Phobos LIFE Experiment To Mars

This month the Russian Federal Space Agency will launch an unmanned mission to Mars and its larger moon Phobos. On board will be a sample return capsule contributed by The Planetary Society with a payload of live microorganisms to test the hypothesis that life can survive in space after being blasted off planets from meteor impacts. Eight-legged water bears (tardigrades), Conan the Bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), Average Joe (Bacillus subtilis), Old Salty (Haloarcula marismortui) and the Fire Eaters (Pyrococcus furiosus) will all make the journey. 

Meet the Microbes & Learn More at Shuttle LIFE

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Unravelling The Secrets Of Spider's Silk

The strength of spider silk exceeds anything we can produce in laboratories, but what gives the threads their strength & how the silk proteins are stored in the spider's silk gland and then assembled in the spinning passage in a split second to form the threads has been largely unknown, until now. Scientists found the silk proteins are stored as highly concentrated droplets with a high salt content which stops the proteins from clumping. In the spinning passage the salt content is lowered, enabling the proteins to align & stick together to form the thread. By regulating both the salt concentration & pH balance the protein strands are formed head to tail into a continuous thread & cross linked for extra strength.

Read More at Physorg.com

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Are Mosquitoes 'developing resistance to bed nets'?

Bed nets treated with insecticide have been one of the cheapest & most effective methods of combating the spread of Malaria, especially in Africa. When properly deployed they can cut malaria rates by half. Now a team of researchers from Senegal have suggested that mosquitoes may be developing an immunity to the nets and their use has reduced the immunity of children and adults to malaria infection. The researchers argue that the effectiveness of the bed nets reduced the immunity that people acquire through exposure to mosquito bites, while the proportion of the insects with a resistance to one type of pesticide had risen from 8% to 48%. As a result there was a rapid rebound in infection rates. Other researchers suggest that the study was too small to draw any such conclusions as it only looked at one small village.

Read More at BBC News

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Microbes Are Pre-adapted For Life In Space

The world's first artificial nuclear reactor was built in 1942. Prior to this poisonous pools of radioactive waste did not exist on Earth. Yet, more than a dozen different species of microbe have inherited the genes which enable them to survive, and even flourish, in radioactive conditions that could only be experienced in space. These microbes must have inherited the genes which made survival in space possible, from microbes which had lived in space. This supports the idea that not only could life have been brought to Earth on meteorites, but that material flowed between planets. In a series of experiments scientists have exposed various organisms to the radiation, and extremes of pressure and temperature they would need to survive to make the journey through space and enter our atmosphere protected within meteorites. Computer models also suggest that boulders, ejected from earth during major impact events such Chicxulub that occurred 65 million years ago, could reach Titan and Enceladus orbiting round distant Saturn.

Read More at Daily Galaxy

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Bats Helping The Blind

The phrase 'Blind as a bat' is misleading. All bats can see but many rely on echolocation to bounce sounds off an object, including prey, to determine its size, shape, and location. The ultrasonic waves that bats use have now been incorporated into a piece of technology to help blind people. The cane senses and vibrates as it nears objects, enabling the user to detect and negotiate obstacles in their path. This video shows the cane in action.

Watch Video at BBC News

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Microbes Use Wind Power To Travel The World

Computer models of Earth's atmosphere have been used to demonstrate how microbes can use the winds to be widely dispersed between continents, enabling them to colonise new lands and potentially spread diseases. The smallest microbes can easily travel between continents and achieve extensive within-hemisphere distribution, although there is almost no dispersal between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres during the year-long time-scale of the simulations. It was discovered to be less easy for larger microbes to travel between continents.

Read More at Physorg.com

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The Mathematics Of Flocks

Mathematical models have shown that the complex patterns formed by flocks of starlings, called a murmuration, or schools of fish moving in unison, obey a few simple rules. Computer models were used to help decode these rules. Fish schools are always elongated as an automatic result of self organisation. As a fish, swimming behind another, slows down to avoid a collision, its immediate neighbours move in to fill the gap, producing an elongated school. Individual fish on the outskirts of a turning group can accelerate slightly, while those inside slow down, so the fish maintain their position in the group and keep the school elongated. Starling flocks produce more complex, varied patterns. Birds in the flock turn individually but do not vary their speed much, so the positions of birds relative to one another change. A wide & flat flock becomes long and narrow after a 90-degree turn. Another factor is the large number of individuals in the flock & the small number of partners (seven) that each bird interacts with.

