Rebecca Enzor

Welcome to Science Tuesday, my newish feature where I gather up all the science articles that I found interesting over the past week. They aren’t necessarily the biggest news items this week, but they’re the ones that interested me enough to read and post on G+ and Twitter.

In absolutely random order, here’s this week’s science goodness!

Ancient Death Toll of Birds Confirmed: Drier and smaller islands saw higher extinction rates, likely because they could easily be deforested, leaving birds no place to hide. Winged birds were 30 times likelier to survive the human expansion than were flightless birds. Bigger birds went extinct more often, as did unique species found only on the Pacific islands.

Extinction Enabled Rise of Crocodiles: although nearly all the crocodilelike archosaurs, known as pseudosuchia, died off about 201 million years ago, the one lineage that survived soon diversified to occupy land and sea. The lineage included the ancestors of all modern crocodiles and alligators.

This is the same Mega Volcano extinction event we were talking about last week!

Why Cuckolded Males Care for Other’s Offspring: By one estimate, the amount of effort a typical garden bird expends rearing chicks is the bird-equivalent of cycling the Tour de France. It stands to reason that male animals should only spend this much effort on their own offspring. Yet, bafflingly, research shows that males of many species continue to care for young they did not sire.

Social Isolation Shortens Lifespan: the take-away? Get out there and PARTY!

EPA Charges Half of U.S. Rivers in Poor Environmental Condition: This is so sad

Pesticides Damage Bee’s Brains: Work carried out by the University of Dundee, in Scotland, revealed that if the pesticides were applied directly to the brains of the pollinators, they caused a loss of brain activity.

But if you put pesticides directly on any brain guess what? You’ll destroy the brain. Take this article with a grain of salt.

(For those of you wondering, my dayjob is mainly testing water and soil samples for Pesticides.)

Blind Cavefish Also Hard of Hearing: “The caves are very loud with the sound bouncing off the walls and stuff,” Soares said. “It would not be very adaptive for the fish to hear at a frequency where the environment is so loud.”

Stone Age Phallus Found in Isreal: “The large amount of tools made of obsidian, a material that is not indigenous to Israel, is indicative of the trade relations that already existed with Turkey, Georgia and other regions during this period.”

Most of the article wasn’t about the stone phallus, but the headline sure does work!

An Animated GIF of Magnetic Paste: Just watch it. Creepy and amazing.

Glowing Millipedes Found on Alcatraz: These millipedes, which aren’t found anywhere else in the world, emit the light as a warning to predators that they are toxic, Rowland said.

Apparently they also smell like cherry or almond, so the researcher smells every one he picks up (but don’t eat them, they have cyanide in their body!)

Mystery of Desert ‘Fairy Circles’ Revealed: It is possible the termites don’t cause the fairy circles, but merely live in them. However, Juergens found the insects were present even during the early stages of patch formation, before the grass had died off on the surface. Over the termites’ lifetime, they munch on the grassy borders and gradually widen the circles.

WWF Finds Rare ‘Sumatran Rhino Footprint’ in Borneo: It is estimated that fewer than 200 Sumatran rhinos, the smallest in its species, exist in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Tiny Blue-Bellied Fish Discovered in the Rio Negro: The fish – since named Cyanogaster noctivaga – is not only a new species, but an entirely new genus. And it was found in a stretch of river that has been particularly well explored, making it even more of a surprise.

Brain Size Didn’t Drive Evolution: In the study, researchers looked at 17 species that span 40 million years of evolutionary time, finding changes in the relative size of specific brain regions, rather than changes in brain size, accounted for three-quarters of brain evolution over that time.

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And that’s it for this week’s Science News!

If you want to receive the same daily science emails I do, you can sign up for the Sigma Xi SmartBrief here.

Hello Aledans! I know this should be a Science Tuesday post, but since I took Monday off this is technically my Tuesday! So happy virtual Tuesday Are you ready for some awesome science-y goodness? I know you are

70-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Egg Fossils Discovered in Spain, Linked to New Species in the Region: The best part of this article is the picture of the dinosaur squatting to lay an egg

Birds Evolve Shorter Wings to Survive on Roads: Birds in Nebraska have evolved shorter wings, which may help them avoid dying on roads by taking off quickly and darting away from cars.

