. In fact, the males look so similar to each other, that trilobite beetles are hard to classify without using genetic testing. Scientific American
Peter Ward talks to Nautilus about a "living fossil": the nautilus, our namesake.
ART
Sebastian Currier, artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies, composed “Deep-Sky Objects,” a cycle of songs for soprano, ensemble and electronics, bringing music and astrophysics together. Set in the distant future, the cycle features two lovers’ longing for each other, though entire galaxies separate them. Recently performed by the Argento Ensemble, Currier joins the Ensemble’s director for a conversation about the cycle, and about “spectral music”, in this video. IAS
Science and art collide: Challenging our understanding of separation, and what it means to be home.
EPIDEMIOLOGY
Prion disease is caused by the misfolded protein PrP, or prion, which infects a healthy body, converting normal proteins into toxic prions, causing tissue damage and cell death. Mice that had been bred with bank vole PrP instead of mouse PrP were exposed to eight different species’ toxic prions and all eight caused the disease. Usually, prion disease is spread within one species and not species to species, but bank voles are an exception. PLOS One
Why do creatures evolve with seemingly useless or potentially life-threatening traits?
April 4
NEUROLOGY
A protein called PCAF triggers genes that regenerate 65% of damaged nerves after spinal cord injury in mice, opening the door to new therapies for spinal cord injury. Mice were injected with a virus carrying PCAF, which normally turns "on" regeneration genes only in the peripheral nervous system (nerves outside the brain and spinal cord). However, when virally-driven, PCAF triggered nerve regrowth in the injured spinal cord, despite the fact that the central nervous system doesn't normally regenerate after nerve damage. Nature Communications
For people with permanent nerve damage, brain-computer interfaces could help restore functionality using robots.
ASTRONOMY
Nicknamed “El Gordo,” or “The Fat One,” galaxy cluster ACT-CLJ0102-4915 is far more massive than first thought, clocking in at about 3 million billion times the mass of our sun. Using images collected by the Hubble telescope, astronomers measured the warping effect of El Gordo’s gravity on the stars they could see beyond the cluster. This allowed them to determine its mass, confirming that El Gordo is the most massive known galaxy cluster. Arxiv
What can two galaxies merging reveal about our Universe, and our future?
ECOLOGY
Wild Pacific salmon life cycles negatively impact marine birds’ nesting habits in the North Pacific Ocean off the coast of Alaska, as both compete for the same food resources. The salmon live for two years and tend to mature on odd-numbered years, leading to an influx in adult salmon every odd year. Conversely, the birds produce fewer eggs at later dates as the salmon population booms, but in even-numbered years when there is less adult salmon, the birds have up to 15% higher breeding success. PNAS
Clash of the tiny: Squirrels and the turf war for L.A.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
A survey of 456 homeless people living in shelters and hostels in London has revealed that a much higher percentage of them are problem gamblers than the U.K. gambling population as a whole. Homeless people were asked a series of questions about their gambling, rating each response on a scale of 0 to 4 points, with a score higher than 8 signifying problem gambling. The British Gambling Prevalence Survey says 0.7% of gamblers in the UK have a problem, while for the homeless it is 11.6%. Journal of Gambling Studies
Why do we keep playing the lottery even if we know the odds aren't in our favor?
April 3
BIOENGINEERING
Tissue engineers have designed a “mini-heart” out of a cuff made from cardiac muscle cells that helps return blood to the heart when veins fail. Normally, blood makes the return trip from the legs to the heart through skeletal muscle contractions in the calves, which squeeze the blood upward, and valves in veins, which prevent the blood from flowing back down. Wrapped around a damaged vein segment in a leg, the mini-pump is designed to push blood upward with each throb. JCPT|YouTube
Engineering the human body has been our forte for millennia.
PALEONTOLOGY
Several bones, including tooth bones, of a saber tooth cat were discovered in a German coalmine at the same depth as human spears had previously been found. Both finds come from the same layer of ground, which would have been exposed to the elements 300,000 years ago. The find shows that early hominids and saber tooth cats must have competed for food and territory, revealing more about how homo sapiens’ ancestor lived in Paleolithic Europe. Phys.org
If we want to understand how early humans lived, we need to let go of our preconceptions.
PALEONTOLOGY
The preserved footprints of a carnivorous theropod dinosaur chasing a herbivorous sauropod have been digitally reconstructed in 3-D. Known as the Paluxy River tracks, the 45 meter-long trail of prints were excavated in 1940 in Texas, but some portions no longer remain. To reconstruct the site researchers scanned 17 photos of the site, developed a digital model, and compared it to maps drawn by the original excavators, creating an three dimensional representation that can be seen, here. PLOS One
Theropods like T.Rex may not look much like a bird's ancestor, but their feathers tell a different story.
ENVIRONMENT
The Baltic Sea is one of the largest oxygen-starved, or hypoxic, areas in the world. Researchers analyzed the amount of oxygen in the water and the changing level of salt over time to reconstruct the different oxygen levels over the last 115 years. In that time, there has been a tenfold increase in the level of oxygen deprivation, which mirrors the rising temperatures as warm water carries less oxygen. PNAS
Despite its salinity, the Dead Sea is teeming with microbial life.
April 2
ANTHROPOLOGY
When he was just a child, Pha Le’s father made the decision to escape from a life of persecution in Communist Vietnam. In exchange for agreeing to pilot a boat out of Vietnam, Le’s father got passage for only three people, forcing him to leave Le’s two younger brothers behind with a promise to send for them. In this audio recording, Le recounts his family’s escape and how deliverance can come in many different forms. The Moth
One woman's deliverance comes in a form that goes against her religion, family, and life experience.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Humans often tell “white” lies or bend the truth to help themselves or others in their group. Sixty volunteers were given oxytocin, a hormone associated with social interaction, and then asked to toss a coin, with one outcome ending in financial reward. When on oxytocin, volunteers would lie about the coin toss more if it benefited the group, but not if it only benefitted themselves, demonstrating that oxytocin may shift an individuals’ interests to the group’s, even in the face of moral convention. PNAS
Is it possible for something to be neither true or false?
MARINE SCIENCE
Squid control their body’s shine using a skin element called structural iridophores, which are highly reflective pigment cells. This skin element is partly controlled by something called the stelate ganglion, which is a collection of nerve endings outside the brain that help the squid react to its environment. If the wiring between the stellate ganglion and the brain is cut, the iridophores become transparent, dulling the squid’s iridescent skin. Journal of Experimental Biology
We now know how squid shine, but how do they see?
ECOLOGY
Roe deer in the Champagne region of France have given birth at the same time each year for 27 years, despite warming climates. Spring now comes about two weeks before it did in 1985, but fawns are still born at the same time as they were back then. Researchers find that fawn survival rates are falling, and they suspect it might be because the fawns have less food during the briefer springtime, leading them to be undernourished. PLOS Biology
Is there such a thing as hybrid ecologies, where man's industry and nature can intersect?
April 1
PSYCHOLOGY
Researchers asked a group of congenitally blind people, people who had gone blind later in life, and sighted people wearing a blindfold to say aloud the numbers one to ten. At the same time, they had to move their head, left and right, depending on how they saw the number order. People with visual experience all counted from left to right, while congenitally blind people went the opposite way, demonstrating that our tendency to visualize numbers from left to right is socially learned. Behavioral Brain Research
Losing his sight, a scientist illuminates the path to a cure for a deadly disease.
ENVIRONMENT
Phytomining consists of growing certain kinds of plants on metal-rich soil, like old minefields, allowing them to absorb metal through their roots and concentrate it in their leaves. They can then be harvested and burned, and their ashes processed in a smelter to collect the metal. About 400 known “hyperaccumulators”—plants that absorb metals like nickel and gold—exist, with the most efficient being yellow alyssums, which can become 9% metal through absorption. New Scientist
Nearly everyone and everything is partially made of discarded atomic elements.
ASTROPHYSICS
Earlier this month, the BICEP telescope at the South Pole detected what appeared to be gravitational waves left over from the Big Bang. Scientists kept BICEP at 4 kelvin (-452.47 F) by pouring liquid helium into the telescope’s casing, making the detectors sensitive to tiny amounts of energy. In this interview, electrical engineer Steffen Richter, the man who keeps BICEP cold, explains what life is like at the South Pole, and why the aurora makes the isolation all worth while. Science
Alan Guth, who first proposed the theory of cosmic inflation, and Sean Carroll talk time for Nautilus.
BIOENGINEERING
Researchers at Duke University are testing a new bioengineered muscle by inserting it into a chamber with a glass “window” placed on the backs of living mice. The glass chamber provides the researchers with a window to check the muscle’s progress in the mice. The muscle’s fibers are genetically modified to produce fluorescent flashes during calcium spikes, which cause the muscle to contract and which will become brighter as the muscle grows stronger. PNAS
Without a direct window, we have to use other creative strategies to monitor complex biological processes.
March 31
PSYCHOLOGY
Researchers photographed 230 people and mapped their facial muscles as they responded to verbal cues, such as, “You have unexpected good news. Most people expressed each emotion in the same way, with facial expressions interpreted to mean, for example, “happily surprised,” for 93% of the time. By plotting each emotion’s features into a computer program, researchers can use this tool to analyze the relationship between visible emotional responses and brain function. PNAS
Understanding and displaying human emotion, on the machine level.
ENTOMOLOGY
Six new Dracula ant species have been identified in Madagascar using a novel technique that compares the ants’ behavior instead of their anatomy. Dracula ant species are very difficult to identify: Some species have queens that are smaller than workers, or large individuals that look like workers, but behave like queens. A queen in one species can look almost indistinguishable from a worker from another species; often confounding researchers’ attempts to catalogue them by looks alone. ZooKeys
Meet the fire ant: traveler extraordinaire.
LITERATURE
In the Harvard rare book collection, there is a small French philosophical volume, “Des destinées de l’ame,” by essayist Arsène Houssaye. Houssaye gave the volume to a friend, Dr Boulard, in the 1880s, which Boulard had rebound in human skin because, according to a note included in the book, “a book on the human soul merited that it was given human skin.” Harvard’s collection contains three books bound in skin, a technique known as anthropodermic bibliopegy. The Crimson
What it means to be human is defined by the metaphors we use to describe our world.
CHEMISTRY
Arranged in a sequential spiral, this beautiful rendering of the periodic table as it was in 1949 attempts to use art to explain the chemical similarities between elements. Elements are arranged in order of number of electrons, from the simplest – Hydrogen – at the center to the most complex – the as yet unknown Rutherfordium (atomic number 104). Elements that behave in similar ways are grouped together and colored with different shades of the same color. LIFE
Some elements we take for granted, like carbon, are actually made of waste.
