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May 02 2012
How Our Circadian Cycle Helps Us Not Need to Pee Overnight
How to keep track of mouse urine
Eight hours is a long time without a trip to the bathroom when awake, yet most of us can sleep through the night without peeing. And no, it’s not just because you (presumably) stop drinking coffee in your sleep: even when food and drink are factored out, you both make less urine and have better bladder capacity during the night. As with most behaviors that change from day to night, it does indeed have everything to do with the circadian rhythm.
In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers compared normal mice with mice whose circadian rhythms were disrupted by genetic mutations. To keep track of mice urination over time, they used a rather charming contraption that slowly unspooled urine paper under the cages (see image). Urine spots on the paper were counted up and, sure enough, urination in the normal mice showed 24-hour patterns while the mutant mice did not.
The study also identified a molecular mechanism that lets bladders hold more urine during sleep. Concentrations of the bladder protein Cx43 goes up and down over the course of 24 hours. It makes bladder muscles more sensitize to ...
April 28 2012
Dogs Are Manipulable, Cats Are Manipulative, and Both Act Like Babies
How you doin’?
After thousands of years living in our homes, cats and dogs have gotten pretty good at tuning into human social cues—as good as as human babies anyways.
Dogs, with their adorable puppy faces, are easily swayed by the actions of humans. A new study in PLoS ONE shows that dogs will prefer a plate of food preferred by a person, even if that plate has less food on it. Cats, on the other hand, have an especially annoying “solicitation” purr that they deploy when they want something from their owners, much like (though quieter than) a hungry baby that will not stop screaming. Pet owners who fancy themselves parents may actually be onto something.
Although babies can’t understand words, they are good at following body language and the gazes of their parents—what are called “ostensive cues.” Dogs do the same thing; when they see you looking in a particular direction, for example, they look there too. Researchers in this new study show that dogs made their decisions based on these ostensive cues as well. They began by presenting the dogs with two plates with unequal amounts of food. Then an experimenter would look at ...
April 27 2012
This Scientist Endures 15,000 Mosquito Bites a Year
The things we do for science.
Researchers who study mosquitoes and other blood-sucking insects sometimes use themselves as skeeter chow. In some cases, it’s because certain species of mosquitoes seem to prefer human blood to animal blood. In others, though, it’s a cheap, convenient alternative to keeping animals around for the insects to feed on or buying blood. And as it turns out, once you’ve been bitten a certain number of times you develop a tolerance to mosquito saliva.
Entomologist Steve Schutz, seen above paging through a magazine while the bloodsuckers go to work on his arm, feeds his mosquito colony once a week. He has welts for about an hour, but after that the bites fade, occasionally leaving a few red spots. That’s good, because at 300 bites a week, he averages about 15,000 a year. That’s dedication.
April 23 2012
Whales May Use Globs of “Ear Fats” to Hear Underwater
CT scan of whale head; fat in yellow, ear bones in magenta.
For us landlubbers, jiggling fat may just be an unsightly presence. For whales, jiggling clumps of fat in their jaws may pick up sound waves underwater, helping them communicate over long distances in the sea. We knew that dolphins and porpoises have “ear fats,” but baleen whales have not been as well-studied for one simple reason: their heads are just too big to fit into a scanner.
A new study looks at minke whales, a genus of balleen whales that top out at only seven meters long. (Tiny compared to 30-meter blue whales.) Scientists put six frozen whale heads, salvaged from beached animals, in CT and MRI scanners to analyze the soft tissues. Some of the heads were still too big, so the lower jaw had to be removed or excess flesh trimmed away. The scans and subsequent dissections showed a glob of fat sitting right next to the ear bones. While the anatomical evidence is compelling, the researchers admit they still have to show how exactly the fat works to help in hearing.
