Bite SCIze

Wildlife Photographer of the year winners!

2008-10-30T10:53:00.000-07:00

The Wildlife Photographer of the year is now officially open. The winning images, just like the sneak peak images that were previously released, are pretty stunning (although I am not much of a fan of the overall winner).

Troublemaker. Winner of Animal Portraits, by Stefano Unterthiner.

The show. Winner of 15-17 category, by Catriona Parfitt.

Window on the ice melt. Runner up in the One Earth Award, by Ira Meyer.

Cypress Swamp. Winner of In praise of plants, by Cece Fabbro.

Polar Sunrise. Winner of Creative visions of Nature, by Miguel Lasa .

Shark nursery. Runner up in animals in their environments, by Brian Skerry.

I'll resist posting all the photos, but if you're in London, definitely go check out the exhibit (but try and do it on a weekday unless you like crowds). Otherwise, you'll have to wait for the collection to start touring or you'll have to check it out online.

Here comes the sun

2008-10-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

The Boston Sun had some sizzling photos of the Sun in all it's yellow glory recent.

A six day animation of the sun, taken by NASA's Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) and filmed in June 2005.

"A sweeping prominence, a huge cloud of relatively cool dense plasma is seen suspended in the Sun's hot, thin corona. Emission in this spectral line shows the upper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K (over 100,000 degrees F). The hottest areas appear almost white, while the darker red areas indicate cooler temperatures."

A closeup of magnetic structures on the Sun's surface.

A total solar eclipse, February 16, 1980, in Palem, India

A sunspot and granules on the Sun's surface.

An erupting solar filament. "Filaments are concentrated bundles of magnetic field filled with relatively cool gas, suspended in the solar corona. When they become unstable, they can erupt, triggering coronal mass ejections and solar flares. The dark material here is relatively cool, while the bright material is hotter than a million degrees. As this hot material cools, it condenses and drains down the lines of magnetic field in the corona much like beads moving along a wire, a process some scientists refer to as "coronal rain"."

A visually stunning prominence eruption, seen in extreme UV light. "It rose up and cascaded to the right over several hours, appearing something like a flag unfurling, as it broke apart and headed into space. The material observed is ionized Helium at about 60,000 degrees."

David Attenborough at his best

2008-10-21T02:02:00.000-07:00

Magic eye 101

2008-10-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

While doing a recent survey on Cognitive daily about illusions, I learned an important (and apparently quite well known) lesson -- 'magic eyes' work on the computer. Turns out magic eyes were everywhere on the Internet. But there is was little (and inadequate) explanation of how they work. How do magic eyes work? This simple text-based magic eye provided the insight I needed (to make it work, you might need to view it larger here).

(Props to the first author who writes a book that also has magic eye embedded pictures.)

For how it works, and more on magic eyes on the internet, please read on.

Essentially, our brains piece together the illusion on the basis of slight differences in what our right eye sees and what our left eye sees when we look 'beyond' the image. As wiki unhelpfully explains:

The Magic Eye images have a horizontally repeating pattern which differs slightly with each repetition, therefore giving the illusion of depth when each eye focuses on a different part of the pattern.

But the text magic eye from above, with a little handy work from me, gives a more concrete idea of how it works.

When you lose focus, the repeated texts merge into one, and emerge from the otherwise random background. At least that's how I understand it. More complex, colorful, magic eyes work on the same principle, but the repeated pattern is more complex and therefore harder to pick out.

My digging also showed me that magic eyes have evolved to new levels since I remember looking at them on the internet. They are everywhere, and they can do nearly everything now:
You can make your own magic eye with words (shame about the blatant coca cola add though).
Make your own more arty/abstract magic eye (depending on your artistic predisposition).
Watch a moving magic eye (not actually an eye).
Play pong and tetris. And even allegedly Quake II, but watch out that your eyes don't start bleeding.
And, being the internet, there's even magic eye porn out there too!

I need to get rest my oh-so-tired eyes now.