March 30
EXPLORATION
When Commander Chris Hadfield embarked on his first space shuttle flight, the odds of catastrophic disaster were one in 38. “You realize by the end of the day you’re either going to be floating effortlessly, gloriously in space,” he told the audience at TED2014 this month, “or you’ll be dead.” Watch his TED talk to learn how he kept calm when he went blind during a spacewalk—and to hear him perform 'Space Oddity'by David Bowie. TED
Alexander Kumar describes the feeling of coming home from the deep emptiness of space.
LITERATURE
“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” This sentence, from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of ten great sentences from English language literature chosen by The American Scholar. It captures the great uncertainty of the creative process, the moment where the artist attempts to make sense of their world and to understand what the world means to those around them. American Scholar
If we are to truly discover our world, we must come to terms with uncertainty.
EVENT | APR 14
The distance between Mars and the Earth shrinks by about 300 km every minute as the planets orbit’s align at their closest point,, reaching a peak minimum distance of 92 million km between the planets on April 14th. At this position known as an “opposition of Mars,” Mars and the sun sit directly opposite one another on either side of the Earth. April 14th is also a full lunar eclipse, so if it is a clear night both the moon and Mars should be visible red bodies in the sky. Phys.org
An astronomer explains why we need to fall back in love with the dark.
GENETICS
Since 1948, the residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, have been subject to the longest running cardiovascular study ever: the Framingham Heart Study. Now in its third generation of participants, the study offers unique insights into the effect of modern medicine and lifestyle on the changing trends in physical health and lifespan. In a lecture at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns uses this data to explore how natural selection shapes contemporary man. Harvard
As we learn more about our universe, our view of ourselves and our future is changing, too.
March 29
BIOCHEMISTRY
Non-profit paleontology organization PaleoQuest has teamed up with Lost Rhino Brewing Company to create Bone Dusters Paleo Ale: a beer brewed with yeast from fossil whale bones. Brewers collected the yeast (a subspecies of modern brewer’s yeast) from samples of a 14 million year old whale skull, which was a member of the Protocetidae family of ancient cetaceans. The first 650-gallon batch will soon be on sale at the Lost Rhino Brewing Company’s taproom in Virginia. Scientific American
Beer could be the secret to human civilization.
MEDICINE
In the 1850s, Florence Nightingale drew one of the most famous medical data visualizations of all time, demonstrating that in the Crimean War (1853-56), more British soldiers died of poor sanitation than in combat. Her visualization demonstrated the value of improving hospital hygiene, her life’s great work. It is now on display as part of the British Library in London’s new exhibition, Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight. British Library
For preventing disease, big data is the new drugs.
ORNITHOLOGY
In Aesop’s tale ‘The Crow and the Pitcher,’ a crow drops stones into a water jug until the water level rises to a level it can drink from. This may not be pure fiction: Researchers recently challenged six New Caledonia crows to choose from various kinds of stones to displace water in tubes for a food reward. All of the crows picked solid and sinking objects rather than floating or hollow ones, indicating that they had basic understanding of the causes of water displacement. PLOS ONE
Understanding cause and effect is a human tendency, one of many we actually share with animals.
March 28
ORNITHOLOGY
Ornithologist John James Audobon’s Birds of Americais a collection of 435 life-size, hand-colored plates depicting a range of bird species. This weekend, the exhibit Audobon’s Aviary: Parts Unknown opens at theNew York Historical Society. It highlights the watercolor studies done by Audobon in preparation for the book, in which he illustrated the birds he had collected, stuffed, and arranged using wires to replicate “natural” poses. New York Historical Society
Protecting the cathedral of biology in the Galapagos, beginning with a yellow warbler.
COSMOLOGY
A dwarf planet less than 250 km in diameter with two rings has been spotted among a collection of objects, called Centaur, between Saturn and Uranus. Known as Chariklo, the planetoid was identified by the European Space Organization at La Silla Observatory in Chile after it passed in front of a star. Made up of water ice and rocky matter much like it’s far larger neighbor’s rings, Chariklo’s rings are only 3-7 km wide, and no more than a few hundred meters thick. Nature
An exciting discovery, but what happens when new planets turn out to be fakes?
MEDICINE
Finding the Root of Gulf War Illness
Veterans with so-called ‘Gulf War Illness’ can suffer from fatigue and muscle repair problems, but doctors don’t know what causes it. Levels of phosphocreatine, a molecule that regulates energy metabolism in muscles, was compared before and after an exercise test in seven affected veterans and matched controls. Sufferers of the disease didn't recover as quickly as the controls after the test: They had severely depleted phosphocreatine, which could be used as a diagnostic marker for the disease. PLOS ONE
The trauma of war could be partially resolved with the help of technology.
GENETICS
An American cattle breed, the Texas longhorn, descended from two breeds brought to the United States by colonialists and immigrants. By reconstructing the genetic history of 134 cattle breeds from around the world, researchers found that the Texas longhorn is descended from Spanish cattle brought to America in the 1600s. These were then bred with Zebu cattle, a kind of Indian cattle that was introduced to the U.S. from Brazil on a new wave of immigration to the States in the 1800s. PLOS Genetics
Human migration can help plot our own evolutionary history, too.
March 27
COSMOLOGY
A new dwarf planet, called 2012 VP113, has been found beyond the edge of the known Solar System. Thought to be part of the hypothesized inner Oort cloud (a cloud of icy objects about one light year from the Sun), the planet is 80 times further from the Sun than is the Earth. Previously, the dwarf planet Sedna, at 76 times the distance of Earth to the Sun, was considered the edge of the Solar System, but 2012 VP113’s discovery has expanded our horizons even further.Nature
Our place in the universe is constantly shifting, rocking out of control.
CELL BIOLOGY
Scientists directed radiation at fruit fly larvae, damaging their cells' DNA and causing most of the cells to self-destruct. But before the cells died, they turned on a protein that activates a gene regulator named bantam, which has been linked to cell proliferation and maintenance. Surviving cells became increasingly less likely to self-destruct when exposed to further damage, despite the continued DNA damage. GSA
Can we engineer bacterial cells to kill one another?
MEDICINE
A new study of children under three in 36 developing countries found that increasing per person Gross Domestic Product (GDP) had little affect on bringing down nutrition-related growth defects. The research measured the affect of a 5% increase of per person GDP on incidences of stunting, wasting, and being underweight. On average, the odds of being stunted fell by 0.4 %, underweight by 1.1%, and wasted by 1.7%, suggesting that increasing GDP does not mean equally improved health outcomes. The Lancet
Why the current food aid policies may not be the best solution to world hunger.
ZOOLOGY
Ten species of tiny snails of the genus Plectostomahave been discovered in West Malaysia, Sumatra, and Thailand. Researchers used a micro-CT scanner to get 3-D X-rays of shells, identifying each species by shell shape, distribution, and genetic similarity. One of these, Plectostoma sciaphilum is already extinct and more are endangered as the limestone hills the snails live on are rare and isolated, making them a popular target for mining companies who want to use the limestone to make concrete. ZooKeys
Nature is inconstant, but can we ever know this until it is too late?
March 26
PALEONTOLOGY
A new fossil reveals that not all anomalocarids, an extinct group of marine predators, grasped prey with spiky appendages near their mouths. The discovery of the anomalocarid Tamisiocaris reveals that it may have instead eaten as whales do., Rather than appendages,Tamisiocaris had a filtering apparatus that could be swept through the water like a net, trapping small crustaceans and other creatures. Nature
What modern birds and an infamous Jurassic predator have in common.
PALEONTOLOGY
Paleontologists discovered this year that the lower half of a fossilized turtle’s humerus, the largest upper arm bone, uncovered on a New Jersey beach formed the missing piece of a partial turtle bone previously housed in the Academy of Natural Sciences archives in Philadelphia. The 70-75 million year old bone is from ancient turtle Atlantuchelys mortonis. Having a complete humerus has revealed that the animal was about 10 feet from tip to tail, making it one of the largest sea turtles recorded. YouTube
It took paleontologists years to work out what our most famous dinosaurs really looked like.
VISUAL ART
The colors of the sunset in old paintings may show how much pollution from volcanic activity was in the air at the time of their creation. Researchers analyzed landscapes painted in the last 500 years and found that for a few years following a large volcanic eruption, red sunsets became popular features in European paintings. Large volcanic eruptions fill the atmosphere with ash and gas, which can travel for thousands of miles and scatter sunlight, making sunsets red across the globe. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
If we want to preserve art for the future, we have to rely on science.
March 25
MARINE SCIENCE
A new study of bluefin tune, yellowfin tuna, and amberjack embryos has revealed that crude oil leaked from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill can cause serious heart defects in all three species. The fish embryos were exposed to crude oil collected from surface water and the damaged wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico. Because the spill occurred during these fish’s spawning season, the finding implies that the numbers of fish reaching maturity in the years following the spill will dip significantly. PNAS
Is there ever any good to be had from waste in our oceans? For some creatures, it's home.
MEDICINE
Citrate, a derivative of citric acid, is a natural by-product of cell metabolism that helps deliver calcium to bones. Researchers found that when citrate mixes with water, the viscous mix becomes trapped between the nano-scale mineral crystals within bones. This fluid allows enough movement between the crystals to make bones slightly flexible and less likely to shatter under pressure. PNAS
The body's natural resilience is amazing, but over time we have engineered them to become even better.
PALEONTOLOGY
Most mammals have seven neck vertebrae that can, in certain conditions, sprout a rib. Researchers compared modern elephant specimens with woolly mammoth remains from the late Pleistocene and found that they were 10 times more likely to have a neck rib than their modern relatives. In elephants, a neck rib is associated with inbreeding and a harsh environment during pregnancy, suggesting that mammoths may have suffered from a particularly adverse environment in the years leading up to their extinction. PeerJ
Monsters and marvels are the genesis of science.
EVENT | MAY 26
In 1829, Harvard University student Joel Giles produced his thesis “Solar and Lunar Eclipse,” a collection of illustrated proofs of the mathematics behind the two different kinds of eclipse. It is one of 406 digitized theses collected by the university’s archivists, produced during the 1780s up to the 1830s. The thesis is now one of many curious archive items on exhibit at the university as part of the ‘From Code Books to a ‘Love Story’’ exhibit, as a piece of art as much as science. Harvard
Wander through the Nautilus cabinet of curiosities.