Read More at Science Daily

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Animal Experiments: A Necessary Evil?

The need to use animals in experiments is a very contentious and emotive issue. Procedures involving animals in the UK have risen over the past decade to reach just over 3.7 million in 2010. Although experiments using dogs fell by 2%, rabbits by 10 %, cats by 32% and even the use of guinea pigs was down by 29%, there was an increase in the use of mice and fish whose genes can be easily modified. Despite the focus on dogs, cats and monkeys in campaign posters by animal rights activists, those creatures are used in less than half of 1% of all procedures. In fact 44% of procedures are not what most people imagine as an 'animal experiment' at all, but merely the act of breeding transgenic creatures, allowing the animals to mate as they would naturally. Many scientists fear attacks from animal rights extremists yet, as this fascinating article highlights, they are working on research into conditions that effect millions of people such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's.

Read More at The Independent

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Mosquito Versus Raindrop

Mosquitoes seem to thrive in humid places where heavy rainfall is common. Can mosquitoes fly in the rain and if so, how? A raindrop may be similar in size but weighs 50 times more than a mosquito. David Hu, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta used high speed cameras and a specially constructed "rain box" to film the insects in flight. The mosquitoes showed no sign of trying to avoid the raindrops. They received both glancing blows and direct hits from drops, which momentarily knocked the insects off course before they re-stabilized and continued on their way.

Read More and Watch Video at io9

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Deepest Worm Lives Beneath A Mile Of Rock

Nematode worms are one of natures great survivors. They are found in desert, mountain, and ocean and even survived on the space shuttle Columbia after it disintegrated on reentry. A new species of nematode, the deepest known animal, has been discovered in a rock fracture a mile underground, in the Beatrix gold mine in South Africa, where no other animal has been found. It was thought only single-celled organisms could inhabit the bedrock beneath our feet but now the search is on to find other such creatures. Every new extremophile organism found, extends our knowledge of what life needs to survive, and of the possibility of life being discovered elsewhere in the universe.

Read More at Discover Magazine

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Wasps Make Zombie Spiders Weave Weird Webs

The parasitic wasp Zatypota percontatoria can infect the Neottiura bimaculata spider and change its web weaving behaviour. Usually the spider will build a special protective web with a cupola-like structure in which to overwinter. Instead the wasp makes the zombie spider build this structure in the summer to house and protect the wasp pupa. It is unclear exactly how the wasp controls the spider's behaviour in this way but it is thought to manipulate the nerves or the glands that secrete hormones. Once built the wasp larva kills and eats the spider and builds its cocoon inside the dome.

Read More at Discovery.com

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Microbes Shall Inherit The Earth

Global warming is not a recent phenomenon. Natural causes in our ancient past drove rapid increases in carbon dioxide and led to mass extinctions.  The most severe of these took place 250 million years ago at the end of the Permian Period, possibly due to increased volcanic activity as the supercontinent Pangaea broke apart. Global temperatures rose by up to 5 degrees Celsius and 90% of ocean species were lost. Now global temperatures have risen by almost three-quarters of a degree Celsius over the past 100 years. By looking at the past, professor of earth sciences and biological sciences, David Bottjer, has made three predictions: as oceans absorb more CO2 they will become more acidic causing coral reefs to die off. Ocean circulation will slow due to the hotter atmosphere and, as oxygen levels decrease dead zones will appear, unable to support oxygen-dependent life, like fish. As other forms of life decline the microbes will increase and take over.

Read More at Physorg.com

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Fossils Provide New Clues To Insect Evolution

A new insect order has been discovered by scientists at the Stuttgart Natural History Museum. Named Coxoplectoptera it is an extinct relation to the mayfly, but seems to have characteristics of various other insects. Wing veins like a mayfly but the wing shape & breast of a dragonfly & legs like a praying mantis while its larvae resemble freshwater shrimps. Their anatomy suggests that they were ambush predators living partly dug in to river beds.

