Cheaper, Better Satellites Made From Cellphones and Toys. MOUNTAIN VIEW, California – Instead of investing in their own computer research and development, engineers at the NASA Ames Research Center are looking to cellphones and off-the-shelf toys to power the future of low-cost satellite technology.
Duck Penis Length Depends on Other Guys. WILLIAMSBURG, Virginia — New measurements find that the maximum length of a duck’s penis depends on the company he keeps.
And in this case, it’s his fellow males who make the difference. A drake’s penis substantially wastes away at the end of one breeding season and then regrows as the next season begins. Among lesser scaup and ruddy ducks, the regrowth varies in length or timing depending on whether males have to compete with a bunch of other guys, said Patricia Brennan of Yale University. Her new measurements offer the first evidence in vertebrates that social circumstances influence penis growth, she reported July 29 at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society. In many bird species, males don’t grow specialized organs to deliver sperm. To see whether competition among males influences penis growth, Brennan housed some of her drakes in groups of seven to eight males with just five or six females.
Antarctic Octopuses Discovered With Sub-Zero Venom. A research expedition to Antarctica to study the region’s octopus life has returned with descriptions of four new species, and the first known sub-zero venoms.
“Antarctic octopus venom works at temperatures that would stop other venoms in their tracks,” said biochemist Bryan Fry of the University of Melbourne, who led the expedition. Antarctic octopuses eat a wide variety of animals, from clams to fish. They catch their prey with their tentacles and use their venom to kill them, much like snakes. The venoms are being studied as potential sources of pain-killers, Fry said, because they work on the nervous system. Orangutans Are Extraordinarily Energy Efficient. Lie down on the couch, television blaring, a bowl of chips on your stomach and a Big Gulp of cola on your chest.
If you need anything, yell for it. Wait a few hours. When the World’s Biggest Fish Poops. Reaching 40 feet long and weighing up to 15 tons, whale sharks are the world’s largest fish.
They feed by filtering plankton and fish eggs from a vortex created by their opening mouths — and as shown in a first-of-its-kind photograph of a whale shark pooping, activities at the other end of the fish are equally behemoth in proportion. Violent Dreams May Precede Brain Disease. Vivid, violent dreams can portend brain disorders by half a century, a new study finds.
The result, reported in the August 10 Neurology, highlights how some neurological diseases may take hold decades before a person is diagnosed. Spotting early warning signs of the disease may allow clinicians to monitor and treat patients long before the brain deteriorates. People with a mysterious sleep disturbance called REM sleep behavior disorder, or RBD, experience a sudden change in the nature of dreams. Dreams increasingly become more violent and frequently involve episodes in which an attacker must be fought off.
The normal muscle paralysis that accompanies dreams is gone, leaving the dreamer, who is most often male, to act out the dream’s punches, twists and yells. Look Around You: Science Video Reductio ad Absurdum. New Technique Finds Buried Bodies Better. Researchers have unearthed a new way to find a buried body.
The sensitive method, published online June 23 in Forensic Science International, detected trace compounds emanating from decomposing rats months after death. If the technique also works for human remains, it may help law enforcement personnel find hidden graves of victims months after a murder, researchers say. Because the method relies on a superthin, flexible tube to catch faint chemical signatures in air pockets near the corpse, it may be used to detect bodies buried in hard-to-reach areas, such as under concrete slabs.
“There are about 18,000 clandestine graves in the United States and 100,000 homicides annually, so stuff like this is needed,” says forensic scientist Arpad Vass of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Currently, people use corpse-sniffing dogs, ground-penetrating radar, and chemical analyses of air and soil to pinpoint buried bodies. Forensic scientist R.E. Enormous Ice Block Breaks Off Greenland Glacier. A 100-square-mile block of ice 600 feet thick has calved off one of the largest ocean-bordering glaciers in Greenland.
The Arctic hasn’t lost a chunk of ice that large since 1962. “In the early morning hours of Aug. 5, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland,” oceanographer Andreas Muenchow of University of Delaware said in a press release Aug. 6. “The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for more than two years. Top 10 Most Wanted Lost Amphibian Species. Scientists in 14 countries on five continents are teaming up to hunt for as many as 100 species of amphibians that are thought to possibly be extinct, but may be surviving in remote corners.