March 24
BIOENGINEERING
Escherichia coli bacteria naturally produce biofilms made up long chains of proteins called CsgA, which help the bacteria stick to things. Scientists genetically engineered E. coli that produce biofilms tagged with clusters made up of the amino acid histidine, a building block of protein, but only when certain other molecules were present. The histidine tags latch onto gold nanoparticles, forming rows that can be used as nanowires— which could be used to develop living materials . Nature Materials
Re-engineering bacteria can make it its own worst enemy.
BIOENGINEERING
Drug resistant tuberculosis (TB) appears to be spreading, with 450,000 patients suffering from the illness in 2012. In honor of World TB Day, tomorrow a documentary by PBS's Frontline draws attention to the danger of virulent drug-resistant TB strains, and the need for better medicines. Luckily, drug developers have a new tool at their disposal: 3D printed petri dishes. PBS
Zach Zorich investigates how 3-D gelatin models could help find new therapies for TB.
EARTH SCIENCE
Volcanoes occasionally form in unexpected places, 100s of kilometers from the nearest rift valley, which are depressions in the Earth’s crust created by moving tectonic plates. In narrow, deep rift valleys, there are fewer large pockets between the crust and mantle that magma coming up from the mantle can pool into and then escape vertically through the ground. Instead, it is pushed horizontally away from the rift until it can find a point under less pressure to break the surface. Nature Geoscience
In the Earth's crust, jewels are forming.
MARINE SCIENCE
The glasshead barreleye fish has a cylindrical eye pointing upward, allowing it to see other creatures above silhouetted in sunlight. But to see what lurks behind it and at its sides, the fish uses a mirror-like membrane on its eye that is lined with guanine crystals. This reflects the light given off by bioluminescent creatures and other reflective surfaces around the fish on to its retina, allowing it see the rest of its environment even though it is constantly looking up. Proc. Royal Soc. B
How animals see their world.
MEDICINE
Scientists at Boston’s Northeastern University are developing an app called VocaliD that will let users donate their voice to those who can’t use their own. Software strips thousands of words spoken by a donor down to the tiny units of individual sounds. This is then blended with whatever sounds the recipient can make, matching both voices to create a personalized blend and convincing synthetic voice. VocaliD
A computer that can not only read for us, but which could be better at it, too.
March 23
MARINE SCIENCE
North Atlantic right whales can be tracked using a telltale “gunshot” sound produced by adult males, according to new research. Scientists proved they could track the whales using the sounds by placing remote acoustic monitors at two whale breeding grounds for two years. They found that the timing of the sounds corresponded with the right whale breeding season in the late fall indicating that it’s used during courtship or to ward off competing males.PLOS ONE
More seductive sounds the male of the species makes to find a mate.
VISUAL ART
Pink ribbons are a subtle way to show support for breast cancer, but a new collection of ball gowns inspired by the disease is quite the fashion statement. Each dress is decorated with cell patterns taken from images captured by researchers at the Naus Lab for cellular and physiological sciences at University of British Columbia. The collection, titled Fashioning Cancer: The Correlation between Destruction and Beauty, can be found here. UBC|Flickr
High heels become a symbol of rebellion in one woman's struggle for freedom.
FILM
Samsam Bubbleman is an artist with an unusual medium: soap and water. He is a record-breaking professional bubble blower, which are created when two layers of soap molecules sandwich water molecules between them, blown up with exhaled carbon dioxide. In this short film, he explains how blowing bubbles can entertain, fascinate, and awaken childhood nostalgia in even the most adult of audiences. Aeon
In art, we can find moments of brief and unexpected beauty.
MEDICINE
In the latest generation of Deep Brain Stimulator devices, two wires with four electrode contacts weave through the motor area of the brain, the subthalamic nucleus. The wires connect to a radio-controlled pulse-generating implant in the patient’s chest, which sends programed electrical pulses that quiet involuntary movements, like tremors. The implant records any abnormal neural patterns that may correlate with the tremors, something previously possible only when the brain was exposed during surgery. Nature
Brain-machine interfaces are becoming increasingly sensitive, unlocking its secrets.
March 22
COSMOLOGY
In 2024, Mars One hopes to successfully land four volunteers on Mars to establish the first extraterrestrial human colony. A historic mission, but there is a condition: there will be no way to return to Earth. In this short film, five Americans explain their motivations for entering Mars One’s competition to find four suitable candidates, and why going to Mars is worth never coming home. The Atlantic
When Alexander Kumar returned from Mars, he found his concept of home altered.
LITERATURE
Written in 1901, Thought-Forms by theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater features a sequence of beautifully colored images illustrating the book's central argument: that emotions, sounds, ideas, and events manifest themselves as visual auras. These auras are, the authors say, visible only to a gifted few. In this article, critic Benjamin Breen argues that Besant and Leadbeater believed they had a kind of spiritual synesthesia—a collision of the senses with the spiritual world. The Public Domain Review
There may be a little synesthesia in all of us.
ENTOMOLOGY
The curator of invertebrate zoology at the The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has discovered nineteen new species of praying mantis found in tropical forests in Central and South America, and in international museum collections. All the species are bark mantises, which live on the branches and trunks of trees and have flat bodies to mimic moss and bark These mantises are fast runners, gliding swiftly from one side of the tree to the other to avoid detection by predators. ZooKeys
Dedicating your life to the study of one animal can lead to greater discovery.
ZOOLOGY
On an expedition in New Britain, an island near Papua New Guinea, American geologist John Lane happened upon a tree kangaroo for sale at the side of the road. He posted photos of it online, prompting calls from biologists asking if Lane knew where the tree kangaroo, which wasn’t thought to be found on New Britain, had come from. So began Lane’s epic search for the rare and strange marsupial, as told by this article at The Atavist. The Atavist
The tree kangaroo could be an introduced species gone native, like these Galapagos plants.
March 21
FILM
The 1968 short film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames is a lesson in mankind’s relative unimportance on the cosmos’ vast scale. We begin with a man having a picnic on the grass in Chicago: Seconds later, our view has zoomed out 10 feet, then a 100, then a 1,000. At the same time, we are told the relative distance a man, a cheetah, and an airplane can travel in 10 seconds, the film’s perspective constantly expanding by a factor of 10 until we find ourselves 100 million light years away. Youtube
Science fiction films seek to disorientate us, taking us further from home.
PERCEPTION
The rise of digital journalism has blurred the line between real life journalists and software generated content, according to a new study. Readers were given a mix of articles written by journalists and machines and asked to rate their credibility, quality, and objectivity, as well as whether a human wrote it or machine. The machine-produced articles were perceived as more informative and trustworthy than those written by journalists, but they were judged as more boring and less pleasant to read. Journalism Practice
If we have competent artificial writers, will there soon be artificial readers, too?
ASTROPHYSICS
Astrophysicist David Arnett has been modeling stars’ physical processes with computers for years—a subject he became fascinated with after he saw a supernova in 1987. For decades after, most computer models were in 2-D only, showing the supernova as a fluid process with one stage in its demise seamlessly leading to the next. Now, Arnett has developed a new model of a supernova’s collapse in 3-D, allowing researchers to far better recreate the turbulence and dynamism of a star’s final moments. AIP Advance
Spotting supernovas may soon be a thing of the past, as the dark becomes a rare commodity.
ENTOMOLOGY
Three fossil stick insects from the early Cretaceous period (about 126 million years ago) have been found in Inner Mongolia. Parallel dark lines line the insects’ wings, and tongue-like shields protect their abdomens . These designs correspond to fossils found in the same region, from a relative of the gingko plant, which has tongue-shaped leaves with multiple, parallel lines.PLOS ONE
Stick insects and other animals reveal the wandering path of evolution.
March 20
ECOLOGY
A tropical milkweed has weaponized pollinia, the sacs of pollen that attach to pollinators like bees and birds to be distributed elsewhere. The pollinia have an unusual horn-like that appears to physically prevent the sacs from becoming entangled with other parent plants’ pollinia once they are attached to a pollinator. The horn effectively bars other plants’ pollinia from attaching to a pollinator, giving the original plant a better chance of successful pollination over its competitors. New Phytologist
Secrets of seduction from the animal kingdom.
GENETICS
At almost 7 times larger than the human genome, the loblolly pine genome has approximately 20.1 billion base pairs (humans have about 3.2 billion). A large proportion of the genome consists of repetitive sequences of DNA. The main form of these repeats is called a retrotransposon: a chunk of DNA that appears to have little purpose other than to copy itself and then become re-inserted elsewhere in the genome without seeming to affect the trees’ evolutionary adaptability. Genome Biology
Evolution is not so straight forward as we like to think it is.
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
To smile, according to health and well being entrepreneur Ron Gutman, is to be human. Smiling expresses joy and happiness, but it according to various studies done over the last fifty years it can also help you live longer, influence the outcome of your relationships, and boost your academic success. In thisTED talk, Gutman reviews some of the more unusual and profound of these studies, demonstrating how simply smiling could change our lives for the better. TED
The science of happiness: Expressing gratitude can boost your health.
ZOOLOGY
Researchers studying a group of Azara’s owl monkeys in Argentina for more than 18 years have confirmed that they are completely faithful to their mates by examining their DNA. They examined 14 areas of the genome in 35 offspring from 17 sets of parents, and found all of them only had genes from their parents, with no instances of cheating. Coyotes, sea horses and a kind of mouse are also known to be similarly faithful to their mates. Proc. Royal Society B
Our capacity for love is a mark of human uniqueness, one that apes may share.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Bighorn sheep were deliberately introduced in 1975 to Tiburón Island in the Gulf of California as part of a strategy to repopulate the endangered mainland population. For nearly 40 years they’ve been considered invasive, but now, researchers have found 1,500-year-old dung that matches scat made by bighorn sheep in Tiburón. This was confirmed by sequencing the dung’s mitochondrial DNA, raising questions about whether the modern sheep are an invasive or a reintroduced species. PLOS ONE
In the American South, an invasive species has made itself at home.
March 19
PALEONTOLOGY
A dinosaur called Anzu wyliei has been described for the first time from three specimens found in 66 million year old rocks at the Hell Creek Formation in North and South Dakota. Thought to be feathered like the species’ closest relatives, Anzu was 11 feet long, 5 feet tall at the hip, beaked, and had long, thin legs and neck like an ostrich. But the resemblance ends there: its forelimbs were tipped with large, sharp claws and it had a long, strong tail. PLOS ONE
T Rex, Anzu's relative, was less bird-like but similarly feathered.
NEUROSCIENCE
A new study has found that chronic or repeated sleep deprivation in mice leads to neuron damage and permanent loss. When mice were sleep deprived for a short time, the locus coeruleus brain cells, essential for optimal cognition, produced more of protein called sirtuin type 3 (SirT3), which protects brain cells from metabolic injury. After longer periods of sleep deprivation, the SirT3 response halted, and within several days the mice lost 25% of these neurons. Journal of Neuroscience
Maintaining our circadian rhythm could be the secret to happiness.