Fast fungi

2008-10-07T13:29:00.000-07:00

Carl Zimmer has been blogging about some seriously fast fungi -- like 180,000 g acceleration fast!

Briefly, Nicholas Money has used a 250,000 frames-a-second (ie, damn fast) camera to record fungi shooting their spores. His recordings show that spores can shoot as far as 2.5 meters, are fired at 55 miles per hour, and experience acceleration of up to 180,000 g. Money calls this “the fastest flight in nature.”

The video, which he put to opera music, is very impressive. The good stuff starts at around 19 seconds.

Money's full published PLoS One paper is available here.

And the Nobel goes to....

2008-10-06T05:24:00.000-07:00

"The scientists who discovered HIV will share the Nobel prize for medicine with the expert who linked human papilloma virus (HPV) to cervical cancer", The BBC reports.

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier get 1/4 of the prize each for their HIV findings, while Harald zur Hausen gets the other 1/2 for his work on HPV.

Last week, the Ig Nobels were also awarded, for "science that makes you laugh, and then think".
Among the winners were:
-Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence, for showing that stale chips taste as good as fresh chips, so long as the stale chips sound like fresh chips. (This reminds me of work be Heston Blumenthal, of the fat duck (one of 'the worlds best restaurants'), who has examined how sound affects taste, with the crunch carrots and also by designing a sound track to accompany a tasting menu.)
-Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith, who showed mathematically that if it can tangle, it will tangle.
-Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan, who showed that lap dancers make more money in tips when they are ovulating.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008 - highly commended images

2008-10-02T15:09:00.000-07:00

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, now in its 44th year, is opening on Oct 31st at the Natural History Museum in London. To get all us nature lovers excited, they have released a sneak peak of some highly commended images:

Angry Queen, by Piotr Naskrecki, shows a Cambodian armoured ant ready to strike. Stand back, unless you enjoy being sprayed by acid.

Treetop Jigsaw, by Brittany Fried. Not only is this photo of the Malasian rainforest really cool, it is in the 10 years and under category.

Spider Crabs in the canary islands, by Jordi Chias Pujol.

A lonely Baobab blowing in the wind. Photographer unknown.

Sterling genie. A swirl of starlings, captured by Baris Koca over Lake Morgan in Turkey.

A hoopoe, sporting a Mohican crest, caught on film by Ramon Navarro Blazquez near Seville.

A hunting vixen, by Patrick Centurioni.

Safieí Al Khaffaf spotted this Griffon vulture on the Russian side of the Caucus mountains. Entered into the 15-17 category.

Namibian bee-eater, by Chris van Rooyen

Some 6,000 sandpipers on a sand bar in Cordova, Alaska. Taken by Arthur Morris.

To be honest, I was a bit disappointed by 2007s offerings, but so far I like what I see! Looking forward to the winners being announced on the 29th of Oct, two days before the exhibit opens.

Spiders on drugs

2008-09-30T06:19:00.000-07:00

An oldie but a goodie.

Seriously though, there is a long history of scientists pushing drugs on innocent unsuspecting spiders, dating back at least as far as 1954. NASA scientists had a go in the in 1995, with wacky results.

It's a bird, it's a plane...

2008-09-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

No, it's a man with wings and jetpack! The future has finally arrived! Yves Rossy (a.k.a. Fusion man), a (presumably somewhat crazy) Swiss 49 year old, flew across the channel on Friday with a rocket pack in under 10 minutes.

About a previous flight, he said "I'm really pleased it went well." Attached to heavy metal home made wings, and with 4 kerosene-burning turbines only centimeters from his body, "really pleased" is somewhat of an understatement, I think. Try "alive". It doesn't even have proper steering. He controls it with his body. Nutter. Gotta love it.

Watch his previous flight here:

Meanwhile, Stephane Rousson, a 39-year-old French nutter, failed
in his attempt to cross the channel in a pedal-powered airship this weekend. Although his craft, essentially a bicycle attached to a blimp, may be less futuristic looking, I'm guessing it is more environmentally friendly. I hope this is not the solution for sustainable flying though... I'd rather have my own jetpack.

