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Past Shows
April 1, 2006
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Stinking Baby Bugs
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Burrower bug mother bringing food to her offspring |
Babies cry and children whine when they’re hungry. But how do insects that can’t cry or whine get their parents’ attention? Well, a new study suggests that burrower bug babies start to stink when they’re starving.. sending out a chemical signal to their mother that they need food.
In experiments designed by Dr. Butch Brodie of Indiana University and his colleagues, mother bugs were subjected to the chemical smells of a starving brood and a group of babies that were well-fed. The research team used their unique “smell-o-tron” to blow the odours to the mother bugs. When the parent smelled chemicals from the hungry group, she doubled or tripled her collection of food.
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Meerkat Infanticide
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Female meerkats fighting - Courtesy, Andrew Young |
Meerkats have been known for their remarkable cooperative society. These attractive african mongooses live and work together, watching out for predators, raising and even suckling each other's young. There is, however, a dark side to meerkat society. Dr. Andrew Young, a research fellow in Zoology at the University of Cambridge, has revealed that infanticide is rife among meerkats. In particular, when a female gets pregnant, she attempts to murder every other infant in the troop so that her new infants will get the benefit of the group's cooperation.
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Knowing Me, Knowing You
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MRI of the brain - Courtesy, National Science Foundation |
One of the hallmarks of being human is our ability to empathise with others – to read people’s expressions and emotions. Even with complete strangers, we somehow understand how they are feeling, what they are thinking and what their intentions are. But how do we do it? Scientists have been grappling with this for ages. There just didn’t seem to be any obvious mechanism to explain it.
But then, about 15 years ago, something weird happened in a monkey lab in Italy. Scientists there discovered a new type of brain cell. They called it a “mirror neuron”, because of its ability to mirror the activity of those around it. The neurons were firing not only when the monkey itself performed an action, but when it watched an experimenter perform it as well. So, even when the monkey was completely still, and did nothing but watch someone else pick up a peanut, its brain fired as though it were picking up the peanut itself. And that got researchers wondering if this could be the key to our exquisite mind-reading abilities.
Toronto science journalist Alison Motluk set out to explore the implications of mirror neurons, and prepared a documentary, called Knowing Me, Knowing You. Here are the people she spoke to:
Dr. Christian Keysers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands has been studying these neurons for some years now. He says they have the uncanny ability to mirror or mimic what’s going on in the brains of others.
Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the Brain Mapping Center at UCLA, had had a hunch that imitating other people’s facial expressions was somehow linked to feeling what they were feeling. This turned out to be true.
Dr. Mirella Dapretto, who works with Dr. Iacoboni at UCLA, immediately began wondering if malfunctioning mirror neurons might explain the problems that autistic people have.
Dr. V.S. Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego. He thinks the combination of language and learning by imitation that mirror neurons seem to enable may explain why humans have such a rich and rapidly evolving culture.
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Obesity Virus
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Could these chickens have a virus that makes them fat? |
It’s a contentious idea, but Dr. Leah Whigham is not the first to suggest that a virus could make us fat. In her latest study, the associate scientist from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has studied the effect of some human adenoviruses on chickens. She found that one such virus, Ad-37, seems to cause obesity in the birds. Her finding builds on other studies that show that two related viruses also cause obesity in animals.
Dr. Whigham admits that more research is needed to determine if viruses play a role in obesity, and indeed, developing a vaccine is still a long way off. She plans to study other adenoviruses to see if they, too, have the same fat-making effect in animals.
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Carbon Producing Mammal
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Remaining samples of Dr. McKenzie's discovery |
A remarkable new animal was discovered in Viet Nam recently by Dr. Alexander McKenzie, a biologist at the Woody Hole Terragraphic Institute. The small mammal seems to be able to consume most kinds of organic matter, and somehow combines it with carbon dioxide from the air, to produce fecal pellets of limestone. Dr. McKenzie thinks that perhaps by ranching these animals in large numbers, enough CO2 could be absorbed to have a meaningful effect on global warming. Dr. McKenzie is now searching for more of the animals having inadvertantly consumed the only one he's found so far.
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