Human Sacrifice, Dogs and Cats Living Together, Mass Hysteria!

That's a fine looking flying squid And now we have Neon Flying Squids.

This is a harbinger of something, and I do not think that it will end well.

On a research vessel 15 years ago, a group of Japanese scientists documented something that had only previously been described by startled sailors to disbelieving listeners. They saw a formation of squid flying through the air.

The shoal of about 100 squid rose unexpectedly from a patch of the Pacific Ocean around 370 miles from Tokyo and glided near the boat for about 30 metres. The astonished researchers were the first to capture photographs of such a thing, which looked like the early stages of an alien invasion.

They were probably neon flying squid (Ommastrephes bartramii), the subsequent study states, a species that is part of a 20-strong flying squid family that was known to leap from the water but, until then, was only rumoured to also be able to glide above it.

The neon flying squid was able to gain such elevation by using the hyponome, a funnel-like muscular organ also present in other cephalopods, such as octopuses. The organ is able to force water out in a jet, propelling the body along both in and out of the sea. Photographs of the gliding squid show them with their arms (they have 10 limbs in all) splayed outwards.

Neon flying squid are about the length of a rolling pin and tend to gather near the surface to feed upon fish and crustaceans. It’s unclear exactly why they would fly in unison in this way, with one possible explanation being that they were evading a predator, such as a shark.

This is some seriously weird sh%$.

Project Scoop

This is a reference to a Michael Crichton novel The Andromeda Strain, of course, involving a lethal pathogen brought back to earth by a satellite operated as a part of a government program called Project Scoop..

Project Scoop was a program to bring back potential candidates for germ warfare from the upper atmosphere.

Well, I just read an article about an experiment where viruses were sent into space, and while no one was harmed as a result, some profoundly weird shit happened.  (Take off the tinfoil hat.  The emergency evacuation of some crew from the ISS is entirely unrelated., the E. coli and the bacteria phage viruses used are completely harmless)

When scientists sent bacteria-infecting viruses to the International Space Station, the microbes did not behave the same way they do on Earth. In microgravity, infections still occurred, but both viruses and bacteria evolved differently over time. Genetic changes emerged that altered how viruses attach to bacteria and how bacteria defend themselves. The findings could help improve phage therapies against drug-resistant infections. 

It gave me a big of a literary flashback to the Crichton book. 

I'm Calling Bullsh%$

Colossal Biosciences, a genetic engineering firm has claimed that they have recreated the dire wolf species, which has been extinct for more than 10,000 years.

They haven't.  This is marketing to Game of Thrones fanbois.

For over 2 million years, dire wolves roamed present-day North America until their extinction around 10,000 B.C.

On Monday, a Dallas-based bioscience firm said it had brought the species back to life in the form of three pups, claiming to have “successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction” in a remarkable statement on its website.

Notice that there is no mention of any peer reviewed or pre-peer reviewed paper?

Red flag. 

The team at Colossal said the pups — named Khaleesi, [More GoT Wankery] Romulus and Remus, and ranging in age from 3 to 6 months old — were created using a combination of gene-editing techniques and ancient DNA found in fossils from between 11,500 and 72,000 years ago.

Other scientists, however, say that while Colossal’s technological feats are impressive, the animals are not truly dire wolves — and that the process raises ethical questions.

“The reality is we can’t de-extinct extinct creatures because we can’t use cloning — the DNA is just not well enough preserved,” said Nic Rawlence, an associate professor and director of the Palaeogenetics Laboratory at New Zealand’s University of Otago.

………

Pontus Skoglund, leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at Britain’s Francis Crick Institute, said in a post on Bluesky about the dire wolf project that he was “not necessarily against the initiative, but would a chimpanzee with 20 gene edits be human? … These individuals seem optimistically 1/100,000th dire wolf.”

………

In the wolves’ case, scientists edited the gray wolf genome to approximate the size, color and coat of a dire wolf, Rawlence said. “There are about 19,000 genes in that genome. They looked at all the differences and said there are 20 key differences in 14 key genes that they could change to make a gray wolf look like a dire wolf,” he said. “Their technology is amazing, but my personal view is it needs to be used to conserve the animals we’ve got left,” he said. This could include using money the company has raised to manage existing endangered species or reintroduce genetic diversity among existing species to help them adapt to climate change or diseases.

This sounds a lot like Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons levels of humbug.

 

Neener Neener Reader(s)

I know what you are all wondering following my drunk blogging of the Presidential debate, how bad was my hangover.

I had no hangover at all.

I have in fact never to had a hangover, though I did wake up drunk once, which was a bit disconcerting to put it mildly.