And the (scientific) photo winners are...

2008-09-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

The winners of the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge have been announced, and are definitely worth checking out:

Glass forest. Taken by Mario De Stefano with a scanning electron microscope, this image took the first place in the Photography section. It shows diatoms, tiny algae, attached to a marine hydroid, another tiny plant-like creature. According to Stefano:

“This is the study of a community, … the same community as you would find in a rainforest.”

Squid suckers. Honourable mention in the Photography section, Jessica D. Schiffman and Caroline show the 400 micrometer diameter suckers that Loligo pealei squid use to latch on to prey. False colour scheme inspired by Little Shop of Horrors.

Visualizing the bible. Honourable mention in the Illustration section, Chris Harrison and Christoph Römhild show that science and religion needn't always disagree. Bar along the bottom represent the different chapters from the bible, and the length of the bars represent the number of verses in the chapter. The arcs represent the 63,779 cross references in the bible, with different colours representing the distances between connected chapters.

Mad hatter's tea, from Alice's adventures in a microscopic wonderland. Colleen Champ and Dennis Kunkel won first place in Informational Graphics for this whimsical science drawing. The Mad Hatter, March Hare and sleepy Dormouse (beetles) sit at a table (of butterfly wings), surrounded by a field (of crystallized vitamin C), under a flock of flying geese (a.k.a. aphids), atop a colourful explosion (of mold spores).

I like this one too, but have no idea what it is. Something to do with a worm, perhaps?

There's lots of other cool entries, including some science websites, such as Exploring Life's Origins, that are worth a gander too.

The full details seem to be at the NSF website, with links to past winners too, and Science also has a spread on the competition.

Step towards safer stem cells

2008-09-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

Researchers have turned adult cells into stem cells using a virus that doesn't fuse with the cell's genome, providing a potentially safer way to generate stem cells, Konrad Hochedlinger and colleagues reported in Science.

Scientists have made huge advances in stem cell biology of late, and can reprogramme adult human cells into induced so-called pluripotent stem (iPS) cells by overexpressing a set of proteins. Although these reprogrammed cells provide great promise for stem cell therapy — they can alleviate symptoms of Parkinson's and sickle cell anemia in mouse models, for example — there are still many barriers to their safe therapeutic use. For one thing, scientists have had to reprogramme target cells with a virus that fuses with the host genome, and this fusion process increases the risk of tumour development.

To address this considerable limitation, Hochedlinger and colleagues used adenoviruses, which don't fuse with the host genome, to reprogramme adult mouse cells. These so-called adeno-iPS cells are similar to conventional iPS cells — they can differentiate into various tissue, including lung, brain and heart — but do not increase the risk of tumour formation or fuse with the host's genome.

If these findings can be replicated in human cells, adeno-iPS cells may represent a source of safe stem cells, that can be tailored to individual patients' needs, with broad implications for stem-cell therapy.

Ejaculation - 1, sudafed - 0?

2008-09-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

Or, Put away that tissue, and grab a tissue?

The title of this recent Medical Hypotheses article pretty much says it all: "Ejaculation as a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males."

Sina Zarritan makes the logical (?) argument that as ejaculation stimulates adrenergic receptors, and as stimulation of adrenergic receptors relieves cold symptoms, masturbation/sex can be used to treat a stuffed nose.

A more in-depth analysis of the article is available at Neurotopia.

Not every one is having it though. In "Ejaculation as a treatment for nasal congestion in men is inconvenient, unreliable and potentially hazardous", also published in Medical Hypotheses, Mohammad Fakhree disagrees. Again the title says it all really. His insightful arguments include:

"...in some males there are limitations in the number of ejaculation per day..."

and

"Furthermore there are some limitations in using of ejaculation or masturbation as treatment of nasal congestion such as not being applicable out of home and not having any sex partner."