ENVIRONMENT
A common titanium compound used to whiten paint, food, and toothpaste becomes a photocatalyst when exposed to light. Thin titanium dioxide nanotubes were laid over a graphene sheet in order to trap impurities in water as it is passed over the two materials. Sunlight catalyzed the tubes, which causes them to oxidize and break down some of the impurities in the water, while the rest of the impurities remain trapped in the graphene to be removed later. American Chemical Society
Our water is teeming with pharmaceuticals, but is it harmful?
GENETICS
A new study of lactose tolerance—the ability to drink milk—in various African populations has found a link to the domestication of cattle and other milk-producing animals. A variant for the gene that expresses for lactose tolerance commonly found in Europeans, called T-13910, was also found in central and North African pastoralist groups. The mutation arose between 5,000 and 12,000 years ago, coinciding with the development of cattle farming in the Middle East and North Africa. American Journal of Human Genetics
It wasn't pastoralism, but beer, that domesticated man.
March 18
BIOENGINEERING
Protein hydrogels are used as scaffolds for cultivating organ cells like repair patches, but like gelatin, the gels fall apart easily, making them unsuitable for growing heart cells which need a strong foundation to withstand the heart’s beat. A new hydrogel developed from the protein tropoelastin has the elasticity and strength to give the cells proper support. 3-D printing patterns into the gel makes cells grow in a coherent pattern, creating robust colonies that can be used as repair patches in the heart. Nanowerk
Sometimes, medical advancements come in unlikely forms.
COSMOLOGY
A rare kind of rainbow called a glory was spotted in Venus’ atmosphere by the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft. Like all rainbows, a glory is caused by sunlight filtering through cloud droplets, but glories can only be seen from above, and they look like colored concentric circles. According to the data collected, clouds of sulphuric acid droplets that were either coated with elemental sulphur or mixed with ferric chloride probably created the glory, but further research is needed. Icarus|ESA
Peering at planets would be impossible without telescopes like Hubble.
MEDICINE
Researchers transplanted human stem cells into mice bearing humangenes. The genes encoded immune system proteins, which transformed thestem cells into white blood cells, lending the mice a human-like immune response. They learned that the mouse's system was indeed similar to human's when they grafted a tumor onto the mouse, and foundthat its immune cells attacked the invader in much the same way asthey would in a human body. Nature Biotech.
Without test subjects, medicine would never advance.
ENERGY
Low-pressure pockets in subterranean shale rock could provide the perfect dumping ground for the nuclear waste from power plants. Glaciers squeezed the water from the rocks, and as they retreated, the rock sprang back into its original shape faster than water could seep back in, making them practically impermeable to water. This unique physical property means that the waste would have no opportunity to leak into the groundwater—the biggest argument against burying nuclear waste underground. ACS
Our nuclear waste is a gold mine, but can we use it?
March 17
ASTROPHYSICS
The BICEP2 radio telescope on the South Pole has, if confirmed, found the most direct evidence of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime that travel outward from a source point as predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916. Detected in the Cosmic Microwave Background, the waves appear to have been created by the rapid inflation of the universe moments after the Big Bang. If proven, physicist Alan Guth's theory of cosmic inflation, proposed in 1980, will finally be validated. Nature|New York Times
Sean Carroll and Alan Guth talk to Nautilus about trying to trace time's arrow in the cosmos.
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
A symbol of good luck, the four leaf clover is a rare find. Most commonly found on plants of the Trifolium repens, or white clover, variety, it is thought that a four leaf clover occurs once in every 10,000 clover shoots. This video explains how statistical analysis and other tactics can help you find the supposedly lucky charm. Scientific American
Know your chances, with the help of math.
NEUROSCIENCE
Genes that determine the architecture of the inner ear may influence musical aptitude. Scientists sequenced 767 peoples’ genomes and tested their ability to differentiate between pitches and musical patterns. Genetic variations most strongly associated with high scores in the audio tests were found near the GATA2 gene, which is associated with the inner ear and inferior colliculus, the part of the brain that processes the ear’s signals into sound. Nature
A musical genius' talent for code has given us one of our greatest mysteries.
ASTRONOMY
NASA launches the first of its Asteroid Grand Challenge competitions today, asking wannabe asteroid hunters to produce an algorithm that can spot asteroids in images collected by on-the-ground telescopes. The algorithm needs to increase asteroid detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, and ignore imperfections in the data. Sign up here to get involved, and find out how your work could be in the running for $35,000 worth of awards from NASA. Top Coder
Mark your target, and begin your journey into space.
March 16
ENERGY
Geothermal Energy Gave Refuge to Life in Antarctica
Geoothermal sites like volcano craters, hot springs, and steam-carved caves provided refuge to Antarctic plants, fungi, and invertebrates during the last glacial period. The heat would have enabled the organisms to survive the cold, before diversifying and spreading across Antarctica. A new study has revealed that species continue to be most diverse and concentrated at these sites, highlighting the importance of heat to survival. PNAS
Life in Antarctica, alone in the wilderness.
COSMOLOGY
As we settle in to watch the second episode of the revival of Carl Sagan’s epic series Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson, we cast an eye back to episode 9 from the original. In this segment from “The Lives of Stars, ” Sagan used the analogy of Alice’s fall into Wonderland to illustrate the distortion surrounding strong gravitational fields like black holes. When light enters, it bends towards the center of gravity, distorting the surrounding space. Youtube
Is it possible to fall in love with the night sky?
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Conman George Psalmanazar beguiled the 18th Century European elite with his 1704 book, The History of Formosa, about an exotic island where priests sacrificed children and criminals were killed and eaten. He was eventually discredited after explorers started traveling to Formosa, modern day Taiwan. Until then, Psalmanazar was the foremost authority on the place, even constructing a fictitious alphabet and dictionary, which you can read here.Cambridge
Is home where the heart is? Or is it a fiction we tell ourselves?
ENTOMOLOGY
Five new species of armored spider have been discovered in South East China. The armored spiders, so named for their complex plate pattern covering their abdomen, were found in caves in South East China’s Karst region. Two of the species had only 4 eyes (spiders have 8 on average), a possible result of their development in the dark cave environment. ZooKeys
Evolution can take an unusual path depending on the environment.
March 15
GENETICS
This week, Aeon magazine published a discussion of science writer David Dobbs' essay, 'Die, Selfish Gene, Die,' which challenges the gene-centric explanation of evolution in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.Biologist Karen James reminisces about the enlightening effect Dawkins' text had on her younger self, while primatologist Robert Sapolsky laments the popular obsession with genes and DNA as the "Code of Code." As he told Nautilus, environment counts for more in our development than we think. Aeon
Our immediate environment can chart the course of our development.
MICROBIOLOGY
By taking data from their studies in molecular biology, biochemists, computer scientists, and music technologists have come together to produce a new installation at the Kibbee Gallery in Atlanta, GA. CalledMolecular Music, the installation is designed to help the audience enhance their understanding of how molecules behave by hearing them as well as seeing them in action. The installation is part of the Atlanta Science Festival, which runs between March 22nd and March 29th throughout the city. Molecular Music
Music can hijack our perception, changing how we experience the world around us.
ASTRONOMY
Tim Peake, a European Space Agency astronaut, is to embark on his journey to the International Space Station next year and the agency is taking suggestions for his mission's name. The first British astronaut to go to the International Space Station with ESA, Peake's mission will last for six months as part of Expedition 46/47. Enter the competition here for your chance to win the privilege of naming the mission and a mission patch signed by Peake. ESA
We can all shoot for the stars, we just need to pick a way to get there.
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
In the early 1980s, Barry J. Marshall started drinkingHelicobacter pylori in order to find out whether the bacteria cause peptic ulcers. In 2005, he was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his selfless work. In this podcast, Marshall explains why risk-taking should lie at the heart of science experimentation, and why future generations will be better for it. Nobel
Putting your family into genetic limbo for the sake of science.
March 14
COSMOLOGY
This striking composite image, taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2007, wouldn't have been possible without using a "Pi Transfer" to navigate a path around Saturn. As Cassini orbits Saturn, it flies by Saturn's largest moon, Titan, at opposite sides of its orbit, with Titan's orbital position differing by pi radians between the two flybys. When it flies by, Cassini uses Titan's gravity to change its perspective on Saturn, enabling it to take various images of the planet and its rings. NASA
Navigating our way through space requires a craft, but we have to choose it first.
PALEONTOLOGY
A new fossilized species of ostracod, a class of crustaceans that includes shrimp, has been discovered in New York State. Measuring between 2-3 millimeters, the 450 million year old fossils were so well preserved that their eggs were still intact underneath them, providing evidence of ancient reproductive and brood care strategies. Researchers have named the ostracod Luprisca incuba, after Lucina, the Roman goddess of childbirth. Current Biology
Mother's love, compassion, empathy—this animal has it all.
ECOLOGY
Dingo baiting to preserve livestock is having a deleterious affect on small native Australian mammals, according to a new study. Researchers compared unregulated sites in conservation reserves with those that had been setting out poison traps for dingoes, which threaten livestock. Removing dingoes meant the population sizes of their competition, foxes, and the large herbivores they preyed upon like kangaroos, increased, while small mammals, such as bandicoots, that the foxes ate were in decline. Proc. of Royal Society B
In a hybrid ecology, nature is no longer held separate from man.
March 13
ZOOLOGY
Light pollution puts seed-dispersing fruit bats in the Amazon rainforest off foraging for their food, according to new research. A cage filled with fruit was divided into one dark compartment and one lit with a common kind of street lamp demonstrated that the bats would fly into the dark compartment twice as much as the lighted one. Once in the compartments, bats in the dark compartment ate almost twice as much fruit as bats in the light compartment. Journal of Applied Ecology|Youtube
Our addiction to light may be about to overwhelm us.
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
On this day in 1855, astronomer Dr Percival Lowell was born. After studying the drawings of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli of canals on Mars he devoted much of his work to noting unnatural features on the surface of the Red Planet, which he claimed were markers of not only water, but of complex life. Although NASA's Mariner missions disproved the existence of canals in the 1960s, the question of whether there is life on Mars still fascinates. New York Times|NASA
Life in space may have been carried there by us.
ENGINEERING
With a snap of its tail, a blue, rubbery-looking fish darts away in a stream of bubbles. But this is no fish, it is a robot: Carbon dioxide released from a canister in the fish's tail bends it quickly in the opposite direction, mimicking a real fish's fast escape maneuver. This short video from MIT demonstrates the advance in so-called soft robots: self-contained, autonomous, robots with soft exteriors and powered by fluid pumped through flexible channels. Youtube|MIT
Video: Robot animals could take control of real-life nature.