[via ScienceNow]
April 20 2012
“Obliterating Animal Carcasses With Explosives”: USDA’s Step-by-Step Guide
During a snow storm last year, several cows managed to wander into a ranger cabin where they have stayed ever since. Alas, the cows have not been playing house—they died in the cabin, and there they remain, dead and frozen. Rangers at Conundrum Hot Springs are now faced with removing several tons of dead, frozen cow from the remote mountain spot. If not, the slowly decomposing bodies could attract predators and cause contamination.
So here’s the dynamite idea they’ve proposed: blow ‘em up to smithereens and radically speed up the decomposition process. Lucky for the rangers, the USDA happens to have a protocol detailing every step of this process—including diagrams of where to place the explosives.
Because this diagram is optimized for a horse, it includes species-specific pro tips like, “Horseshoes should be removed to minimize dangerous flying debris.” The full protocol also includes a second, more complicated diagram of where to pack explosives on a frozen animal such as these cows. It ends with this note: “Carcasses that have been partially obliterated will generally not show any trace of existence the next day.” Good to know.
[via Improbable Research]
April 19 2012
Bald Men, This Nude Mouse With 1 Sad Tuft of Hair Could Be the Key to Your Follicular Future
My, what, uh, nice hair you have…
Among the mutant lab mice that scientists have dreamed up, there’s a particularly funny-looking nude mouse. Now scientists have managed to make it look even more ridiculous by adding just one small tuft of black hair on its back.
Getting the hair follicles to sprout was no small feat of bioengineering. As reported in a new paper in Nature Communications, researchers took stem cells from bald mice as well as men and implanted them in the skin of the nude mice. A plastic sheath guided the growing hair through layers of the skin, and voila. The individual hairs could also stand up on their ends—just like how your body hair stands up when you’re cold–which means the bioengineered follicles even connected to the small muscle that control piloerection.
And if you ever wanted to a naked, red-eyed mouse with one tuft of black hair to stare straight into your soul, do not miss the video below.
[via Nature News]
Image and video courtesy of Takashi Tsuji / Tokyo University of Science
April 18 2012
Canada’s New Quarters Will Have Glow-in-the-Dark Dinosaurs on Them
And unicorns, too.
Well, no. Just the dinosaurs. But isn’t that enough?
Each of the quarters, which will retail for $29.99, will feature an image of a Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, a dinosaur discovered in Alberta. But take it into the closet under the stairs or wherever your favored glow-in-the-dark viewing site is, and the creature’s skeleton glows.
This is, according to TIME’s Moneyland, the Canadian government’s latest scheme to help shrink the deficit. We’re not hopeful, though—how many dino-loving 6-year-olds have $29.99 to spare?
[via Moneyland]
Image courtesy of Canadian Mint
April 06 2012
Hyenas Change Their Diet During Lent, According to a Poop Analysis
Did you know I can eat and digest bone? Plenty of calcium.
After painstakingly identifying all the animal hairs in hyena poop, scientists have determined that Lent forces spotted hyenas in Ethiopia to change their diets too. No, Ethiopians have not managed to convert hyenas—they just deprive them of butcher scraps.
As the heavily Orthodox population gave up meat for Lent, hyenas could no longer depend on scavenging outside butcher shops, so they hunted down donkeys instead. Donkeys are a common livestock animal in northern Ethiopia and an especially easy target because they’re kept outdoors at night. While opportunistic hyenas will take whatever dead meals they can get, don’t underestimate the hyena’s ability to hunt down prey several times bigger than itself.
The research team had collected hyena feces from March to May and identified all the animal hairs found in them. With the start of Lent, goat and sheep hairs dropped off in frequency, while the percentage of hairs belonging donkeys doubled to over 30%. Hyenas will eat practically anything—from putrid corpses to dung—so donkeys are pretty much a treat.