Brilliant!! More on Fakhree's disagreement is available at The Lay Scientist.

Sudafed sales set to fall?

Fruit - up close and personal

2008-09-16T16:04:00.000-07:00

Fruit, a new book by Rob Kesseler and Wolfgang Stuppy, provides an amazingly up close examination of the colourful fruits and seeds that make our world so tasty. Kesseler and Stuppy use electron microscopy to showcase seeds, sometimes providing insight into the ingenious ways in which fruits make sure their seeds get spread. The photos are beautiful.

Scarlet pimpernel. When an animal brushes past the scarlet pimpernell, it knocks the outer casing open so that the seeds can escape. Seeds that fall onto the animal catch a free ride to distant fields.

Creeping carrot. This seed has wings, which allow it to fly in the wind, and spikes, which allow it to attach to passing animals. In either case, it can go far.

Strawberries. Mmmmmmmmm.

Peach skin. The short and long hairs make up the peach fuzz. The interspersed spots are fruits the breathing pores.

Poppy. When the wind blows the poppy, its tiny little seeds are thrown out of the open holes at the top of the capsule, like salt from salt shaker.

Three corner jack (Emex australis). Now matter how this seed falls, it always has a sharp spike that will stick up into the air, so that it can lodge itself into the foot of a passing animal and hitch a ride.

A fig. You will never see flowers on fig trees - oddly, the fig flowers are closely packed together inside the fruit, as is shown above.

Japanese wineberry.

Mulberry. Unlike blackberries and raspberries, which form from a single flower, the mulberry forms from a cluster of flowers, with each flower creating a single tasty segment of fruit.

Kiwi skin.

This seed has lots of hooks, which allows it to cling to the outside of animals. Apparently many herbs use this technique to ensure the dispersal of their seeds.

And some others that you need to buy the book to find out more about:

An interesting slideshow of some of these photos is available here. Time to go make a fruit salad now.

PS: Thanks to Hackosphere for helping me to use selective expandable posts.

Look, but don't touch

2008-09-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

Alex Villegas has been photographing and recording wildlife in the Costa Rican jungle for some 15 years. This creepy crawly caterpillar, photographed by Alex, is not just visually stunning, it's also physically stunning -- if you're lucky enough to come across one of these, don't touch unless you want it to sting. More photos available on the BBC here.

Successful powerup, overreported news

2008-09-10T10:12:00.000-07:00

It's difficult to avoid news about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN today. For my part, I find it difficult to get excited about the LHC. I find it even harder to get excited at the mere fact that it has been powered up. Perhaps when protons start colliding, things might get exciting.
As to those foos who think that the LHC might cause a block hole that will destroy the earth, here is a useful website to keep you up to date: http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

There are some pretty stunning photos of the beast at National Geographic though.
And there is also a surprising excellent News Feature by Cory Doctorow in Nature about data storage, discussing in part how the CERN will handle the massive amounts of data that will be generated by the LHC experiments.

Water bears in space!

2008-09-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

Water bears, scientifically known as Tardigrades, are not only unbelievably funny looking animals, they can also survive in space!

First reported in 1773, water bears have since been described by scientists as “One of the most miraculous creatures" (by Gustav Jager in 1867) and as “strange miniaturized water animals" (by Alfred Kaestner in 1969). Though water bears are widespread around the earth, they are only 0.3 mm long, and so escape detection. Despite their small size, they have many of the characteristics of larger animals, including legs, claws, eyes and muscles. Something that makes them even remarkable, however, is there ability to enter a dried-up, and super resistant state — dried water bears can survive years without water.

Reporting in Current Biology, Petra Rettberg and colleagues now sent a minutia of dried-up water bears (what do you call a group of water bears?) into space. Amazingly, these animals were able to survive 10 days exposure to the harsh conditions of outer space — freezing temperatures, extreme desiccation and phenomenally high levels of radiation! Until now, only lichens and bacteria had survived such conditions.