METEOROLOGY
Scientists have mapped the evolution of Hurricane Sandy with the help of volunteers who collected 685 rainwater samples from sites ranging from North Carolina to New Brunswick, Canada. Oxygen and hydrogen isotope levels recovered from the water revealed when the storm met other weather systems. Over the mid-East Coast, levels of a hydrogen isotope increased as the storm collided with a continental cold front and picked up evaporation from the Atlantic, causing intense rain over the North East of America.Utah |PLOS One
Never mind hurricanes - how can we insure against a rainy day?
March 12
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Twitter may seem like a cacophony of different voices and opinions, but new research shows that dominant majority opinions evolve quickly and are difficult to change once established. An analysis of 6 million tweets collected at random from the first 6 months of 2011 were sorted by topic to reveal the authors’ underlying sentiment as they developed over time. Opinions became established if increasingly large institutions endorsed them over time, demonstrating that social media is not free of market forces.CHAOS
If a story is compelling enough, will we believe it even if the evidence says otherwise?
MICROBIOLOGY
Bacteria communicate with one another using chemical signals called quorum sensing. Researchers studied the function of quorum sensing inPseudomonas aeruginosa, finding that like humans and other animals with complex communication patterns, bacteria pass different combinations of signals to each other that depend on their social and physical context. That means the bacteria can change the function of these chemical signals as needed, letting them respond intelligently to their environment. PNAS
Bacteria don't just communicate like humans: they live with us, too.
INTERNET CULTURE
Twenty five years ago today, computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web while working at CERN, bringing "www." into existence and fundamentally altering the way we share information. As it celebrates its silver anniversary, the Pew Research Center reports that 87% of Americans now use the Internet, up from a mere 14% when they were first surveyed in 1995. But while 76% of Americans think the Internet is good for society, 15% think it is outright bad for society. Pew Research Center
Hackers rewrote the rules of the Internet, all from the comfort of an IRC chatroom.
March 11
THEORETICAL PHYSICS
In August 1984, theoretical physicists Michael Green and John Schwarz brought string theory into the mainstream of theoretical physics. Twenty years on, Green says that the outcomes of their research are still impossible to predict: In the meantime, he says, string theory "provides a constant stream of unexpected surprises." Watch this video to find out what was so surprising about Green and Schwarz's breakthrough, and why it made many physicists take string theory seriously. Phys.org
As we seek to understand the universe, we must be comfortable with total uncertainty.
NEUROSCIENCE
In a new study in Sweden, a group of 84 volunteers were interviewed while wearing virtual reality goggles and headphones, once with the ability to perceive their body, and once without the ability to perceive their body. In a memory test a week later, participants recalling the “out of body” experience had very poor memories of the event. Follow-up fMRI scans showed that when people tried to recall the “out of body” event there was a lack of activity in the hippocampus, the part of the brain linked to episodic memory.PNAS
There is a constant search in the brain for the heart of what makes humans unique.
ZOOLOGY
Research at the Tsaobis Baboon Project in Namibia has found that baboons copy other baboons’ demonstrations if they have bold personalities. Shy baboons watched a task demonstration for the same length of time as bold baboons, but when it came to completing the task themselves they were unable, or unwilling to do it. This could be because of the strict social hierarchy baboons have to abide by—one that Robert Sapolsky believes informs the human social hierarchy, too. PeerJ
Primates are the source of our obsession with celebrity.
March 10
ENVIRONMENT
The Mongol Empire, begun by Genghis Khan in the early 12th century, may have risen on the back of unusually good weather. Tree rings in ancient Siberian pine trees growing on Mongolia’s Khangi Mountains show that between 1211-1225 AD there was significantly more rain and warmer weather than was normal. The good weather brought fertile pastures with it: enough grass, one presumes, to support an army’s worth of warhorses. PNAS
Seeds can sow a revolution, in culture and science.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Until 1900, visitors to Stonehenge could remember their trip by taking a bit of the stone home with them. Visitors had been allowed to use chisels to chip off some of the 5,000 year old World Heritage Site, until the landowner decided to put a stop to the damage. Some didn’t pay heed to the new rules: Six years ago, conservationists noticed that one stone had been chiseled once more. Smithsonian
Sometimes the closest we come to fame is in a place, not people.
MATTER
Diamonds that have been bombarded with nitrogen atoms can be used to detect the tiny magnetic fields produced by high temperature superconductors, materials that when kept at -280 F (-173 C) have almost no resistance to electricity. The nitrogen atoms pair with vacant spaces in the diamond to create so-called nitrogen-vacancy centers. The light emitted by these centers is highly sensitive to magnetic fields, allowing the superconductor’s miniscule field to be read using laser spectroscopy.Physical Review B
Diamonds: the ancient relic with a violent history.
March 7
ASTRONOMY
New data from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a satellite that took more than 750 million images of our solar system and its immediate surroundings, shows that our sun lives in a crowded neighborhood. Astronomers identified 3,525 new stars and brown dwarfs within 500 light years of our own sun. WISE was retired in 2011, but the satellite was brought back to life in late 2013 to help hunt for potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. NASA
Tracking down our sun's first home.
ECOLOGY
Bananas are plagued by round worms, which burrow into their roots, sap them of nutrients and moisture, and eventually cause the plant to fall over. Researchers compared the popular export banana, Grande Naine, with the Yangambi km 5 banana, which suffers less worm damage. They found that though both bananas have metabolites that can kill worms, the Yangambi variety has almost twice the load of the most potent, called anigorufone, than the more popular variety. Phys.org
Once harvested, the banana's journey from tree to fruit bowl relies on science.
EARTH SCIENCE
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh are calling for volunteers across the UK to adopt a tree this spring to help track how climate change is altering natural processes. Once you pick your tree, you can log its basic information at TrackATree.org.uk along with information about the plants living beneath its canopy, like bluebells, updating as the season progresses. Researchers recommend a weekly pilgrimage from before it buds all the way to leafing. Track a Tree
If we want to save endangered species, we need to start tracking them.
March 6
EVOLUTION
Adipose fins, seemingly useless fins located between the dorsal fin and the tail, are found in more than 6,000 species of fish. Researchers took the genetic information of more than 600 species of both living and fossil fish and reconstructed their evolutionary tree to pinpoint when and in what species these fins evolved, expecting to find that they had evolved in early fish but had lost their significance. Instead, adipose fins arise independently and repeatedly throughout the evolutionary tree. Royal Society
Evolution's weave defies our understanding.
GENETICS
Revive and Restore, a U.S.-wide project, wants to bring back the passenger pigeon, hunted to extinction in 1914. By sequencing the genomes of passenger pigeon specimens and their still-living relative, the band-tailed pigeon, researchers hope to pinpoint the genes in the passenger pigeon that give it its unique characteristics. Band-tailed pigeons could then be bred together to amplify the genes that are key to passenger pigeon traits, eventually bringing the passenger pigeon back from the dead. Revive and Restore
We are becoming less and less tied to the rhythms of natural time.
PALEONTOLOGY
By examining the abundance of dung and tree beetle fossils from the Last Interglacial (132-110,000 years ago) and the early Holocene (10-5,000 years ago), paleontologists have constructed a picture of early environments. In the Last Interglacial, 55% of fossil beetles were dung beetles, suggesting that there was lots of open pasture for large ancient herbivores to graze on, while depositing their dung. Meanwhile, in the early Holocene, 57% were tree-associated, suggesting an increase in woodland. PNAS
The amazing cosmic capabilities of dung beetles.
March 5
ENERGY
A new nickel-gallium catalyst converts hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methanol, which we use to make different kinds of fuel, more efficiently than a conventional copper-zinc-aluminum catalyst. The new catalyst was found by comparing the chemical properties of the conventional catalyst with a database of 100s of compounds. At 200 C, nickel-gallium produced more methanol from the same amount of natural gas than the original catalyst, and less carbon monoxide byproduct. Nature Chemistry
Advances like this help to explain why the combustion engine just won't die.
MARINE SCIENCE
Like a modern day Jacques Cousteau, marine architect Jacques Rougerie has created a fantastic floating marine research lab that will allow scientists to observe our oceans uninterrupted for months at a time. In blueprints, the Sea Orbiter stretches 27 m into the air and 31 m into the sea, uses solar and wind power for energy and a mini model has already been tested for durability in storms. Rougerie’s dream could become reality: it reached its $444,632 goal on crowdfund site Kiss Kiss Bank Bank. Sea Orbiter
Peter Ward's wonderful and dangerous life, under the sea.
COSMOLOGY
The Milky Way Project wants citizen scientists to help analyze thousands of photographs of the Milky Way collected by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Users are given photos to mark if they see bubbles (dark gaps in a dust cloud), star clusters, Extended Green Objects (young stars with green-looking outflows), and galaxies. This narrows down the images that astronomers then study. Milky Way Project
Starless planets could be fantastic rarities, or common as muck.
March 4
ARCHAEOLOGY
Oxygen isotopes preserved in snail shells embedded in a lakebed in Haryana, India, reveal a 200 year long drought about 4,100 years ago. The delta-18oxygen isotope value increases when evaporation exceeds rainfall, and 4,100 years ago the concentration of the oxygen isotope went up by more than four percent. Archaeologists suggest that the Indus civilization, spanning South Asia, began to deurbanize at the same time, possibly due to the devastation of rain-dependent crops. Geology
Insuring your company against rain comes at a price.
NEUROSCIENCE
Sebastian Seung’s neuroscience lab at MIT has created a game where players score points by correctly coloring in the connection pathways between retinal neurons in 3D cube simulations of tiny chunks of the brain. So far, players have colored in more than 2 million of the 3D cubes, allowing the lab to map the connections in 90 brain cells. The researchers hope that by mapping the connections in retinal cells, they may uncover the connections essential to motion perception and other visual perception. Eyewire
How eating a bar of chocolate unlocked one woman's neural sound system.
ECOLOGY
A New Guinea flatworm, one of the world’s 100 worst invasive species, has been found in a greenhouse in Caen, France. The worm is very flat, about 5 cm long, and a dark olive-black with a clear stripe running down its length, and a white belly. This is the first sighting of the worm in Europe, but conservationists are already worried: In Britain, the related New Zealand flatworm has already invaded and devastated the native earthworm population. PeerJ
Are ants the ultimate invaders?
