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That Long Distance Feeling

KBO binary - courtesy CFEPS

Long distance relationships are hard to manage, even for Kuiper Belt asteroids. Dr. J.J. Kavelaars, an astronomer with the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics (part of the National Research Council of Canada) in Victoria, and his colleagues, have found two asteroids beyond the orbit of Pluto forming a very tenuous binary pair. The asteroids are only about 50km in diameter, but are orbiting each other more than 100,000 km apart. The slightest gravitational disruption would destroy their delicate orbital dance.

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Related Links

Science Magazine paper
Story and movie at the Canada France Ecliptic Plane Survery

Worm Grunting

Worm Grunting - courtesy Jayne Yack

Worm grunting, charming or fiddling is a technique used in different parts of the world by bait gatherers to drive earthworms out of the ground. Dr. Jayne Yack, a neuroethologist and professor of biology at Carleton University, and her students, decided to study the phenomenon by visiting a worm grunting festival in Florida. There, they met another researcher coincidentally studying the same thing. It turns out the bait gatherers may be scaring the worms out of hiding by duplicating the sound made by worm-eating moles - a theory proposed by Darwin in the 19th century.

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Related Links

Dr. Yack's paper in Biology Letters (with supplemental video)
Dr. Kenneth Catania's paper in PLOS One
Science Magazine story (with video)

Bionic Monkeys

While a treatment for spinal cord injuries is still only a distant possibility, researchers are making some encouraging strides. Dr. Chet Moritz, a Senior Fellow in physiology and biophysics at the University of Washington, Seattle, has developed a device that allows monkeys to move a paralyzed limb simply by thinking about it. Dr. Moritz first trained the monkeys to play a simplified video game with a specialized controller. He then temporarily paralyzed their arm with an injection of Lidocaine, which mimicked a spinal cord injury. However, the monkeys were still able to move their arm and play the video game via an electronic relay that sent signals directly from the monkeys' brain to the muscles in their forearm.

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Related Links

Dr. Moritz's study in the journal Nature:
A media release from the University of Washington
A story on Dr. Moritz's research from cbcnews.ca

Suicide Ants

The Brazilian suicide ant, Forelius pusillus, courtesy April Nobile

If you think you make sacrifices for your family, you need to check out the family dynamic in an ant colony. Dr. Francis Ratnieks, a professor of biology and environmental science at The University of Sussex, has been studying a remarkable form of selflessness in a species of Brazilian ants. The ants, which make their underground colony in sandy soil, seal up the entrance to their home each night at dusk. In order to do this, a few ants stay outside stuffing sand into the entrance. The problem is, once they've done this, they're stuck outside where they almost always meet their end. Dr. Ratnieks says surviving overnight outside the colony is virtually impossible. While other insects such as bees are known to sacrifice their lives in order to defend their colony, this is the first time researchers have found a species that does it in a pre-emptive manner.

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Related Links

Dr. Ratnieks' web page
Dr. Ratneiks' study will be published in the November issue of The American Naturalist
Story in ScienceNow (includes video)

Neanderthal Surf n' Turf

Neanderthal from Wikimedia Commons

There are a lot of misconceptions about Neanderthals. When their fossilized remains were first discovered in the 1800's, it was assumed that they were too primitive to share much in common with modern humans. But the more researchers have studied our evolutionary cousins, the more striking the family resemblance. In a recent set of digs in two coastal caves on Gibraltar, Dr. Chris Stringer, a Paleontologist with the Natural History Museum in London, England, has discovered that the Neanderthal diet was more broad than researchers originally supposed. Dr. Stringer and his colleagues found evidence that the Neanderthals occupying these caves close to 30, 000 years ago harvested and cooked shellfish, hunted seals and occasionally butchered dolphins. These findings suggest that Neanderthals didn't simply hunt land animals but that they also enjoyed surf n' turf.

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Related Links

Dr. Stringer's study in the journal PNAS
A media release from The Natural History Museum
Dr. Chris Stringer's website

How the Turtle got its Shell

Artist's impressions of turtle intermediate forms, courtesy Royal Society

It sounds like it could be one of Kipling's "Just So" stories, but in fact, this is a new fossil of an ancient turtle that is helping paleontologists understand turtle-shell evolution. Dr. Walter Joyce, the Collections Manager in Vertebrate Paleontology at the Yale University Peabody Museum of Natural History, has analyzed the fossil. It's of a 210 million-year-old turtle with a very thin shell, indicating that the shell first formed as the turtle's skin transformed into bony armour.

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Related Links

Dr. Joyce's paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Dr. Joyce's home page

Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein. Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0