Do sperm whales use sonar to stun giant squid? In a word: maybe. I
delved quite enthusiastically into the topic last year, and came out tantalized and frustrated by limited evidence.
So I was very excited to see an article in the Smithsonian called
The Sperm Whale's Deadly Call. Is this new research, finally showing once and for all that sperm whales knock out their prey by very loud shouting?
Frankincense is a milky, fragrant resin used in incense and perfumes across the world and is also a key part of the Christmas story but trees are declining so dramatically that production could be halved over the next 15 years, according to a new study in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology.
But global warming isn't the culprit on this one, it is most likely insect attack. Frankincense is obtained by tapping various species of Boswellia, a tree that grows in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Yet despite its economic importance – incense has been traded internationally for thousands of years – little is known about how tapping affects Boswellia populations.
How old is the water in your drinking glass? What about the ice cubes floating in it? Any answer is bound to make reference to the water cycle (evaporate, rain, repeat). Still, for most practical purposes, water is both eternal and constantly replenished.
As I have a long train journey and not much to do, I can use it to write about this recent
open access paper on Eyjafjallajökull written by a couple of my colleagues in the lab. As it is open access you can go and read it for yourself if you wish, but I thought I would first explain a few of the key concepts discussed in the paper.
First, a quick reminder on the eruption itself. The timings of the various eruptive phases are important, as the researchers were looking not just at the eruption as a whole, but on how the magma changed during the eruption.
In the
previous blog post we familiarized ourselves with a most remarkable device. A device resulting from 20th century science: Albert's chest of drawers. This chest, although presented as a
gedanken gadget, is real in the sense that devices with the same characteristics
have been built, although none of these take the actual shape of a chest of drawers. In fact, the devices built so far are way smaller in size. They are based not on drawers, but on photons or sub-microscopic particles.
A number of midwives believe modern births rely too heavily on medication and technological intervention and they instead have created 'birthing rituals' to send the message that women's bodies know best and that birth is about female empowerment.
It's no surprise the Pacific Northwest, home of progressive anti-vaccine efforts, is also on the vanguard of this latest fad in anthropology. In Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Melissa Cheyney, assistant professor of medical anthropology at Oregon State University, documented rituals used by midwives and conducted interviews with midwives and new mothers.
A gene mutation dating back to 11,600 B.C. is the second oldest human disease mutation discovered so far. The investigators described the mutation in people of Arabic, Turkish and Jewish ancestry, which causes a rare, inherited vitamin B12 deficiency called Imerslund-Gräsbeck Syndrome (IGS).
The mutation is found in different ethnic populations but it originated in a single, prehistoric individual and was passed down to that individual's descendants. The researchers say this is unusual because such "founder mutations" usually are restricted to specific ethnic groups or relatively isolated populations.
Galaxies are theorized to have massive black holes at their centers but the one in the Milky Way is the only supermassive black hole close enough for astronomers to study in detail. A recent violent encounter is a unique chance to observe how a black hole gulps gas, dust and stars as it grows ever bigger.
The normally quiet neighborhood around the massive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is being invaded by a gas cloud that is destined in just a few years to be ripped, shredded and largely eaten. The Chandra X-ray satellite has already scheduled its largest single chunk of observation time in 2012 near the Milky Way's central black hole.
To recap: in 2011, the California market squid fishery caught tons of squid (118,000 tonnes to be exact) and was
all set to close. However, some fishers noted the continued abundance of squid in the ocean and petitioned to
keep catching.
Then Oceana spoke up on behalf of the squid, with an argument neatly summarized by Geoff Shester, Oceana's California program director, as
Protect Calamari, Save the Whales:
Scientists aren't sure what causes clogs in flowing macroscopic particles, like corn, coffee beans and coal chunks. But new experiments suggest that when particles undergo shear strain, they jam sooner than expected.
Shear strain is sort of like cupping sand between your hands, and then, without changing the width between them, moving one hand forward and the other hand backward. Not much sand flows between your hands with a force like this.