March 3
ENTOMOLOGY
Bumblebees buzz when foraging; they vibrate flower stamens to dislodge pollen. Scientists at Stirling University recorded 1,289 buzzes of female worker bees from various common British bumblebee families and found that each family has its own buzzing style. For example, bee Bombus pascuorum buzzes at 213 Herz (about an A note) for a second when foraging pollen, while Bombus terrestis buzzes for a mere ¾ seconds at 280 Herz (a solid D). Naturwissenschaften
Hidden in Elgar's music, there are unbreakable codes waiting to be broken.
PALEONTOLOGY
To try and recreate how a bipedal dinosaur may have walked, scientists turned to their distant descendant: the chicken. Chickens with wooden tails weighted at 15% of their bodyweight strapped onto them developed a distinctive walk from their free roaming counterparts who tend to walk using just the section of leg below the knee. With wooden tails, their weight was thrust forward, and they used their thighs for movement, causing them to have big, heavy strides—like a dinosaur. PLOS One
Behind every famous dinosaur, there are unsung heroes.
February 28
METEOROLOGY
In Darwin, Australia, climate scientists are flying into icy weather in order to find out how high altitude ice crystals form in clouds, mostly at altitudes above 22,000 feet. When flying through ice crystal clouds, the crystals get into airplanes' engines, slowly cooling them so that ice accumulates in the engine and makes it lose power temporarily. Pilots don't have onboard weather sensors that can detect the ice crystals, leaving it up to scientists on the ground to predict the weather for them. NASA|Youtube
Getting up close and personal with winter storms for science.
CELL BIOLOGY
To protect against bad bacteria, our intestines are lined with mucus secreted by cells in the intestine lining. Scientists found that by inhibiting a molecular switch, called NLRP6 inflammasome, in mice, their intestinal wall’s cells don’t produce the mucus, leading to infection and inflammation from bad gut bacteria linked to obesity and metabolic diseases. If NLRP6 also guards against infections in humans, then inflammasome may become the target of new therapies for diseases influenced by gut bacteria like diabetes. Yale
What if obesity really is nobody's fault?
ANTHROPOLOGY
In 1970, a local brujo, or wizard, in Catemaco, Mexico hosted a witchcraft convention. Since then, Noche de Brujas, The Night of the Witches, has grown to a mass cleansing ceremony, held on the side of Cerro Mono Blanco hill. The festival is held on the first Friday of March: a mere 100 pesos can buy a limpia, or cleansing. Lonely Planet
Superstition and intuition have always been the frontiers of science.
February 27
MEDICINE
Patients with multiple food allergies may build up a tolerance to the food by ingesting tiny, increasing doses of it for several months. In a clinical trial, doctors found that injecting asthma drug Omalizumab, used to treat allergy-triggered asthma, for 8 weeks before starting food therapy and for the first 8 weeks of treatment sped the desensitization process up from 85 weeks to 18. By week 18, most patients could eat 4 grams of the different foods they were allergic to safely, the equivalent of 2 peanut M&Ms. Yale
Five more unlikely breakthroughs in medical science today.
COSMOLOGY
NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed 715 new planets, 94 % of which are smaller than Neptune, bringing the total number of confirmed exoplanets—planets outside our Solar System—to nearly 1,700. Four of them 2.5 times smaller than the Earth. The multi-planet systems, all with flat, circular orbits, resemble our own Solar System's, indicating that this pattern is commonplace throughout the Milky Way. NASA
The trials and tribulations of exoplanet hunting.
GAMES
The U.S. government recognizes players of the online game, League of Legends, as professional athletes, meaning they can travel to the US with P1-A visas for their extraordinary ability in sports. Each day, 27 million players battle on League of Legends. The championship finals, screened live in California in October 2013, attracted a crowd of more than 10,000 spectators. US Gamer
Do we make gods of gamers?
February 26
MEDICINE
Treating smoke-exposed mice with diabetes drug ciglitazone reversed damage caused by early-stage emphysema, chronic lung inflammation that increases the lung’s volume and makes it difficult to breath. Mice were exposed to cigarette smoke for 3 months, giving them early-stage emphysema, and then treated with the drug twice a week for 2 months, while continuing to be exposed to smoke. After 5 months of smoke, untreated mice had almost 450 mm^3 lung volume, while treated mice had 350 mm^3 lung volume—the same as when the trial began. Journal of Clinical Investigation
Can the body learn to fight its biggest health threats alone?
HISTORY
Cornflakes inventor and surgeon John Harvey Kellogg is oft quoted, “You cannot work with men who won’t work with you.” Children often think this of their parents, choosing instead to follow their immediate desires—like buying up boxes of Frosted Flakes—even if they know it could land them in trouble. In this piece by B.J. Novak, one boy finds out that his instincts to work against his parents may have been worth sugary cereal, after all. New York Times
A box of Frosties could change your life.
MARINE SCIENCE
Horseshoe crabs are the sole source of Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL), a blood extract that is used to detect pathogen contaminators in drugs and medical devices that could cause hemorrhagic strokes and other severe complications. Pharmaceutical companies drain up to 30% of blood from several hundred thousand crabs each year. The cost of LAL is high for these living fossils: a new study into their survival rates found 10-30% of crabs died after bleeding. Biology Bulletin
Modern medicine and its dramatic impact on our fish.
February 25
MEDICINE
Spectrin is a protein that helps form elastic lattices under the surface of red blood cells, helping them flex as they travel through the circulatory system. In a study of roundworms, scientists found that worms with impaired spectrin also suffered nerve cell damage and a disrupted sense of touch. The result indicates that the protein builds the same elastic lattices around these nerve cells. Nature Cell Biology
Why lasered Jell-O is the perfect shell for pathogens.
NEUROSCIENCE
Scientists have identified the section of the brain in the hippocampus that allows animals to recognize another member of the same species. Mice tend to be naturally curious and spend more time investigating a new mouse than one they have met before, but if the brain section (called CA2) is nonfunctioning, they show no preference for novel or previously encountered mice. CA2 has high levels of a receptor protein for the hormone vasopressin, which is linked to social bonding in animals. Nature
The intricacies of neuroscience, and what Robert Burton thinks it reveals about ourselves.
February 24
GEOLOGY
Sand dunes form when individual grains of sand accumulate through wind transportation, a process called saltation. Individual granules form ripples perpendicular to the wind's direction, eventually growing into sand dunes. This picture from NASAshows a Martian dune field in a crater near Mawrth Vallis: The dune's shape and spacing is determined by the size of the sand particles, wind speed, and ground topography. NASA
The treasures that lie beneath the Earth's surface.
EXPLORATION
The Polynesian Voyaging Society plans to sail around the world in a 62”x20’ storied Hawaiian canoe, called Hōkūle’a. The canoe will be navigated almost entirely using “wayfinding,” which is a traditional Polynesian method of navigation relying on natural markers like the sun, stars, and waves. It will take about five years to complete the 47,000 nautical mile journey, with the first leg from Hawaii to New Zealand to be completed by the end of this year. National Geographic
Man can journey round the Earth and far beyond it.
MICROBIOLOGY
The western black-legged tick, carried on the backs of the western grey squirrel, harbors a new species of the Borellia bacteria that has researchers worried. Out of 1,180 tick samples from San Francisco parks, researchers found 43 ticks with Borellia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, and the new strain Borellia miyamoti. People infected with B. miyamoti appear to suffer similar symptoms to Lyme disease, but it is still not known whether the bacteria cause long-term health problems. CDC
Uncertainty in medicine may be on the brink of resolution.
February 21
ENERGY
Pomegranates have inspired a new silicon anode, which stores charge in a rechargeable electrolyte battery. Silicon nanoparticles are coated in a layer of carbon, and then grouped into larger clusters, which are then coated a second time. This protects the silicon from damage by a battery’s electrolyte fluid. The fruity-design results in batteries that retain 97% charge even after 1,000 cycles of charging and discharging energy. Nature
The natural world could be our best resource for energy efficiency.
BIOENGINEERING
Using a lettuce seedling attached to two aluminum electrodes, scientists have created a bio-wire: a plant used in place of a wire to transfer electricity from one point to another. The lettuce tended to have a lower output voltage than input, with 12 Volts in and 10 Volts out, but this fluctuated. Scientists believe the fluctuations are caused by the plant’s cytoplasmic flow, which is the delivery system of nutrients and fluids keeping the plant alive. Arxiv
Plants already have a fully fledged communication network.
MEDICINE
Many vaccines must be stored at 35 to 45 F, but MenAfriVac, a new meningitis A vaccine, is still viable at temperatures of 102 F or less, and can be kept out of a fridge for up to four days. If the vaccine heats beyond 102 F, a heat sensor label changes color to warn doctors that the vaccine is too hot. After vaccinating 155,000 people in Benin with either the normal meningitis A vaccine or MenAfriVac, doctors reported that there were no cases of meningitis A in Benin in 2013, including the areas were MenAfriVac was used. MenAfriVac|Vaccine
Keeping things cold in transit can be hard, especially when they are time sensitive.
February 20
LITERATURE
Science fiction author Ray Bradbury said that he wasn’t predicting the future in his work, but trying to prevent it by exposing its flaws ahead of time. But science fiction authors actually have a good track record for predictions come true: Isaac Asimov predicted online education, Arthur C. Clarke predicted tablet computing, and Douglas Adams predicted eBooks. Watch this PBS episode to find out more about how science fiction told readers about their future selves. Youtube
The time machine: where literature and science meet.
GAMES
Twitch Plays Pokemon is an online multiplayer game of Pokémon Red, originally released in the 1990s for Nintendo Gameboys. The game was set up a mere five days ago, but already has 80,000 players all vying for control of the hapless central character, Ash, as he navigates his way through the Pokémon universe. Follow this link to play, or to watch the chaos unfold as thousands of people try to play a single player game. Twitch|Kotaku
Online sabotage can have dramatic consequences, on and off line.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Old lead is more pure, dense and less radioactive than the freshly mined metal, which means it is the ideal shielding material for sensitive physics experiments. But it is also of historical importance: Romans made pipes, coins, weapons and other everyday objects from lead, providing physicists with a large and easily accessible supply. Melting these down destroys the information they can give us about our past, but they could be the key to unlocking some of the secrets of our future, too. Scientific American
One person's waste is another's goldmine.
February 19
ENTOMOLOGY
Stick insects have two separate pads on their feet, one sticky and one not, which they switch between depending on the direction of travel and terrain. When moving up a surface, stick insects don’t stick: instead they use the non-sticky pad, which is covered in lots of tiny hairs. The hairs generate massive amounts of friction with the surface the insect is climbing, allowing it to move upwards without having to unglue itself with every step. Royal Society|Phys.org
Some more amazing animals who travel in strange and wonderful ways.