Image via Flickr / Diamond Glacier Adventures
March 30 2012
Ancient Ichthyosaur Carcass Did Not Explode, According to Study of 100 Bloated Human Corpses
In 2004, a street in Taiwan got showered in whale guts. The putrefying whale was on route to a necropsy when pent-up gas blew a hole in its body and entrails spewed onto unfortunate passersby. One hundred to 200 million years earlier, an ichthyosaur—a dolphin-looking marine reptile contemporary to dinosaurs—died and became a fossil. Since embryos were scattered around the ichthyosaur mother’s body, some paleontologists believed the decaying animal had met an end as explosive as the whale’s.
The exploding-carcass theory has been used to explain why so many ichthyosaur fossils have been found with embryos ejected or bones oddly scattered. But as with old bones, evidence is frustratingly thin: the theory was mostly based on exploding whales as proof of principal. Scientists who want to test this hypothesis today don’t have any ichthyosaur carcasses at their disposal…but there are a lot of humans around now, many of them dead. A new study measuring gas pressure in 100 bloating human carcasses found the pressure (0.035 bar) to be nowhere near high enough to cause an explosion underwater (more than 5 to 15 bar).
Exploding carcasses are totally Discoblog’s thing, so ...
March 28 2012
March 27 2012
Clever Way to Track Tiny Nocturnal Primates: Decorate Their Lice With Distinctive Nail-Polish Markings
The unique pattern of dots for each lemur’s lice.
Hey lemur, sit down right here. I’ve got my bottle of nail polish—oh no no, don’t need your hands, let’s look at your ears instead. While we’re at it, can you show me the lice on your eyelids and testes too?
Just another day in the life of a lemur biologist. The brown mouse lemur of Madagascar is a five-inch-long primate that sleeps in tree-holes all day and only comes out after dark. To study their social interactions, scientists had to get crafty with toothpicks and a few bottles of nail polish. They trapped 23 male and 9 female lemurs, finding and tagging the lice on each of them with a unique pattern of nail polish dots.
From August to October, they then mapped how lice spread from lemur to lemur, which seemed to mostly happen mostly between males fighting each other for mates. Breeding season began a few weeks into the tracking period, and lice transfers between males shot up dramatically. (Only one louse was ever found on any of the female lemurs. Hmm…) Fourteen of the 23 males donated or received at least one louse, and ...
March 19 2012
Hot Defensive Bee Ball Cooks Hornet Alive
It’s a hot mess.
A giant hornet feasting on honeybee larvae has nothing to fear from a honeybee’s stinger. That puny thing? Ain’t gonna pierce this rigid exoskeleton. But 500 angry bees—now that’s a problem.
When Japanese honeybees detect a hornet in their hive, they swarm around it by the hundreds. The collective vibration of their flight muscles makes it just hot enough (about 116 F) to be lethal for the hornet. Give it 30 to 6o minutes, and the hornet has been cooked to death.
Japanese scientists were curious about the brain activity that coordinated this complex honeybee behavior. After baiting the honeybees with a doomed hornet (see video below), they plucked several bees from the ball and identified brain areas active during the hot defensive bee ball.
Image via Ugajin et al, PLoS ONE; video via PopSci
March 15 2012
Spy Eggs Help Get to the Bottom of Penguin Trash-Talking
Think I’m cute? Them’s fightin’ words.
If you think penguins are cute, huggable things, you have not met a little blue penguin (yes, that’s actually the name of the species). Adorably named but fiercely territorial, male little blue penguins will get into bill-slashing, flipper-whacking fights. One-eyed penguins are not uncommon.
After winning a fight, the penguins flap their flippers around and engage in loud braying (listen here). After seeing (and hearing) this behavior, researchers wondered: Are the winners just really happy to have both eyes, or are they sending signals of their toughness to “social eavesdroppers” in the penguin colony?
To test their hypothesis, the researchers got clever, temporarily swapping a fake, pulse-measuring egg into the nest of an eavesdropping penguin. As the penguin sat incubating on the fake egg, the scientists replayed the sounds of a fight followed by the approaching calls of the winner or loser. The heart rate of male penguins jumped when they heard a winner, but not a loser, approaching. The males were also less likely to call in response to an approaching winner. By advertising their victories, winners may be keeping competition at bay.
