• Where’s my fur coat? Hairless bear in Germany is the saddest thing you’ll see today.
• “Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination” opens at the California Museum of Science. On display is a giant Darth Vader mask made of old electronics. All lesser nerds tremble in its presence.
• I did what last night? Woman has a terrible case of the morning afters—transient global amnesia to be exact—that can be triggered by sex.
• Will learning foreign languages be irrelevant one day? Space-age glasses that translate foreign languages are under development.
• If the hairless bear weirded you out, then put a smile on your face with these cute little narcoleptic meerkats that fall asleep while standing up.
It’s a question you wouldn’t be surprised to hear a toddler ask: Do butterflies have ears? Well yes, yes they do. And one species was recently discovered to have ears on their wings. The blue morpho butterfly from Central and South America has beautiful bright blue wings complete with a simple ear structure that picks up noise and relays it to the brain.
Via MSNBC.com
In the new study, Kathleen Lucas of the University of Bristol in England and her colleagues were interested in the odd-looking hearing membrane that sits at the base of the blue morpho’s wing. The tympanal membrane, as it is called, is oval-shaped with a dome at its center that kind of resembles the yolk at the center of a fried egg, Lucas said.
Researchers determined that the butterflies can distinguish high and low frequencies, uncommon in simple ears, and they speculate this could help them determine if a hungry bird is about to swoop down and attack.
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Image: flickr / DavidDennisPhotos.com
We know filming in the wild can be deadly: Just ask the Grizzly Man or the Crocodile Hunter. But what do these animals actually do when we aren’t around to observe them?
The Museum of Animal Perspectives is working to learn the answer to this question. Three months ago, Sam Easterson, a video artist, began surfing the ‘net for videos that scientists had posted of animal behavior in the wild. So far, Easterson’s collection of critter-cam videos includes a black bear, a raccoon, an Asian elephant, a moose, and an Amazon red squirrel. The footage gives you the illusion that you are there, actually spying on these creatures. Currently, the most popular videos are the Patagonian conure, the bald eagle, and the oh so cute owl.
The Scientist reports:
Log on to the site, and you’ll see the Dwelling Cams Gallery page—a Google map with pointers at some 25 locations around the world. Each one takes viewers to a video of an animal kicking back in its own home—be they birds called Patagonian conures hanging out in their cliff burrows in Argentina), an eastern mole inspecting his tunnel in Indiana, or something more mundane, like brook trout spawning in Ontario, Canada.
Needless to say, the videos are pretty entertaining. One DISCOVER editor admitted she “was at a party on Saturday and the armadillo cam was a major topic of conversation. The snuffling makes it oh so excellent.”
Image: flickr/ hockey.lover
Strangely enough, it makes sense: A study of red junglefowl, a close relative of chickens, found that males can “adjust the speed and effectiveness of their sperm by allocating more or less seminal fluid to copulations.” The determining factor in this remarkable change of speed is how attractive the male finds the female. According to Discovery News (not to be confused with DISCOVER):
The study…adds to the growing body of evidence that males throughout many promiscuous species in the animal kingdom, including humans, can mate with many females, but chances of fertilization are greater when the female is deemed to be attractive.
Desirable female red junglefowl are easy to identify.
“Female attractiveness is determined by the expression of a sexual ornament — the comb — which is phenotypically and genetically correlated to the number and mass of eggs females lay,” according to study co-authors Charlie Cornwallis of the University of Oxford and the Royal Veterinary College’s Emily O’Connor.
To collect their data, the researchers collected natural ejaculates from dominate and subordinate red junglefowl that had just mated with either an “attractive” or “unattractive” female. What the dedicated won’t do for science.
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• When summer storms hit, beware of your XBOX or Wii—apparently an increasing number of people have faced injury while playing hardwired video games indoors when there’s lightning outside.
• Spoon that irresistible raw cookie dough into your mouth at the risk of kidney failure and bloody diarrhea: Toll House has recalled its dough due to possible E. Coli contamination.