ASTRONOMY
NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is designed to pick out radioactive X-ray signals radiated from dying stars and their subsequent supernova. By training it on the supernova Cassiopeia A, astronomers found patterns of titanium-44, an element created when star’s explode, in the heart of the supernova, suggesting that when the star died it didn’t blow up uniformly. Instead, successive shockwaves probably ripped the star apart, leaving the titanium in random clumps near the center.NASA|Youtube
We are all made of the remnants of an exploding star.
MATHEMATICS
A new proof of part of the Erdös discrepancy problem, which tries to find patterns in an infinite list of the numbers “1” and “-1”, by University of Liverpool mathematicians took up 13 gigabytes of memory. The proof is two gigabytes larger than the whole of Wikipedia, making it too large to actually go through and check. The proof begs the question: Can a computer be trusted to prove a math problem once and for all? Arxiv
David Deutsch reminds us that for the truth to set us free, we have to challenge it.
February 18
ZOOLOGY
The Consolation of Elephants
Just as humans embrace and offer consoling words in times of sadness or stress, elephants appear to touch and vocalize in order to calm distressed elephants. Now, scientists have found empirical evidence for these consolations, by observing 26 captive Asian elephants for nearly a year. Elephants touched one another’s face, made high-pitched chirping sounds, and even put their trunk in the stressed elephant’s mouth in order to calm it after being spooked by a dog, and other stressful events.
Elephants are not the only animal with empathy, apes have it too.
COSMOLOGY
A forgotten model of the universe has been brought out of obscurity by the first English translation of a little-known paper by Albert Einstein. Written in 1931, “On the cosmological problem of the general theory of relativity” features a universe that expands and then contracts back towards a singularity or end point, like a reverse Big Bang. The paper was published only a year before the widely accepted Einstein-de Sitter model, in which the universe constantly expands.Springer
Another of Einstein's lost hypotheses.
MICROBIOLOGY
MreB, a protein found in bacteria, appears to be the key to how rod-shaped bacteria cells keep their unusual shape. The bacteria Escherichria coli (E.coli) cells have a rod-like shape, maintained by targeted bursts of MreB release along the longer, straight sides of the cell that build up the cell’s wall. Conversely, if MreB is inhibited, the cell loses its rod-like appearance and morphs into a spherical shape. PNAS
Everyone knows E.coli, but these molecules are truly famous.
February 17
SENSES
Scientists have found a correlation between haptic feedback, which is information we get by touching things, and being able to move our bodies in a rhythmic and stable way. Using a virtual paddle and table tennis ball, researchers found that people performed far better juggling the ball if they felt it hit the paddle in their hand rather than just being able to see it. This improved a person’s timing, making them more able to repeat a movement successfully and with the right rhythm. Physiology
Finding the right rhythm can be an algorithmic headache for transporters.
COSMOLOGY
In the early 1500s, Polish-born astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus adopted the heliocentric theory of the universe, which stated that the planets revolved around the Sun at a speed that was relative to the distance they were from it. His first writing on the subject, Commentariolus, was sent only to other philosophers, who discouraged him from continuing his work. Copernicus disagreed with the Bible’s model of the universe that placed Earth at its center, rupturing the marriage of religious dogma to science.Stanford|Commentariolus
Searching for our own place in the universe is as challenging as ever.
February 14
HEALTH
Hospitalizations for strokes correlate with sharp changes in temperature. Doctors collected 157,130 discharge notes for stroke sufferers and the corresponding local temperature and dew point level for the year 2010-2011. Each 5-Fahrenheit change in temperature coincided with a 6% increased risk of hospitalization, but more research is needed to find out what role meteorological factors play in the risk of having a stroke. Live Science
A chance correlation can yield more than a coincidence.
ALGORITHMS
Scientists at MIT wound flexible rubber tubes around a variety of column sizes, and then measured how the rods’ weight, length, stiffness and thickness varied their natural curvature. Based on their findings, they designed a computer algorithm that can take any of these variables and find the curvature of anything with a curl. Computer animators tend to avoid curls because the math involved is too difficult, but reducing them to a scalable algorithm could help bring more curly-haired characters to the big screen.MIT
What braids can tell us about spacetime.
ZOOLOGY
There is no way to identify individual Australian sea lions without invasive techniques like microchipping or branding. To find a new method, researchers in Western Australia set up Whiskerpatrol.org to see whether people might tell sea lions apart lies based on their whisker spots, which is the markings made by the whiskers coming out of the sealion’s muzzle fur. Amateur photographers can upload photos of sea lions to help create a catalogue of identified individuals that can be tracked easily for further research.WhiskerPatrol
Tracking endangered species, like honeybees, is essential for their survival.
February 13
ZOOLOGY
In Bahia state, Brazil, loggerhead turtles and hawksbill turtles congregate on the coast to lay eggs and find a mate, and a number of hybrid turtles result from the mix. Researchers charted the progress of 157 immature hawksbill turtles over a year, finding four hybrids that looked like hawksbills, but behaved like loggerheads. There is almost triple the number of loggerheads than hawksbill turtles known to nest along Bahia’s coast, the hybrids’ behavior reflecting the dominant population’s. PeerJ
Organismal mergers and the symbiosis of species.
GENETICS
America’s first settlers may have been Asian, according to the genome of a boy that died 12,600 years ago in Montana. A member of the Clovis people that came to America 15,000 years ago, the boy’s skeleton is the oldest known human remains in the Americas. His DNA had strong similarities to DNA found in Asian Siberia, and to modern Native American DNA. Youtube|Cambridge
Is it possible to trace our distant ancestors' first, human, home?
ENGINEERING
If we want to build structures in space, we need to bring our own resources with us. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Cal. welded a fragment of Arizona’s Canyon Diablo meteorite with an electron beam in a vacuum to mimic space. But the electron beam wasn’t innovative enough to weld the metal: the phosphorus and carbon impurities made the iron crack, putting our extraterrestrial building plans on hold. Sci. Tech. of Welding and Joining|Nature
To build in space, we have to get there first.
February 12
ENGINEERING
The European Space Agency plans to protect its Solar Orbiter spacecraft with a Stone Age painting technique—using crushed burnt bone as black pigment. Launching in 2017, the probe will orbit the Sun at about a quarter of the distance to Earth, experiencing temperatures of 1000 Fahrenheit and 13 times the intensity of sunlight as on Earth. To protect the probe, it will have a titanium heat shield coated in Solar Black, a type of black calcium phosphate, which is made from burnt bone charcoal. ESA
We examine stars with bone, but stars made our bodies.
NEUROLOGY
Scientists have identified one way that exercise may influence our mental health. Lactate is generated when we use our muscles, and it triggers astrocytes—non-neuronal cells in the brain—to release the chemical transmitters used by neurons to signal hormone release. Researchers now report that astrocytes use lactate (lactic acid) in one part of the brain to stimulate the release of norepinephrine, a hormone essential for mammals’ alertness, appetite, respiration, emotion, and sleep/wake cycle. Nature Communications
The never-ending search for human uniqueness, hidden in the brain.
MEDICINE
It is easy to follow a strict vegetarian or vegan diet, but the same can’t be said of our medications. By listing the ingredients of the top 100 most-prescribed drugs in the UK, doctors found evidence of 3 animal-derived products—gelatin, magnesium stearate (produced from rendered animal or vegetable fat), and lactose—in 73 of them. Listen to this podcast to find out more about the study. Podcast|BMJ
Pushing the boundaries of medicine is a gamble, but for some it pays off.
February 11
ALGORITHMS
Computer algorithms can solve problems by learning from past experience. But machine learning isn’t autonomous: each algorithm uses human-set protocols that prioritize one thing over another, like popular sites topping Google searches. Nicholas Diakopoulos at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism argues that when it comes to an algorithm’s decisions, we need to recognize that machines have human bias, too. Tow Center
Machine learning could be a new well of human creativity.
BIOENGINEERING
A robot arm called MIT-Manus is used for physical therapy for people who have had a stroke and been left with motor skills damage or weakened muscles. Patients control the arm while playing a video game, which measures the patient’s arm speed, movement smoothness, and aim. As with all neural illness and injury, predicting long-term health outcomes can be difficult, but by measuring the minute changes in a person’s motor skills, doctors can judge the efficacy of stroke treatments more accurately. MIT
Combining robotics with human awareness can take our level of perception to new heights.
February 10
FILM
In 1976, American filmmaker Jerry W. Leach releasedTrobriand Cricket, hailed as one of the most “interesting ethnographic films” by the Journal of American Anthropology. The film documents how cricket in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea became a unique expression of Trobriand cultural identity. British missionaries taught islanders how to play in the 19th century, but it evolved to become a very different spectacle from the British original: watch the film’s trailer, here, to see why. YouTube
Adopting British standards affected more than sport: we measure time by them, too.
February 9
PHILOSOPHY
To call one’s self a genius, said poet Gertrude Stein, required long stints of sitting around and doing absolutely nothing. Only then could attention be entirely devoted to conscious and deliberate thought. In this article for Nautilus, Greg Beato disagrees: He demonstrates that in order to reach your creative potential, giving in to distractions and procrastination is the secret to success. Smithsonian
Distraction and procrastination can help us reach our highest potential.
MEDICINE
By replicating the spread of breast cancer into bone cells on a 3-D microchip, scientists have uncovered a molecule in bones that appears to attract cancer cells. Researchers injected the protein binder molecule CXCL5, which is secreted by bone cells, into collagen-gel on the chip. The cancer cells invaded the collagen as if it were bone to bind with CXCL5, highlighting its potential role in why advanced breast cancers spread into the bones before other organs in nearly 70% of patients. Biomaterials|MIT
Our cells' genetic codes are taking on a life of their own, out of our control.
February 8
ASTRONOMY
Astronomers have discovered a star dubbed SM0313 that could be the oldest star ever recorded. A star’s approximate age can be judged by its iron content: when the universe first formed, the only elements were hydrogen and helium, but as early stars exploded and generated new stars, they became more chemically complex with each generation. SM0313 contains no iron, which means it was among the first few generations of stars, formed just 200 million years after the Big Bang. Nature
Can we measure anything before the Big Bang?
BIOCHEMISTRY
By using state-of-the-art computer simulations, researchers have discovered that melanopsin, a pigment in the retina that discerns minute changes in our environment’s ambient light, doesn’t help our vision. In contrast with retina visual pigments, melanopsin acts like an interface between physical light and the different physiological responses we have to light as it changes through the day. It is essential for regulating our circadian rhythm, optimizing our body’s response to day and night.PNAS
Time and space are the secret of happiness.