So male penguins brag to pump ...
March 13 2012
Hermit Crab Moves Inside a Living Sea Anemone, Using It Like a Shell
The naked tail of a hermit crab is a flaccid, unsexy, and vulnerable thing. When a snail shell of the right size is nowhere to be found, the hermit crab’s gotta do what’s it gotta do, which in this case is living inside a sea anemone. Hermit crabs will often place anemones on their shells—the anemone’s stinging tentacles keep away predators and it gets to hitch a ride while feeding on food particles the crab misses. That’s probably how this started. But when the crab outgrew its small snail shell, the anemone grew to cover both shell and crab.
Greg Rouse and colleagues found this critter during an expedition off the coast of Costa Rica in 2010. The area is lacking in large snail shells, says Dr. Rouse, and there has been a previous report of this species, Parapagurus foraminosus, covered by an anemone.
Image courtesy of Greg Rouse, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego
March 09 2012
How to Catch Beetles: An Ice Cream Scoop, PVC Pipe, and Frozen Dung Balls
After three and a half years of mucking around Florida cow pastures, veterinary entomologist Philip Kaufman has collected 62,320 dung beetles. That comes to about 60 beetles a day, if you’re counting. What’s the secret to his beetle-catching success? The New York Times Green Blog has got the scooper—erh, scoop:
He collected fresh dung with an ice cream scooper, then packed it into small pouches that he froze in his lab. He set up pit fall traps, or mesh-covered funnels partly buried underground that were baited with the thawed dung balls. Positioned at a slant, the mesh encouraged beetles to fall into a bit of PVC pipe from which they could not escape. After placing the traps, he would return within 24 hours to investigate the day’s catch.
Squatting around cowpats paid off: Kaufman’s research on the diversity dung beetles has just been published in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America. He isn’t the only one with an affinity for dung beetles though. The little critters actually do a lot of a farm’s clean-up work, eating through the dung that can quickly pile up when a ...
March 07 2012
How Rotting Chicken Necks Explain a Long-Standing Paleontology Riddle
A decaying dinosaur’s increasingly contorted neck
What’s wrong with your neck, dinosaur fossil? That looks kind of uncomfortable…
Paleontologists have long wondered by so many fossilized dinosaurs have their necks contorted into painful-looking positions—the phenomenon even has a name: opisthotonus. Various hypotheses have suggested the dinosaurs died in pain, or that their unusual posture is from rigor mortis.
Could be, though, it’s just what floppy necks do in water, according to a recent study involving chicken carcasses. Scientists recruited study subjects from among the dinosaurs’ extant relatives at a local butcher’s, plunged them underwater, and witnessed some startling acrobatics. The New York Times reports:
The teams independently concluded that the ligaments in chicken necks were like rubber bands — bendable, but contracted by default to hold the bird’s head upright against gravity. In the dead chicken, those ligaments still want to return to their natural, unstretched position, but the dead weight of the bird fights against it. In water, however, buoyancy and lack of friction allow the ligaments to contract into their natural shape, cranking the neck backward as they go.
The initial dip into water bent the necks back a full 90 degrees. Over three months, ...
February 23 2012
Rainforest Science: Researcher Licks Frogs to Tell if They’re Poisonous
There’s a certain school of thought among wildlife biologists (Exhibit A) that you should eat any organism you study. Frog scientists—who study toxic frogs, mind you—have a similar habit: lick any frog you study. “Sometimes I just can’t wait till I get back to the lab to do the chemistry, and I want to get an idea if there is something nasty,” said frog scientist Valerie Clark to National Geographic. With limited equipment out in the rainforest, a taste test is the quickest way to tell whether a frog is poisonous. Most of them can’t kill a human, but the poison can make your throat burn and constrict.