• Snakes in a station! About 400 cobras were expelled from a Sierra Leone police station using attack rifles and power hoses after snakecharmers failed to lure the reptiles from the building.
•It’s been a rough week for pets: Just ask the the week-old puppy that was flushed down the toilet, the cat that was shot 50 times, and the kitten that was abandoned in a public mailbox in Boston. Those furballs survived, but the cats and dogs that ate pet food tainted with melamine weren’t so lucky. The manufacturing company and its owners pleaded guilty this week to selling the contaminated food.
•Remember the rap about the LHC? Now there’s another one by the same, er, artist, tackling the subject of rare isotopes.
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A recent survey of the animal kingdom has found that, like humans, animals just wanna have fun.
To anyone who’s ever spent time with a dog, it may seem obvious that animals can enjoy play for the sake of it—though this hasn’t been so well documented in the scientific realm. Jonathan Balcombe, a research scientist with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, has now gathered a list of ways that animals get pointless pleasure, and published it in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science. A few examples:
- Herring gulls play “drop-catch,” tossing around clams and other small, hard objects.
- Hippos go to the spa. When a hippo wants to unwind at the freshwater springs, they relax with their legs spread out and mouth wide open, and let the surrounding fish suck off parasites, flaky skin, fungus, and other blemishes. Sometimes they get so relaxed that they fall asleep.
- Dolphins use vibrators. They’ve been caught making low-pitched buzzing clicks near each others’ private areas, and researchers say it seems to be an enjoyable experience.
- Certain birds have been caught masturbating, while goats, hyenas, primates, bats, and sheep appear to engage in oral sex.
In order to have fun, animals must have a brain that can process the pleasure. Some aren’t so lucky: Sponges and jellyfish aren’t conscious enough to really know what fun is.
As if snails don’t get mocked enough for being so slow, evolution sure isn’t doing them any favors. It seems that evolution favors snails with a slower metabolism because they have more energy for other activities, such as growth and reproduction.
Testing the biological hypothesis of the “energetic definition of fitness,” which purports that the less energy an animal spends, the more it will have for survival and reproduction, the researchers measured the size and standard metabolic rate (the amount of energy required for maintenance) of nearly 100 garden snails. After seven months, the researchers found that surviving snails had a metabolic rate 20 percent lower than that of the dead snails—and no correlation between snail size and rate of survival.
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It’s hard out there for a hippo. An international medical team was in the process of castrating Lieber, a five-year-old hippopotamus, as part of an effort to control population growth in the zoo where he lived. But his heart stopped after his second dose of anesthetic, given to repair a torn suture. A veterinarian tried jumping up and down on the animal to restart his heartbeat, but was unsuccessful.
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• If you thought things were bad on Wall Street, zoo animals laid off at the Bronx Zoo may have it much worse.
• A family looking for relaxation at a Florida beach found adventure instead, when they discovered a one-eyed, three-legged alligator. (It was captured and returned safely to the wild.)
• A glowing frog became a charm on a string of Christmas lights, while the first transgenic puppy glows under ultraviolet light.
• The Telegraph reports that scientists have found, literally, a smiley-faced spider from Hawaii.
• Not so smiley, however, are horse fans around the world, after a group of 21 polo horses died from a supplement prepared at a Florida pharmacy with the wrong proportion of ingredients.
• Non-animal-related: but if you happen to find yourself at the top of Mount Everest, you may soon get decent cell reception.
Injaz—the world’s first cloned camel—was born last Wednesday in Dubai. It wasn’t easy—the process took the Camel and Reproduction Centre (CRC) and the Central Veterinary Research Laboratory a good five years, all to create a 66-pound baby.
Nisar Wani, a researcher at the CRC, removed DNA from cells in the ovaries from an unfortunate camel who was chopped up for meat in 2005. The salvaged DNA was then put into a surrogate mother’s egg to produce the clone, after gestating for just over a year.
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