MEDICINE
Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute discovered that Mycoplasma genitalium, bacteria that infects the genitals and respiratory tracts, appears to have a unique structure that lets it bind to any bacteria-killing antibody it encounters in the body. Once bound to the antibody, the bacterium effectively blocks it from reaching its target bacteria or virus. Researchers think this helps other bacteria and viruses evade the immune system’s response and thrive, establishing long-term infections. Science
Your body has a microscopic purification system of its own.
February 7
GENETICS
Within three thousand years, natural selection has accelerated the process of evolution, giving Tibetans a higher expression of gene EPAS1 than their lowland Han Chinese neighbors, recalibrating the body to live in a high altitude, low oxygen environment. Despite having low hemoglobin levels, EPAS1 allows Tibetans to tolerate hypoxia to an extent that others would fall ill. The extremity of the unique environment of the Tibetan Plateau works in harmony with gene selection to create a unique physiology. Science|Guardian
Human uniqueness lies in the homes we choose.
ENTOMOLOGY
Exposed on a leaf or stem sits what looks like a flesh fly: It has the coral red eyes, filmic wings, and striped body, and it is making the same tell-tale jittery and skittish movements. But the timorus sarcophagoides is not a fly at all: it is a weevil. Red spots on its thorax mimic the eyes, and the weevil's hardened forewings, or elytra, mirror the markings on the fly's body that can change their texture to look transparent, allowing the insect to fool predators successfully.Guardian|BIF
Why trusting our senses may be the wrong choice.
GEOLOGY
Diamonds found in the world’s oldest zircons, a mineral found in igneous rock, are actually laboratory contamination, according to a new analysis of the Jack Hills zircons. The zircons date to the Hadean Area, about 4,200 to 3,000 million years ago, which is the earliest period in Earth’s history. Two recent papers had shown diamond structures embedded in the zircons, but in reality, they were residue left from the diamond abrasive paste used to prepare the zircon samples for analysis under microscope. Science Direct
Uncovering others' mistakes makes for the best science.
February 6
MEDICINE
We use color to signify particular characteristics of ourselves: we can get the blues, be rednecks or even yellow-bellied cowards, but these metaphors could have a new physical meaning. Shooting silver particles in hydrogel with a laser causes it to form hologram structures: as the hydrogel comes into contact with different compounds in the blood, it shrinks and expands, causing the holograms to change color. The bolder the color, the more the compound is in the blood; let's hope the nurse isn't colorblind.Cambridge|RSC
If we know the color, what is the sound of personhood?
MEDICINE
France approved a heart built with satellite technology, called the "Carmat Heart," for human trials. Using the same electronics and motors as a satellite scaled down to a human scale and encased in animal pericardium membrane, the machine is masked from the body. Body and space are inaccessible, hostile places where failure is not an option: Satellites give us the uninterrupted information flow we need to forge on in space exploration, and now, a steady heart beat.Reuters|Carmat
Encounters with the Post-Human
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
People that take risks may seem like thrill-seekers, but in fact they may be more motivated by a lack of willpower. Neuroscientists scanned people’s brains while they played a game that forced them to choose between taking a risk to get more points, or playing safe and getting an average score. When they opted for the safer choice, the neural networks that controlled executive functions like memory and cognition were more active than when they decided to take the risk. PNAS
For some, ignoring the risk of playing the lottery is a weekly event.
February 5
SOCIAL SCIENCE
Do you know what solar radiation sunscreen is, or what red blood cells do in the body? The Pew Research Center is conducting a survey of people’s science and technology knowledge with this 13-questioninteractive quiz. Click the link and find out if you have more science savvy than the average American. People Press|Pew Center
Having some base knowledge is good, but uncertainty plays a starring role in physics.
ASTROPHYSICS
A new Neptune-like planet called Kepler-431b has been found orbiting an orange and red dwarf in a binary star system. The planet wobbles wildly on its spin axis, tilting as much as 30 degrees over 11 years, far more than Earth’s own wobble of 23.5 degrees tilt every 26,000 years. As Kepler-431b orbits the binary stars, its orbit tilts, making it look as if the planet’s path is continuously moving up and down as it crosses the stars’ faces. NASA
Our own home in the universe is rocking out of control, too.
ALGORITHMS
New company Eterni.me wants to use your digital paper trail to create an artificial intelligence “chat bot”. An algorithm uses your instant messages, emails, and other online traces to create a bot that can talk to your loved ones from beyond the grave. Chat bots are increasingly common interfaces between companies and customers: soon they could be the interface between memories shared between two people, even when one is no more. Fast Company
A purely mathematical structure already informs each moment of your life.
February 4
MARINE SCIENCE
Microscopic plankton build their shells in uniform layers, forming daily bands composed of chemicals filtered out from seawater. The concentration of magnesium in a plankton shell increases in warmer water, replacing the calcium usually found in the shell. By analyzing the ring patterns in plankton shells dating back tens of millions of years, scientists get a glimpse of the changing temperatures of the world’s ancient oceans. Science Direct
How to predict the ever-changing weather.
MEDICINE
A common anti-fungal treatment called itraconazole appears to disable the “hedgehog signaling pathway,” a molecular pathway involved in cell division and growth. When the pathway malfunctions, it can cause diseases such as basal cell carcinoma, which is the most common skin cancer in the U.S. In a small clinical trial of the anti-fungal’s effect on the cancer, researchers found that it decreased tumor size by an average of 23 percent. Jrnl of Clinical Ontology
Discovering the unexpected, right under your nose.
GEOLOGY
The Moon’s oldest rocks have extremely similar hydrogen isotopic composition to the Earth’s water and carbon-rich meteorites. This affinity is the strongest evidence yet of a common source for the Moon and the Earth’s water. Either primordial water survived the supposed impact that separated the Moon from the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, or both were seeded with water not long after the Moon’s formation. Science Direct
How man's trips to the Moon took terrestrial science into space.
February 3
MICROBIOLOGY
Distinct and earthy, the black truffle, or tuber melanosporum, packs a punch on the nose and on the wallet. The truffles can fetch more than $1,200 per kilo, leading Chinese suppliers to try and pass off the supposedly inferior and far cheaper tuber indicum, as the real thing. Scientists at the National Institute for Agronomic Research in France are analyzing the olfactory qualities of both truffles, so that suppliers can detect when a fungus is a fake. Guardian
Sino-science thinks fame is a mark of success, but is it?
GENETICS
The hormone thyroxine increases in concentration in our blood when we get hot, increasing our metabolic rate far above its normal state. Aboriginal Australians have a unique pair of mutated genes, called A191T and L283P, which regulate thyroxine. Together, they inhibit the release of thyroxine at high temperatures, keeping the body functioning normally despite living in an extremely hot environment. Royal Society
Did beer cause man to domesticate himself over time?
MEDICINE
Acoustic neuromas, or vestibular schwannomas, are tumors that grow in the skull and typically cause hearing loss and tinnitus. The tumors are typically treated with surgery and radiotherapy, but a new study of more than 600 patients found that tumors grew slower in participants who took aspirin. Aspirin’s anti-inflammatory properties are well documented, but more research is needed to see if and how the aspirin halted tumor growth. Otology and Nuerotology
More medical breakthroughs that came from unlikely places.
February 2
MATHEMATICS
When a player with the ball makes a break for the end zone, defenders have to chase him at the ideal “angle of pursuit” if they want to stop him in his tracks. Taking a defender’s running speed into account, Pythagoras’ theorem can be used to find the angle he needs to run at: the path of the defender is the hypotenuse of a triangle drawn between the end zone and the players’ starting positions. Because there is no time for math on the pitch, players judge the angle by instinct alone. Science 360
The secret of the perfect game of tennis.
ECONOMICS
Most stock trading takes place in public, but about 10% is hidden in so-called “dark pools.” These are private stock markets where trades are anonymous, meaning big financial players can make trades without impacting the market. Despite the attraction of trading without public scrutiny, the dark pools often attract under-informed investors that won’t be able to take up the other side of the trade fast enough for the big traders who rely on deals that go down within nanoseconds, keeping the biggest deals out in the open. MIT|Oxford Journals
We put our money down on blind faith even when we know the stakes.
GEOLOGY
Seven years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed in a report that the world was getting warmer. The authors said that the most likely cause was the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. In a new article linked below, Lee Billing’s explores mankind’s effect on the geological record. BBC|IPCC
Join the search for mankind's mark on Earth.
February 1
SOCIOLOGY
By 2050, the number of people over 65 is expected to triple, and East Asian countries have some of the most rapidly aging populations in the world. Their largest demographic group will be citizens over 65 by then. This is causing some anxiety: 9 out of 10 Japanese, 8 out of 10 South Korean and 7 out of 10 Chinese people say aging is a major problem in their country. Pew Center
How we imagine ourselves in time is very personal.
ENVIRONMENT
This composite radar image of Zambia’s Zambezi River’s flood plain combines three images taken at different points of time in 2011. Every spring, the flood transforms the land into one of the largest wetlands in the world, supporting diverse populations of fish and animals and nourishing grasslands. The image shows the river in lime green snaking from top left to bottom right, and the flood plain in deep blue coming right to the edges of a city, picked out in white. ESA
How do you know if the constants of nature change through time?
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Life Before It Even Happens
Children believe they are alive before their parents have even conceived them, but only in spirit. Most of those surveyed said that they felt emotion and desire before being born, usually because they believed their prelife self would anticipate their birth. It seems that even at a young age, people believe that the mind, not the body, is at the core of personhood.
What is our personal beginning of time?
January 31
ANTHROPOLOGY
In La Paz, Bolivia, people prepare for the coming year during the ancient harvest festival Alasitas, which celebrates the Andean god of abundance, Ekeko. People buy miniatures of things they want, whether it is a new car, a house, or a divorce certificate. In a confluence of Christianity and folk tradition, Andean and Roman Catholic priests bless the objects, before the goods are offered to Ekeko. BBC
The ancient texts that may hold modern cures.
ZOOLOGY
Dogs may know how to sit, lie down, and roll over, but their cousins, the wolves, learn from each other. They pay close attention to demonstrations from other wolves in order to learn how to behave in a close-knit pack. This habit guarantees better cooperation, something domesticated dogs no longer have to worry about. PLOS One
Why we need social hierarchies.
ENTOMOLOGY
Many insects co-opt ants to defend them in return for food rewards, but ants are picky about what species they will serve. To get their attention, Narathura japonica caterpillars excrete the same hydrocarbon mix on their bodies as ants do. The ants recognize the smell and enter into partnership with the caterpillar, protecting it while supping on nutritious droplets leaked by the caterpillar’s dorsal nectary organ. PLOS One
To speak to plants and bugs, you need to smell right.