While frog-licking works in a pinch out in the field, discussing how skin secretions tickle your palate isn’t going to pass the rigors of peer review. Clark’s new study used electrical stimulation to extract skin secretions from frogs and analyzed them in a mass spectrometer. Among the products: sucrose and a new bile acid called tauromantellic acid.
Why does the frog have a bile acid, usually found in the gut, on its skin? Poisonous frogs get their toxins from the insects they eat, they need some kind of sequestering system so ...
February 08 2012
That’s Not a Yawn. It’s a Scream Humans Can’t Hear.
The tarsiers of the Philippines are the smallest primates on the planet, at about five inches tall. They tend to keep their hind legs, which are twice as long as their bodies, folded up frog-style, except when leaping on their insect prey. And a tarsier eyeball, at just over half an inch wide, is as large as a tarsier brain.
But the weirdness doesn’t stop there. No, it most certainly does not.
Scientists had previously remarked that tarsiers were unusually quiet. And they also seemed to yawn quite a lot. Aww, cute, right? Sweepy wittle pwimates! But then, some scientists studying tarsiers made a startling discovery. Zoe Corbyn at New Scientist sums it up well: “Placing 35 wild animals in front of an ultrasound detector revealed that what [the scientists] assumed to be yawns were high-pitched screams beyond the range of human hearing.”
Turns out tarsiers are shrieking their brains out while their predators in the jungle, including birds and snakes, obliviously goes about their business. (And if you were already freaked out by them, as many YouTube commenters on the above video seem to be, we apologize for adding to the creepy.) It seems like a pretty handy, if eerie, ...
February 06 2012
How to Turn a Cockroach into a Mobile, and Kind of Gross, Fuel Cell
Discoid cockroaches, used in this study, can be up to 3 inches long.
From the digestive system that demolishes glue and toothpaste comes the first living, breathing, digesting cyborg-insect power source. Researchers have created a fuel cell that needs only sugar from the cockroach’s hemolymph (basically the cockroach version of blood) and oxygen from the air to make electric energy. The cell’s power density, 55 microwatts per square centimeter at 0.2V, is also very small compared to lithium batteries, so cockroach power wouldn’t be used as a mass power source. But these cyborg cockroaches could take sensors where no human wants to go: nuclear disaster sites, enemy military camps, inside the neighborhood Dumpster.
LiveScience lays out how electrodes inserted into the cockroach’s abdomen hijack its biochemical machinery:
The fuel cell consists of two electrodes; at one electrode, two enzymes break down a sugar, trehalose, which the cockroach produces from its food. The first of the two enzymes, trehalase, breaks down the trehalose into glucose, then the second enzyme converts the glucose into another product and releases the electrons. The electrons travel to the second electrode, where another enzyme delivers the electrons to oxygen in ...
February 01 2012
The World’s Heaviest Insect Is 3,500 Times More Massive Than the Smallest Vertebrate
Record-breaking critters are always crawling, hopping, swimming or otherwise locomoting across our radar. To indulge our curiosity about two creatures who showed up recently in the news, we did a little quick and dirty Photoshopping. If you put the world’s heaviest insect—the giant weta, one of which was recently observed enjoying a carrot on a researcher’s palm—next to the world’s smallest vertebrate—a newly discovered frog so tiny it’s dwarfed by a dime—it might look something like this:
That’s the frog, off to the right. It weighs just 0.02 grams. This weta tipped the scales at 71 grams, according to Mark Moffett, the scientist who snapped her picture. So the cricket-like weta is about 3,500 times the weight of the frog, which Christopher Austin and colleagues found by scooping up leaf litter that was making a funny chirping noise and painstakingly removing the leaf fragments until they found a scrap that hopped.
Wetas can reach 10 centimeters in body length, 20 with their legs extended. The frog is about 7 millimeters long, so it would take around 30 of the frogs lined up head to tail to extend the length of ...
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