With amphibian populations around the world declining quickly and a third at risk of extinction, the unprecedented search could help scientists better understand the crisis. “The rapid and profound change to the global environment that has taken place over the last fifty years or so – in particular climate change and habitat loss – has had a devastating impact on these incredible creatures,” Conservation International’s Robin Moore, who has organized the search for IUCN’s Amphibian Specialist Group, said in a press release August 8. Amphibians have also been suffering from a fungus that causes a disease known as chytridiomycosis, which has already obliterated some species. Images and captions courtesy of Conservation International. Incilius periglenes, Costa Rica. Image: Conservation International. The Brain’s Secret to Sleeping Like a Log. In this clamorous modern world, heavy sleepers have an advantage: They can snooze despite noisy neighbors and car alarms, and they’re capable of conking out on a red-eye flight to awake refreshed and smiling.
But how do these sound sleepers do it? According to a neuroscience study published today in Current Biology, they’re blessed with a type of brain activity that may essentially block out noise. Sleep researchers from Harvard Medical School performed a slightly torturous experiment on 12 healthy volunteers. On their first night at the sleep lab, the subjects’ brain waves were monitored via electroencephalography (EEG), but they were otherwise left in peace. That night, the researchers measured one particular sleep phenomenon: the brief bursts of high-frequency waves known as “sleep spindles.” Science + Geek + Beer = Awesomely Geeky Science Beer. SAN FRANCISCO — What do you get if you cross a beer geek with a science geek? Really good beers with really geeky names. Russian Heat, Asian Floods May Be Linked. Russia’s killer heat wave and monster South Asian monsoon floods could be more than isolated examples of extreme weather. Though separated by a continent, they could be linked.
Monsoon rains drive air upward, and that air has to come down somewhere. It usually comes down over the Mediterranean, producing the region’s hot, dry climate. This year, some of that air seems to have gone north to Russia. Inexplicable Superconductor Fractals Hint at Higher Universal Laws. What seemed to be flaws in the structure of a mystery metal may have given physicists a glimpse into as-yet-undiscovered laws of the universe. The qualities of a high-temperature superconductor — a compound in which electrons obey the spooky laws of quantum physics, and flow in perfect synchrony, without friction — appear linked to the fractal arrangements of seemingly random oxygen atoms. Those atoms weren’t thought to matter, especially not in relation to the behavior of individual electrons, which exist at a scale thousands of times smaller. The findings, published Aug. 12 in Nature, are a physics equivalent of discovering a link between two utterly separate dimensions.
New Find Pushes Age of Stone Tools Back A Million Years. The genus Homo is no longer the sole primate lineage known to have used stone tools to consume the meat of large mammals. New research pushes that skill back nearly a million years. Large fossilized animal bones with ends shattered for sucking out marrow and cut marks deliberately made with sharp stone tools have been found just a few hundred feet from a previously uncovered Australopithecus afarensis skeleton. The bones are roughly 3.4 million years old, and connect the earliest evidence for using stone tools and eating large game to our Lucy-like ancestors. Previously, the earliest evidence for using tools to cut the meat off large animals was attributed to early Homo in the Gona region of Ethiopia around 2.5 million years ago. This find from a different region in Dikika, Ethiopia, , shows the behavior was around at least a million years earlier.
The ability to carve meat off large mammal carcasses likely put Australopithecus in competition with dangerous scavengers, Alemseged says. Haiti Quake Occurred on Previously Unknown Fault. IGUAÇÚ FALLS, Brazil — The devastating quake that slammed Haiti on Jan. 12 occurred on a previously unrecognized fault zone, report scientists who are still trying to determine the implications for the region’s long-term seismic risk.
The newly discovered fault hasn’t been officially named yet but is informally known as the Léogane fault, after one of the Haitian cities that sits directly atop it, study leader Eric Calais told Science News. Just after the magnitude-7 temblor struck, scientists presumed that the epicenter of the quake was located on the well-known Enriquillo fault, says Calais, a geophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Iceland Considers Humanoid Pylon Design to Carry Electricity. Genes Make Some Youth Take More Risks.
Global Warming Protects Antarctic Sea Ice — But Not For Long. An Antarctic ice paradox that has puzzled climate scientists and fueled skeptics’ arguments appears to have been resolved, with a dire forecast. A new study finds that global warming is responsible for snowfall that’s expanded the range of Southern Ocean sea ice, even as western Antarctic glaciers have disintegrated. Extinct, King Koopa-Style Giant Turtle Found on Pacific Island. Claws, Jaws and Spikes: The Science of the Dinosaur Arsenal. Perforated Blobs May Be Earliest Known Animals. Little asymmetric whatsits from Australia may be the oldest fossils of full-fledged animal bodies yet discovered, beating the previous contenders by tens of millions of years and pushing the evidence for animal life into an earlier geologic time.
