Science Made Cool

Life Imitates Art

A team of Russian scientists are boring through miles of ice into a twenty million year old lake in Antarctica. They haven't been heard from for a week now.

It's pretty obvious that the Shoggoths have gotten them.

(Note: Lovecraftian humor aside, I hope that nothing actually has happened to these brave researchers, and that they succeed in getting uncontaminated samples from Lake Vostok.)

Update: As of February 13, they're reporting success, and no Shoggoths. (Of course, that's just what they would say if the Thing has replaced them all.)

Help Fund A Study on Sticky Tongues

Last year, Patty Brennan and I were part of the SciFund Challenge – an experiment in crowdfunding scientific research that raised over $75,000 for its projects in just 45 days. RocketHub, our hosting platform, clearly took note: it added  “Science” to its overall list of project categories, so appeals to support dance, music or photography will now sit alongside requests to fund projects in plant genetics or primatology. And I was delighted to learn that one of the first scientists to step up to the plate is doing some fantastic functional morphology.

Christopher Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Florida, where he studies how temperature affects how chameleons feed. He’d like to learn how different species of chameleon have adapted to living in hot and cold habitats, but since many of these animals are protected and can’t be brought into the United States, he’s raising money to bring his study to them.

He’s already raised enough cash to fund his experiments in South Africa, but further donations will let him take the study to other countries. His RocketHub link is <here>, and there's still a couple of weeks left to donate.

Collagen and Muscle can also be Art

I just learned that one of my photomicrographs has been chosen for the Science Art show at this year’s Science Online conference in Raleigh. Here it is: 

 Milligan’s Trichrome stain gives this thin slice of alligator tissue the look of a stained-glass window, with scarlet strips of smooth muscle interspersed between bands of blue collagen fibers.  

Team Duck Force Wants You!

Want to do some science? Now you can, even if you don't know which end of a test tube to look through. Rockethub is a "crowdsourcing" site for creative projects in a variety of fields, including science. Here's how it works: people in need of funds for a project list what they want to do, and then donors can scroll through the list and contribute whatever amounts they wish to specific projects. All the cool kids are doing it -- Kickstarter is another one, aimed at business startups.

And now Rockethub is hosting a project by none other than our own Science Guru herself. Diane Kelly and her colleague Patricia Brennan are collecting funds to study the mechanical forces within the oviduct of female ducks during mating. This means building their own oviduct out of a suitably durable material, wiring it up with force transducers, and introducing it to some male ducks at a poultry farm in Canada. You can be part of it by contributing. There are goodies, and not the lame Public Television kind of goodies, either.

Join Team Duck Force!

The Case of the Nine Dead Icthyosaurs

Mark McMenamin is not a crazy guy. His sanity (and excellent taste) is proved by the fact that he was among the first people to buy a copy of BONE WARS. So when he (and his dynamic spouse Dianna Schulte McMenamin) start talking about ancient giant icthyosaur-killing squids, people pay attention. Lots of people: the story is all over the Web today.

Here's the scoop. Out in Nevada there's a fossil bed with the remains of at least nine great big shonisaurs, a type of icthyosaur. Those were fish-shaped air-breathing reptiles of the Triassic era, and based on their teeth modern scientists believe they ate Triassic squid, much as sperm whales do today.

The mystery about these remains is how come there are nine dead icthyosaurs, all at least forty feet long, all in one place, and all laid out in the same direction?

There have been several suggestions: a mass stranding in shallow water (but the surrounding rock looks like old ocean bottom, not beach); or mass poisoning by some kind of aquatic plant toxin (but that wouldn't normally make the animals all drop dead at the same place).

Mark McMenamin has decided that this is murder, and someone's responsible. His candidate for the killer: Cthulhu.

Well, not quite Cthulhu, but pretty darn close. His theory is that the remains are a deep water garbage midden, left by a very very big cephalopod (100 feet long) which preyed on shonisaurs. This kind of preying on each other relationship exists in modern oceans between sperm whales and giant squids. If you're a sperm whale, sometimes you eat the squid and sometimes the squid eats you.*

For extra creep factor, McMenamin noticed that the disarticulated vertebrae of the shonisaurs seemed to be arranged in neat lines, like pieces of a puzzle. He thinks the cephalopod did that, too.