Fossils of Earliest Old World Monkey Unearthed: Unlike the new-world monkeys of the Americas, tails of old-world monkeys are never prehensile, or able to grasp things.

I had no idea.

Antarctic’s First-Ever Whale Skeleton Found: Though their flesh decomposes within weeks, whale bones can last anywhere from 60 to 100 years, supporting bacteria and strange creatures like zombie worms, which are mouthless, eyeless animals that feed off the skeletons.

3,300-Year-Old Egyptian Cemetery Reveals Commoner’s Plight: This reminds me of the article about Ancient Roman’s eating bird food from a couple weeks back.

Inbreeding Common in Early Humans, Deformed Skull Suggests: Yet if such small, inbred populations did exist, it would invalidate many of the genetic inferences about when humans split off from the tree of life, Trinkhaus said, because these inferences assume large, stable populations.

Cheap ‘Nano-Tablet’ Purifies Water for up to Six Months: It consists of a small ceramic disk filled with silver or copper nanoparticles that is placed inside a water vessel, where it can repeatedly disinfect water for up to six months.

Giant Squid All One Big, Happy Family: The results suggest that giant squid are all one species. Even more, they’re all part of the same big population, meaning there don’t seem to be groups of giant squid that interact only with one another. Geography doesn’t seem to be a barrier to their breeding, to the extent that any giant squid in the world is a potential partner for any other giant squid in the global oceans.

Oceans May Be Common on Rocky Alien Planets: Never fear space travelers! There is likely a beach where you’re going

Holy Land Farming Began 5,000 Years Earlier Than Thought: Ancient farms, like those in the region today, likely cultivated vineyards, olives, wheat and barley, he said.

Too Much Tea Causes Unusual Bone Disease: The patient’s blood levels of fluoride were four times higher than what would be considered normal, the researchers said.

Note to self: Don’t drink 100 tea bags in a day.

Roman Ruins Yield Clues to Ancient Earthquakes: Analyzing other ancient ruins for such damage could help shed light on the history of earthquakes in a region, which could yield insights on what risks that area faces in the future, the scientists who examined the mausoleum said.

Ancient Giant Trees Found Petrified in Thailand: “The result was the appearance of what is considered the world’s longest piece of petrified wood, with a length of 72.22 meters” (236.9 feet), the researchers report. “In 2006, the name of the park was changed to the Petrified Forest Park because of the fascinating discoveries.”

Shrunken Heads of Sea Snakes Explained: Sea snakes are so pretty, and this is really interesting.

Mega Volcanoes May Have Killed Half of Earth’s Species: This entire article is freaking awesome. Not only did the mega volcanoes cause a mass extinction, but they ripped apart Pangaea and created the Atlantic Ocean.

Single Drug May Combat Several Deadly Viruses: The findings, published today (March 21) in the journal Cell Chemistry and Biology, could eventually lead to a broad-spectrum medicine for many viral diseases, similar to the way antibiotics work on bacterial infections.

Ancient Stone Ships Reveal Life and Death in the Bronze Age: Archaeologists think these 3,000-year-old stone ships were used as symbolic vessels to carry the dead into the afterlife, since bones and urns are often unearthed from the sites. But one researcher believes Scandinavia’s stone ships were also useful to the living, as ritual gathering spaces and possibly even teaching tools.

Robes and Shovels, Medieval Monks Cultivated Wetlands: Another case of people doing amazing things well before we thought they could.

Solar-Powered 3D Printer Uses Sand to Make Glass: Someday your lightbulbs may be made out of solar-powered 3D-printed glass from the desert.

Information Superhighway Approaches Light Speed: Nothing moves faster than light in a vacuum, but large volumes of data can now travel at 99.7 per cent of this ultimate speed limit.