Watch the video below to see a water bear doing it’s adorable victory dance. Three cheers for the water bear!

Not science, but certainly bite size!

2008-09-05T02:30:00.000-07:00

Really cool, and really tiny, street art by Slinkachu adorns London streets -- though I doubt it stays there for very long.

More available on Slinkachu’s blogs here and here. And, there is a BBC video on this miniature artist.

I want one.

Should I stay or should I go?

2008-09-04T15:10:00.000-07:00

Flowering plants use subtle chemical cues to simultaneously attract and reject visitors, ensuring the best fertilization results, Ian Baldwin and colleagues report in Science.

Plants, for the most part immobile, have had to evolve tricky ways to get others to do their fertilizing dirty work. Flowers, with their bright colours and fresh scents, have had a key role in attracting insects and birds to spread pollen between flowers. Unfortunately, however, these visitors aren’t always there to help -- nectar thieves, for instance, hinder plant procreation by using up valuable plant resources without providing anything in return. So how can plants ensure that visitors come to their flowers (where they can pick up pollen), but then not stay too long (they need to visit other plants too for fertilization to succeed, after all) or hog the nectar?

To examine this question, Ian Baldwin and colleagues manipulated production of benzyl acetone, a floral attractant, and nicotine, a repellent, in Nicotiana attenuata, a tobacco plant. In the absence of benzyl acetone, pollinators such as hummingbirds, visited the flowers much less frequently. In the absence of nicotine, however, nectar thieves, such as moths and carpenter bees, were observed feeding on the flowers more frequently. Moreover, when the plants produced both the attractant and the repellent, as they do in the wild, they produced the most seeds – in other words, had the highest fertilization success.

Using a mix of attracting and rejecting signals, plants seem to have mastered the subtle art of seduction. Whether this explains why it’s best not to call too soon after a first date is still unclear.

Weird and Wonderful

2008-09-01T07:53:00.000-07:00

Don’t have a bedside table but what to read in bed? That’s not a problem -- just turn on your light spectacles.

Weird and Wonderful Gadgets and Inventions, hosted at the British Library in London, is currently hosting an inspiring exhibit showcasing a selection of some fantastic(al) and bizarre inventions. The small exhibit, made up of only 3 or 4 glass cabinets of goods, is definetly worth checking out if you happen to be in the St Pancras/Kings Cross neighbourhood. My favorites (other than the light spectacles):

Moustach protectors. Developed to keep your finely kept moustache dry. While the best of these (top right) covered your whole moustache, other versions consisted of cups and spoons with special holes that ensured liquids went straight into your mouth, not on to your moustache.

Finger stretcher. Developed in 1910, this (potentially dangerous) device let pianists stretch there fingers so that they could play difficult codes.

Route finder. Before the days of blackberries, iphones and the like, people were still able to find their way on the fly without carrying big maps... This wristwatch like route finder from the 1930s could show you the way, provided you loaded the write map into it before you set off.

More photos available here.

Signal jamming

2008-08-31T08:24:00.001-07:00

A compound that acts like a jamming device, preventing bacteria from detecting host signalling and bacterial signaling, provides promise for a broad-spectrum approach to treating bacterial infection.

At least 25 bacteria succeed as pathogens, in part, because they can spy on their hosts and communicate with other bacteria. When bacteria detect certain signals, they respond by expressing bacterial proteins that increase their virulence. Sperandio and colleagues now report that they can reduce the effects of bacterial infection by jamming the bacterial signal decoder.

Sperandio and colleagues found that a small molecule, dubbed LED209, binds QseC, the bacterial protein that normally detects external signalling. LED209-treatment not only prevented the upregulation of virulence genes in infected cultured cells, it also protected animals against Esherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium and Francisella tularensis in animal models. For example, 9 days after innoculation with F. tularensis, 80% of LED209-treated mice were still alive, compared with only 10% of untreated mice.