Cast your mind back to the black abyss of the ancient Triassic seas, where a giant tentacled monster sits atop the bodies of the foolish vertebrates that dove too deep in search of food and fell victim to something greater. The monster rasps the meat off the bones with its beak, and then plays with the left over bits, lining them up and caressing them with its arms in the dark.

Good thing there's nothing like that around today, right? Right? 

*Or not. As our reader Danna Staaf points out, the squids may sometimes make the whales fight for their meals, but they don't eat them. At least not on a regular basis. Presumably because the giant Triassic super-cephalopods lurking on the seafloor chase them away.

Flying Fish, Sort Of

A fish out of water flops – everyone knows that. But while most fish flail in place when they’ve got no water to push on, a few species can flip into a controlled long jump that sends them flying several times their body length in one direction. How far can these fish jump? Take a look at this mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis) in flight.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/acg/video/Gambusia_affinis/Gambusia_affinis.mov

Pretty cool, eh? Understanding that jump is the subject of a paper published today in the Journal of Experimental Zoology by Alice Gibb, Miriam Ashley-Ross, Cinnamon Pace, and my former grad school officemate John Long. They noticed that these jumps looked a lot like the movements a swimming fish makes to escape predators _­– called a “c-start” for the characteristic letter-shape the fish bends into – and they figured that the fish were co-opting their aquatic escape behavior for moving efficiently on land. But when they looked more closely, they found that there were some important differences.

                    

For one, on land, the fish don’t bend their tail and head toward the middle of the body evenly as they would in a watery c-start. Instead, they swing head toward tail, bending the body in a sharp curve before a push from the tail launches the fish into the air. The difference seems small, but it implies that the fish are using the same set of muscles differently on land and underwater. So if one of these fish gets stranded on land, the same muscles that produce a rapid-fire snap-and-dart in the water can shift to a slower rhythm that gives the fish a better chance of getting back in the water. 

Research paper: Gibb AC, Ashley-Ross MA, Pace CM, Long JH Jr. 2011. Fish out of water: terrestrial jumping by fully aquatic fishes. J. Exp. Zool. 313A: DOI 10.1002/jez.711

(And more videos at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/acg/video.html)

 

Medicine Made Cool

For most of my life, suspended animation has been one of those "someday" developments which are the fodder for pop-science magazine cover stories. Someday humans will visit Mars. Someday we'll have fusion power. Someday we'll have artificial intelligence. Someday . . .

Well, someday may be getting closer, at least as far as suspended animation goes. According to the Arizona Daily Star, Dr. Peter Rhee, at Tucson's University Medical Center, wants to do human trials on suspended animation within a year. The FDA has approved it. He's at the point of getting funding. This isn't "someday," it's "FY 2012" or whatever.

Now, this isn't quite the "human popsicle" suspended animation beloved of science fiction writers. Nobody's talking about long-term suspended animation, at least not yet. What Dr. Rhee wants to do is chill trauma patients down to about 50 degrees to shut down their metabolism almost entirely. Then surgeons can do long and complex operations on the heart or lungs without worrying that the patient's brain is going to die. Apparently he's already done extensive testing on animals.

And for all the hungry grad students trying to figure out how much they'd get paid for letting someone chill them down for a few hours, I've got bad news. Rhee's tests will be at trauma centers, in cases where the procedure might save someone who's pretty much guaranteed to die otherwise.

Suspended animation, or "frozen sleep" or "hypersleep" or "cryosleep" or "low passage" has been a staple of science fiction since before there was "science fiction." Local boy Edward Bellamy used it as a gimmick to get his hero into the year 2000 in his novel Looking Backward, and H.G. Wells pretty much ripped him off entirely in his novel The Sleeper Awakes. In both books, the notion was just a handwave to let a contemporary character visit the distant future. 

Discussions of realistic interstellar travel tend to split into those advocating "generation" starships which would carry an entire self-sustaining biosphere and society for the duration of the voyage, and those which rely on suspended animation to let the passengers snooze away the trip while robots handle the vessel.