Read More at Science Daily

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Hunting For The Devil's Coach Horse

The Open Air Laboratories Project (Opal) are asking the public to go on a bug hunt this autumn. They want to find out what the current state of invertebrates is in the UK. To this end they have published a free guide and an app to help people identify the beetles, slug and spiders they may find.

Read More at BBC News

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Maggot Medicine!

In a recent trial, patients with diabetes and limb infections were treated with 50 to 100 maggots patched to their wounds every two days for about 10 days. The maggots in 21 out of 37 cases managed to remove dead or infected tissue, thereby speeding up the healing process and preventing more drastic actions such as amputation in severe cases. Maggot therapy remains controversial as many studies have shown mixed results and it is unclear if they can damage healthy tissue if left too long in a wound.

Read More at Discovery News

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41 Million Year Old Fossils Confirm Rodents Came From Africa

Fossilized teeth from three new species of rodent, found in Peru, show the animals were most closely related to African rodents from the suborder Caviomorpha, the group that includes guinea pigs, chinchillas, and New World porcupines. This supports the theory that rodents landed in the north and spread south instead of spreading north as deduced from the fossil record 20 years ago and pushes back the date of the first South American rodents. Previously, the oldest fossils from this group were only from between 30 and 32 million years old.

Read More at Physorg.com

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The Hyperaggressive Rat

In a story straight out of Orwell's Room 101 in 1984, Russian scientists have, since 1972, been conducting a genetic experiment that has resulted in a breed of super vicious rats. In the experiment two colonies of wild rats have been selectively bred, one for tameness & the other for aggression. It is the degree of difference between the two colonies & the speed of change that has surprised the scientists, with geneticist Svante Pääbo declaring of the aggressive rats that "10 or 20 of them would probably kill me if they got out of the cages." Several key regions of the genome involving half a dozen genes have been identified as being key. The next step is to locate the individual genes involved.

Read More at New Scientist

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The Age Of Chivalry Lives (In Crickets At Least)

After mating, most male insects will stay with the female. Scientists believed this was to stop other males from mating with her. Now Rolando Rodriguez-Munoz from the University of Exeter has been studying video of field crickets and discovered that the male keeps close to protect the female rather than to chase away other suitors. The male will even put himself at risk to protect her from danger, letting her forage close to the nest while he feeds further a field, and when danger threatens he lets her enter the safety of the nest first. This increases by four times, the risk of the male being eaten but while the female gains protection the male also benefits by increasing his opportunities to mate with the female and ensuring that his young survive.

Read More at Not Exactly Rocket Science

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Worms Survived Dinosaur Killing Asteroid!

The Manhattan-sized asteroid that hit the Earth 65.5 million years ago, released a billion times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb, triggered dust and ash storms, wildfires, tsunamis, earthquakes, and a “nuclear winter”. It is widely believed to have caused the K-T boundary extinction and demise of the dinosaurs. This event has also been linked to the subsequent proliferation of mammals on the planet. New evidence from North Dakota however, shows networks of crisscrossing worm burrows less than three inches above the K-T boundary layer, meaning they were made within a few thousand years after the extinction event. It is hoped that future research will be able to narrow this period down. Scientists at the University of Colorado believe the burrows were made in a bog-like environment that was eventually buried by sediment. These trace fossils show the worms were one of the earliest creatures to emerge from the devastation and must have been able to withstand the environmental stresses of flooding, including prolonged inundation, low oxygen, and acidic conditions.

Read More at Futurity

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Indepth Chronicle Of The Environment Our Ancestors Knew 7 Million Years Ago

A group of researchers at the University of Utah found they could extrapolate the percentage of woody plant cover from carbon isotopes left in soils in African forests and grasslands when our ancestors were evolving from apes into hominids. They discovered that 7 million years ago the area was mainly grassland with only sparse trees. The tree cover increased to peak around 40-60% woody cover by 3.6 million years ago & then declined, opening up the environments. This research suggests that early hominins adapted to sparser tree cover, becoming bipedal as a more efficient method of travel in more open landscape & developing larger teeth & jaws to cope with a more fibrous diet than fruit. As the trees declined our ancestors became taller & developed the ability to run. Their teeth & jaws became smaller as they adapted to being hunter-gatherers, the new high protein diet also allowing their brains to grow in size.

Read More at The Loom

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