Comic books have warned us time and time again to keep villains away from radiation. It only makes them stronger. Researchers at University of Delaware have discovered that ultraviolet radiation from the sun increases the plant-destroying powers of the common reed, making it an invasive archnemesis to its wetland plant victims.
The “Holy Grail of Climate Change" press release about biomaterial found in Wyoming clouds has been making its way across the internet like a steady front.
Before the days of mandatory underseat pet carriers, my airline colleagues received a call from a woman who needed to bring her therapy pet, a pig, on a flight. The airline didn’t see a problem, since Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs are about the size of dogs and just as well behaved. However, the animal that the woman showed up with was no potbellied pig. On the day of the flight, the woman showed up with a 300 pound barnyard pig on a leash. The pig took up the entire aisle, calmly sleeping through the flight.
Tetris stole hundreds of hours of our lives. It’s about time it starts giving back. Researchers at the Washington University of St. Louis have built a computer simulation that uses a modified Tetris game to explore self-assembly. Their take on the classic puzzle game confirms what Tetris junkies have always known: The T-shaped tetromino is insanely versatile, and the L and Z tetrominoes just can’t get along.
A couple of entomologists at Arizona State have done what NASA famously failed to do: name a thing after Stephen Colbert. The Agaporomorphus colberti diving beetle joins the ranks of Colbert’s many namesakes: the Aptostichus stephencolberti trapdoor spider, the Diamphipnoa colberti stonefly, and just about everything else that needed naming in the last few years.This Colbert-named arthropod series is in good company. There is a wealth of homage, wordplay, and good ol’ scientist shenanigans hiding beneath the latinized genus and species names of formal biological nomenclature. Here are a few highlights.
At least once a year, Cosmo’s cover story is about how to have better, longer sex: a turgid treatise on positions and anatomy. Our finest ladies’ mags are ignoring the obvious.To improve the mating of our species, we must learn from the mistakes of garden spiders and band together to end sexual cannibalism once and for all. Female Argiope spiders only want what all of us want—the upper hand in the war of the sexes. But your friendly neighborhood garden spider has more at stake than the proper replacement of the toilet seat.
On the occasion of her centennial, Rita Levi-Montalcini addressed the crowd with the gentle tone of a grandmother and the confident cadence of a statesman. At 100 years, she has an energy that many younger people might envy. She divides her workdays between her namesake brain research laboratory and her foundation to encourage African women with potential for scientific achievement. These dual pursuits are fitting of a woman who fought past the setbacks of her own time and culture to become a driving force in both medical research and the politics of science.
When want to understand something complex, we make something similar but simpler - a model. Models in engineering re-imagine complex structures as sticks, strings, and hinges. Biology uses simpler living systems, like yeast and mice. But plenty of scientific questions defy our tried-and-true modeling strategies. If a system is too complex or too slow for us to accurately simplify, we must wait for a model to present itself.
Science is great at finding new rules for expectant mothers. They already can’t have alcohol, caffeine, or cigarettes. They also need to stay away from their cat’s litterbox, stay off of planes and rollercoasters, stay off of antidepressants, drop their acne medication, and forgo even a well-considered vegan diet. Now they have to avoid the Hong Kong flu, too. The Annals of Neurobiology recently published a study that suggested that exposure to the Hong Kong virus during the first trimester of pregnancy may contribute to decreased adult intelligence. The Hong Kong flu is fairly easy to avoid now. But it was everywhere in 1969 and 1970. It reached its Norwegian apex in the spring of 1970, affecting up to 40% of the population.
The setup to the classic Melting Ice Cube problem goes something like this: “Fifty grams of ice are melting in a 100-mililiter cup of 35-degree water.” Using simple principles of energy transfer, we can estimate what the final temperature of the water will be, and how much energy transfer was required to make the ice melt. But what if that ice cube was 20,000 square miles and the cup of water was 300 million cubic miles? What if the ice reflected incoming heat but the water absorbed it? And what if hurricanes, droughts, and forest fires depended on the outcome?
Dave Cooper’s pet mantis, Cinco Zapatos, was a good-looking Giant African Mantis with a notable distinguishing feature: her sixth leg was missing. It didn’t seem to hamper her much. Her first weeks as Dave’s insect familiar were uneventful until Dave returned from a three-day trip to find that Cinco Zapatos had molted—and had become Seis Zapatos in the process. Cinco Zapatos had regrown most of her leg.
It’s the same story over and over: he enters a new environment, wastes it, and grabs what he needs from his surroundings to make a clever escape. But this time there’s less mullet and more microscope. Parasites like Plasmodium hijack your own enzymes to leave a dying cell, like opportunistic MacGyvers stuffing useful proteins into their microscopic man-purses.
Remember when Bugs Bunny dressed as Brunhilda to mess with opera viking Elmer Fudd? If the What's Opera, Doc? ended with Bugs biting off half of Elmer Fudd’s head to keep him hanging around as an immobile food source, then the "Kill The Wabbit" cartoon would essentially tell the story of the Spotted Predatory Katydid. This bug-of-prey lures lovesick male cicadas by decoding the complex cicada mating duet and imitating a lusty cicada female. As soon as the male cicada gets in grabbing range, the duet becomes a lot less romantic.