Given that Dr. Rhee's work is focused on suspended animation lasting on the order of minutes rather than millennia, I'd say there's still a long way to go. But someday . . .

 

Really Ancient Mysteries From Tibet

Everybody knows about the Ice Ages, right? Snow everywhere, tundra, glaciers, Neanderthals? Plus all those ginormous hairy animals adapted to the cold: mammoths, mastodons, wooly rhinos, and so forth.

For a long time the big question about those creatures was, "Where did they go?" Thomas Jefferson hoped to find living specimens in the American west, and made sure Lewis and Clark kept an eye out for any signs of giant animals. They did find grizzly bears, which were probably more than big enough for L. & C., but Jefferson never got his mastodon.

And this leads to another question. "Where did they come from?" Because if wooly mammoths, rhinos et al were polar creatures before the last Ice Age, taking advantage of the global cold snap to expand their range southward, one would assume that as things warmed up over the past ten thousand years, they would have simply retreated northward again to their Arctic home.

Except there aren't any in the Arctic. Which is odd, if you think about it. We've got plenty of Arctic species right now: reindeer, polar bears, assorted birds. Why aren't there wooly rhinos wandering around in Siberia? If that's where they came from, why did they stay south and go extinct, instead?

The answer, at least for wooly rhinos, is that they didn't come from the Arctic at all. They came from Tibet.

A team of researchers from the Los Angeles County Museum have recently found wooly rhino fossils 3.6 million years old in southwestern Tibet. In other words, from before the last Ice Age. Evidently they evolved there, in the cold dry plateau, and when the whole of Asia cooled down, the wooly rhinos were already evolved to handle extreme cold. They spread out like rabbits in Australia.

But why aren't there wooly rhinos in Tibet now? Dunno. Maybe somebody ate 'em. Or maybe it's a lot easier to spread out from an isolated mountain refuge than it is to retreat to an isolated mountain refuge, especially if you're a stupid wooly rhinocerous and have no idea that you even have ancestors, let alone that they came from an isolated mountain refuge.

Or maybe they're hiding up there, waiting . . .

Toady Went A-Hunting

Remember yesterday’s movie of the toad eating in slow motion? Now watch this one. It’s still a toad eating a cricket, but this time it was filmed at two different temperatures. Keep two things in mind – first, the toad’s body temperature is the same as the air around it, and second, muscle works faster when it’s warm. That’s why it takes a lot longer for the toad to pull its tongue into its mouth and close its mouth at 17°C than at 24°C. But there’s no real difference in the time it takes to for the toad to fling its tongue out of its mouth. That’s because tongue extension is powered by elastic recoil. Slow muscle contractions pull elastic tissues inside the tongue tight while the toad’s mouth is still closed. When it opens, the tongue flies forward like an arrow from a bow. So whether it's hot or cold, the toad's always ready to go hunting. 

Deban, S. M. and A. K. Lappin 2010. Thermal effects on the dynamics and motor control of ballistic prey capture in toads: maintaining high performance at low temperature. J. Exp. Biol. 214: 1333-1346.

Video by Stephen Deban.

High-Speed Dining for Toads

There's lots of interesting biomechanics going on in this short high-speed video of a toad eating a cricket. For example, watch the tongue elongate from its own inertia as it whips out of the toad's mouth. And see how the toad's eyes start to close as it swallows the cricket at the end of the film? That's not satisfaction -- it's using its eyes to help shove the food down its throat.

For details, see

Lappin, A. K., Monroy, J. A., Pilarski, J. Q., Zepnewski, E. D., Pierotti, D. J. and Nishikawa, K. C. (2006). Storage and recovery of elastic potential energy powers ballistic prey capture in toads. J. Exp. Biol. 209, 2535-2553.

Levine, R. P., J. A. Monroy and E. L. Brainerd 2004.Contribution of eye retraction to swallowing performance in the northern leopard frog, Rana pipiens. J. Exp. Biol. 207: 1361-1368.

 

Video by Stephen Deban and Kristopher Lappin.