Although bacteria tend to evolve resistance to drugs that affect bacterial health, LED209 does not have adverse effects on bacterial health, but just prevents the expression of virulence proteins. Consequently, bacteria are less likely to develop resistance to LED209 and similar drugs, suggesting that that such drugs could make excellent broad-spectrum antibiotics.

Got the not-so blues

2008-08-23T14:07:00.000-07:00

For blue-footed boobies, foot colour is a big deal -- such a big deal, in fact, that females lose their enthusiasm for laying healthy eggs when their mates feet lose their blue brilliance.

Blue-footed boobies, who live on the Galapagos Islands and the eastern Pacific coastline, tend to lead monogamous lifestyles. Each year, females usually lay 2 eggs, of equal size, about 4 days apart. Roxana Torres and colleagues let females lay the first egg, and then used a non-toxic marker to make their partners' feet look duller, suggesting the partners were unhealthy. Consequently, they found, second eggs were layed later and were considerably smaller than expected.

This finding meets with predictions: if females want the best for their babies, then they should vary how much energy they invest into producing offspring depending on how well they suspect their offspring will survive. If the males are unhealthy -- or in the case of blue-footed boobies, are less blue -- then the offspring may have a harder time surviving. Moreover, if the female blue-footed boobies invest more attention to the older egg, then at least one offspring is likely to survive. Perhaps there is something to putting all your eggs in one basket after all.

Presumably, the fact that the second egg is smaller than the first and comes later than expected (making it altogether less likely to succeed) is not the consequence of a decision on the part of the lady bird, but is rather an involuntary response. Do such responses occur in humans too? Is it possible that women coupled with unhealthy (or even seemingly unhealthy) men don't invest as much in as-yet unborn offspring as they could -- unconsciously of course?

Phenomenal photos

2008-08-22T03:40:00.000-07:00

Red veined darter

Some truly amazing photos of wet insects, taken by German Photographer Martin Amm.
More of these available at Zooillogix.

Getting nosey with skin cancer

2008-08-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

Scientists have identified the compounds that give skin cancer its unique smell, suggesting that an electronic nose could help doctors sniff out skin cancer.

Studies have previously established that dogs can smell cancer and that cancerous skin has a different odor profile than non-cancerous skin. Building on these finding, Michelle Gallagher and colleagues used gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to sample the air above cancerous and non-cancerous skin and, for the first time, determined the chemical composition of cancer's unique smell.

These findings were announced yesterday at the American Chemical Society Meeting in Philadelphia. The authors hope to develop an electronic nose that could be used by doctors to quickly, and non-invasively, identify skin cancer. Skin cancer, the most common form of cancer is the US, is currently diagnosed by time consuming, and invasive, biopsies. Lung cancer may also be detectable with an electronic nose.

Interestingly, TB also has a unique odor, which rats and honeybees can detect. In trials, however (and perhaps unsurprisingly), patients have balked at the idea of being diagnosed by a rat. Perhaps odor profiles of other diseases can also be detected electronically. Who nose?

Conniving courters

2008-08-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

When it comes to courting, male fish sometimes pretend they’re after love when they actually want something else -- eggs for dinner.

Reporting in the Journal of Fish Biology, Suzanne Grey and colleagues followed male Telmatherina sarasinorum, also known as sailfin silversides, as they foraged for food in their native habitat, the Malili Lakes of Indonesia. Curiously, the brightly coloured male T. sarasinorum would occasionally display ritual courting behaviour to the females of a related species, Telmatherina antoniae. But whereas males and females normally quiver at the end of the courting ritual, indicating that eggs and sperm have been released, only the female fish would quiver in these curious courtships. And when the females swam off, these males would immediatly begin eating the eggs. This deceptive behaviour, dubbed ‘sneaky egg-eating’, has never been described before.

Sneaky-egg eating occurs at a low but appreciable frequency, the authors note, and probably evolved in part because of a lack of alternative sources of nutrition.

Welcome

2008-08-19T14:12:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my Blog. I hope you like science -- cause that's what we're serving here.
Bon appetite