The newly unveiled fossils, which resemble sponges, come from rocks between 635 million and 659 million years old, Adam Maloof of Princeton University and his colleagues report online in Nature Geoscience August 17. Giant Terror Birds Used Stabbing Beaks to Kill Prey. Double-Whammy Earthquake Caused Tsunami. A giant earthquake that triggered a deadly southwest Pacific tsunami was actually two great temblors, finds a pair of new studies in the Aug. 19 Nature. These results uncover an unusual sequence of geological events that is the first of its kind to be observed by scientists, the study authors say. Stern Korean Culture Stifles Biological Predisposition to Blab. Stressed-out Americans tend to vent. Massive North Atlantic Garbage Patch Mapped. Average plastic concentration and range of the North Atlantic garbage patch. Millions of pieces of plastic — most smaller than half an inch — float throughout the oceans.
Our Solar System: Now With 2 Million Years More Maturity. Do-Gooders Are Unpopular Team Members. Why Fish in the Arctic Don’t Freeze. E.O. Wilson Proposes New Theory of Social Evolution. Ötzi the Iceman May Have Had Funeral Ceremony. Maps: How Mankind Remade Nature. New Predatory Dinosaur Discovered in Romania. Heaps of Fossils From Evolutionary ‘Big Bang’ Discovered. Sea Creatures Hint at Recent Trans-Antarctic Seaway.
Furor Erupts Over Role of Self-Sacrifice in Evolution. Ancient Nubians Made Antibiotic Beer. String Theory Finally Does Something Useful. Mass Extinctions Change the Rules of Evolution. Earth’s Magnetic Field Flipped Superfast. Clustered Networks Spread Behavior Change Faster. Self-Healing Solar Cells Could Have Indefinite Lifespan. Carbon Emissions Not at Doomsday Level … Yet. Earth’s Most Stunning Natural Fractal Patterns. The More Victims, the Less Severe the Judgment. After the Blast: Iceland’s Smoldering Volcanoes. How Mass Migration Might Have Evolved. Rare ‘Asian Unicorn’ Caught in Laos. 6 Surprising New Tyrannosaurs Discovered This Year.
Adaptive Traffic Lights Could Achieve ‘The Green Wave’ Gigantic Spider Webs Made of Silk Tougher Than Kevlar. Video: How the Red Sea Could Have Parted. LHC Detects Evidence of New Physics. Antique Pressed Orchids Used as Climate Change Data. How You Can Help Stop Shark Finning. Ancient Fossil Flower Is Father of Sunflower Family. Time-Warping Occurs in Daily Life.
Video: Huge Hurricanes Seen From Space. NASA Maps Global Air Pollution. Terraforming Earth: How to Wreck a Planet in 3,000 Years (Part 1) Mars Dust-Devil Mystery Solved on Earth. How Plants May Have Made Large Predators Possible. A Third of ‘Extinct’ Mammals May Still Be Alive. 67 Million-Year-Old Snake Fossil Found Eating Baby Dinosaurs. 10 Companies Reinventing Our Energy Infrastructure. Millions of Tons of Water Ice Found at Moon’s North Pole. Sex-Changing Herbicide Makes Amphibians Sick, Too. Video: Model Dinosaur Tests Four-Winged Flight. New Look at Big Bang Radiation Refines Age of Universe. Chinese Scientists Say Losing Google Would Hurt Research. T. Rex Skeleton Can Finally Be Ogled by the Public. Controversial Signs of Mass Cannibalism. Malaria Gaining Resistance to Best Available Treatment. Biodiversity Explained by Ignoring the Forest for the Trees. Stunningly Preserved 165-Million-Year-Old Spider Fossil Found.
Dinosaurs Arose at Least 10 Million Years Earlier Than Thought. Stone Age Engravings Found on Ostrich Shells. Bee Colony Collapse May Have Several Causes. How to Keep Planes From Colliding With Lasers. Mummy Scans Show Heart Disease Was Rampant. The Lost Turkeys of the New World. Early Life Hedged Its Bets to Survive. Ground-Breaking Science: Very Old Papers Are Both Awesome and Hi. Darwin’s Wolf Mystery Solved. 3-D Renderings Bring Ancient Hominids to Life. Cigarettes May Cause Infections.
Animation of Giant Iceberg Collision as Seen From Space. Printable, Moldable Batteries Made From Paper and Nanotubes. Quantum Computer Simulates Hydrogen Molecule Just Right. Mediterranean Sea Saved by Monumental Flood. Building a Better Alien-Calling Code. Giant Panda Genome Reveals Why It Eats Shoots and Leaves. Blue Whale Song Mystery Baffles Scientists. Dinosaur Fossil Reveals True Feather Colors. Increase in Shining Clouds Highlights Climate ‘Weirding’ Gene Patents Under Legal Attack. Everywhere in a Flash: The Quantum Physics of Photosynthesis.