Blogs / Discoblog

Aircraft designers are always on the lookout for tough but lightweight materials. Chris Broomell of the University of California, Santa Barbara may have found a new candidate—on the head of a worm.

The ragworm, sometimes called the sandworm (but not to be confused with the hideous but fictional creatures from Dune), boasts two ultra-tough pincers that it uses to burrow into ocean sediment. At 90 percent protein, you’d expect the worm’s mouth-parts to be tough, Broomell told New Scientist, but they have an additional secret—they’re fortified with zinc. The metal bonds those proteins together, and the result is three times stronger than the polymers humans can currently create.

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Maybe they should call it “soggy old England.”

Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry published a survey this week finding that U.K. residents used more water, and cared less about their water waste and pollution, than their Western European counterparts. Only 48 percent of British survey subjects said they showered for less than five minutes, as opposed to 59 percent for both the French and Spanish.

As always, it’s hard to know how accurately the survey statistics reflect real life. The French and Spanish appear to be the most water-conscious Western Europeans, but knowing that you’re wasting water isn’t the same as stopping your waste.

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On Monday we brought you the story of the Russian scientists forced to evacuate their Arctic research station because their ice floe melted. Today, Nature has an interview with Jürgen Graeser, a German scientist who spent the winter with the Russians at North Pole 35.

So what did Graeser learn during his time up there?

1. Bring a flare gun. Graeser guesses that the team had 30 or so separate run-ins with polar bears, but none of them turned deadly because the flares scared off the bears.

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Here’s another case from the “pitting one animal against another” file: Japanese conservationists want to use bees to protect terns from crows.

Seabirds called little terns nest near Tokyo’s airport after migrating north from Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. But National Geographic reports that are area’s crows are bad neighbors, prone to attacking and killing young terns.

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Earlier this month, we wrote that Santa Claus might have no home this summer as scientists speculate that the Earth could see an ice-free North Pole. Now Russian scientists trying to study Arctic warming have had to abandon their work to keep from ending up all wet.

In September, the Russian team set up North Pole 35, an Arctic headquarters where they could study pollution levels the how fast the ice was melting. Unfortunately for them, and the world in general, the ice melted faster than they anticipated: Their ice floe home, which was almost four miles wide in September, shrank to only one-third of a mile across this summer. Russia evacuated, and the last 20 scientists and their dogs climbed aboard a rescue ship yesterday.

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The Telegraph reports that earlier this week in Australia, doctors at Royal Children’s Hospital announced that they’d diagnosed the first case of so-called “climate change delusion.” Doctors Robert Salo and Josh Wolfe say a 17-year-old male had refused to drink any water out of eco-guilt—he believed his water consumption would cause the deaths of millions of people.

The story seems almost too outrageous to be true, but some blogs and newspapers have jumped on the “Al Gore is literally driving people crazy” angle, and blamed media coverage of global warming for this Australian’s mental condition. The scapegoating seems reminiscent of the story last month about the pregnancy pact at a Massachusetts high school (which was a hoax), when culture warriors were quick to blame films like Knocked Up and Juno for supposedly glamorizing pregnancy or single parenthood. So far, however, we haven’t heard anyone blame this young man’s affliction on the anti-consumption message of Wall-E.

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Do penguins like salsa?

As the continents have made their slow drift around the world, the landmasses have intermingled in all sorts of ways, and occasionally formed supercontinents like Pangaea and Gondwanaland. Now, University of Minnesota Duluth geologist John Goodge says that in a supercontinent called Rodinia, which sat near the Equator 800 million years ago, Antarctica and Arizona used to be neighbors.

According to Science News, experts have argued over what bordered Laurentia—the geologic name for the large landmass that contained most of what is now North America—during the time the continents were clustered in Rodinia. Australia, Siberia and China were all candidates.

So Goodge tested the presence of different chemical isotopes, trying to get a match. And he did—to Eastern Antarctica. Granite found there matches the chemical composition of granite from the American Southwest, he says, and the Transantarctic Mountains contain the same sediments as Laurentian samples he’s studied.

The Antarctica-America connection may have been short-lived; Rodinia broke apart about 750 million years ago. No word yet whether the split was amicable.

Image: iStockphoto

The creators of The Red Balloon probably never had this in mind.

Aérophile, a French company that produces hot air balloons, has created a model that changes color to tell people how clean—or unclean—the Parisian air is that day. After gathering data from Airparif, an agency that monitors air quality in France, the balloon’s owners will adjust its color to correspond with the pollution level—green meaning excellent air quality, yellow signifying OK, and red meaning highly polluted.

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Some plants simply can’t handle their climate changing, and an increased temperature kills them off. Others, as DISCOVER recently covered, manage to migrate to a cooler climate when nature turns up the heat. But a grass found on a rocky hillside in Northern England has chosen a third option: Stay and tough it out.

Researchers from Syracuse and Sheffield universities had been toying with this particular ecosystem for 13 years. Herbs and shrubs abound in the rocky region; more than 50 species of plants per square meter can be found, and researchers decided to put them all to the test. They divided the area into smaller plots, and varied the climate of those plots wildly. One section was given 20 percent more water than its average yearly amount; another area had shelter built over it to simulate drought. The scientists even planted heating cables underneath one plot to simulate a warmer-than-average winter.

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Skyrocketing oil prices are driving the world crazy. States like Utah are cutting the workweek back to four days to save on gas. Even bigger news: President Bush actually agreed to join other G-8 leaders in reducing emissions by 50 percent by 2050. Biofuels seem like a solution, but demand for them has cut into our food supply. Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is now chasing the wind turbine. But some scientists are going to the extreme—using extremophiles, a type of microbe found in some of the most inhospitable places on earth, to solve the energy crisis.

For years, extremophiles were the stuff of science fiction, but now scientists are traveling to places like China’s western deserts to collect the microbes for scientific research. The bugs don’t need sunlight, don’t need to breathe, can bathe in acid, and can withstand radiation that would easily kill humans. Forbes reports that a microscopic bug discovered two miles underneath a South African gold mine in 2006 survives “exclusively on a diet of sulfur and hydrogen,” while other bugs flourish in boiling heat and spend their lives buried in glaciers and volcanoes.

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