…and in related news:

Scientists Examine Nothing, find Something: …what we think of as nothing isn’t really nothing. Even if you were to create a perfect vacuum, at the quantum level it would still be populated with pairs of tiny “virtual” particles that flash in and out of existence and whose energy values fluctuate. As a consequence of these fluctuations, the speed of a photon passing through a vacuum varies, about 50 quintillionths of a second per square meter.

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Wow! Last week was chock-full of cool science-y goodness!

If you want to receive the same daily science emails I do, you can sign up for the Sigma Xi SmartBrief here.

Happy last day of winter, Aledans! Tomorrow it’s officially spring, and I saw the first wisteria bloom yesterday, which is how I know it’s spring. Let’s celebrate with some science-y goodness

If you missed it last week, Science Tuesday is my new feature where I gather up all the science articles that I found interesting over the past week. They aren’t necessarily the biggest news items this week, but they’re the ones that interested me enough to read and post on G+ and Twitter.

In absolutely random order, here’s this week’s science goodness!

How the Rhinoceros Beetle Got Its Horns: Turns out the horns are hollow and dry, so they produce no drag when the beetles fly. How awesome!

Pentagon Weapons-Maker Finds Method For Cheap, Clean Water: But how do you clean the salt molecules off the graphene sheet?

Neanderthal’s Doomed by Vision-Centered Brains: Because Neanderthals devoted more brain space to processing sight, they had less room for social cognition and may have died out as a result.

Japan Taps “Firey-Ice” Fuel From Seabed: This one has me at odds.

On the one hand: Worldwide, the energy stored in hydrates is greater than all other energy sources combined.

But on the other hand: Removing crystallised methane from the sea floor could destabilise the seabed and cause landslides. And if methane escapes from the deep well in the Nankai trough, it will dissolve in the water and acidify the local area, potentially harming ocean life. Hydrate mining in shallower waters could pose further problems. If methane escapes into the atmosphere, it could contribute to global warming. Measured over a century, methane is 25 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

 

Parrots Barter With Nuts: This is pretty cool considering I know some adult humans who can’t show self-restraint.

Field Museum, UIC Anthropologists Find Ancient Coin: Anthropologists from the Field Museum and the University of Illinois at Chicago recently led an expedition that unearthed a rare 600-year-old coin on an island off of Kenya that proves China traded with African countries before European explorers set sail.

Sex in Space: Plant Canoodling Is Weird: Quite the headline! And although the article says “In order to actually do long-term plant cultivation, we have to look for species that can actually reproduce under zero gravity conditions” one of my commenters is working on artificial gravity so we don’t have to worry about the weirdness of plant sex in space.

Early Bird Species Had Four Wings: This is cool. Basal birds probably used their leg feathers to help with flight, effectively giving them four wings.

Chemosynthetic Microbial Ecosystem Discovered In Ocean Crust: I love that we’re always so surprised when we find life somewhere (in this case, the rock layer of the ocean floor)

Medieval Knight’s Tomb Found Beneath Parking Lot: Obviously we need to search all parking lots in the UK, since we keep finding cool stuff buried underneath them.

Five-million-year-old Saber-toothed Cat Discovered in Florida: “The new species shows that the most famous saber-toothed cat, Smilodon, had a New World origin and it and its ancestors lived in the southeastern U.S. for at least 5 million years before their extinction about 11,000 years ago. Compared to what we knew about these earlier saber-toothed cats 20 or 30 years ago, we now have a much better understanding of this group.”

Fluorescence Could Indicate Health of Corals: The results show that fluorescence can be a good marker of the health of corals. In fact, it could be an easier, less invasive method of monitoring corals than those currently used, including analyzing corals collected from reefs back in labs. Fluorescence can be monitored without disturbing the coral and directly at the reef site, and could indicate that the coral is in poor health before it bleaches.

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And that’s it for the past week of interesting science news. I hope you enjoyed growing your brain with science!

If you want to receive the same daily science emails I do, you can sign up for the Sigma Xi SmartBrief here.