Some peculiarity in my metabolism and/or neurology that means that in the few hundred times that I have been drunk over the past forty some odd years, I have never had a hangover.  (I figure 2-4 times a year, I do not drink that much)

Don't hate me because I'm hangover proof.

I put this down to genetics.

I know 4 people who don't get hangovers, and three of them are definitely of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, and I am not sure about the religious and ethnic heritage of the 4th individual. 

If you share this bit of biology, share it in the comments.

I will offer one warning to those so blessed, of the 4 people that I know, 2 are recovering alcoholics.

Without the prospect of a hangover, it appears that unrestrained behavior is more likely.

Good to Know

I've always wondered how cats, whose ancestors were desert wild cats in Africa, developed a taste for fish.

Well, wonder no more.

As the folks at SciShow observe, we may know how cats taste tuna fish, but the evolutionary forces that led to this is unclear.

Cats, of all sizes, are rather odd mammals, they are one of the few true (obligate) carnivores among mammals, along with seals, hyenas, many seals and whales.

They are unable to taste sweet as well, no taste buds for it.

Another Nail in the Amyloid Plaque Theory

When the brains of Alzheimer's patients are examined post mortem, there are large amounts of deposits on the nerves in the central nervous system known as amyloid plaques.

It has been dogma in the field for almost 50 years that this is the cause of this form of dementia, but it increasingly looks like these structures are not the cause of the condition, but rather a symptom, which has the effect of invalidating 50 years of basic and pharmaceutical research into the disease:

At the start of the 20th century, psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer became the first person to notice the strange clumps and tangles in the brain of a person who had died with dementia.

These bundles of amyloid beta proteins have since become the dominant hypothesis for what causes Alzheimer's disease. And, despite decades of failed studies, finding ways to clear them away has remained an obsession.

Now, in two trials, a drug designed to eradicate these sticky plaques has failed to preserve the cognitive abilities of people with early Alzheimer's disease compared to people given a placebo.

The monoclonal antibody gantenerumab did significantly reduce the amount of amyloid beta in the brain as intended, but this did not translate into improvements in cognitive function.

"Among persons with early Alzheimer's disease, the use of gantenerumab led to a lower amyloid plaque burden than placebo at 116 weeks but was not associated with slower clinical decline," the researchers reported in their paper covering the two drug trials.

These results arrive as the amyloid hypothesis reaches a critical juncture in its history – with pharmaceutical companies controversially winning anti-amyloid drug approvals based on thin evidence.

So, it is very likely we've been wrong for the past 50+ years. 

It's time to go to work and get a better understanding of the mechanisms involved.

It's time, to quote the movie The Martian, to, "Science the sh%$ out of this."

 

Now We Know

High speed imaging of a cat glottisFollowing over a century of investigation we now know how cats purr, well probably.

The short version is that they took larynzxes of euthanized cats, with owners' permission, and blew air through them at various speeds, and managed to recreate the phenomenon.

We still have no clue as to why cats purr, though.

I loves our furry enigmas:

There are few things more gratifying to cat lovers than a contentedly purring feline. But the precise mechanisms by which kitties produce those pleasant, low-frequency rumblings has been a matter of some debate among scientists. Now a team of Austrian scientists has determined that connective tissues embedded in cats' vocal cords play a crucial role in this ability, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. The authors argue that their findings call for a reassessment of the current prevailing hypothesis about how cats purr.

Purring is mostly exclusive to cats, although certain other species can produce purr-like sounds, including raccoons, mongooses, kangaroos, badgers, rabbits, and guinea pigs. And cats are usually divided into those that purr (Felinae) and those that roar (Pantherinae); no cat species can do both. The latter category includes lions, tigers, jaguars, and leopards, and scientists have suggested that the roaring capability is due to an incompletely ossified hyoid bone in the larynx. "Purrers," by contrast, have a completely ossified hyoid, although the purring snow leopard is a rare exception.

We know the fundamental frequency at which cats purr—between 20 to 30 vibrations per second, although purrs can go up to about 150 Hz—but that is lower than expected based on vocal cord anatomy. As a general rule, larger animals have longer vocal cords and thus create lower-frequency sounds. But cats are relatively small, typically weighing on the order of a few kilograms, and their vocal cords are also relatively short. Hence the curiosity about how they produce such low-frequency purrs.

There are few things more gratifying to cat lovers than a contentedly purring feline. But the precise mechanisms by which kitties produce those pleasant, low-frequency rumblings has been a matter of some debate among scientists. Now a team of Austrian scientists has determined that connective tissues embedded in cats' vocal cords play a crucial role in this ability, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. The authors argue that their findings call for a reassessment of the current prevailing hypothesis about how cats purr.

Purring is mostly exclusive to cats, although certain other species can produce purr-like sounds, including raccoons, mongooses, kangaroos, badgers, rabbits, and guinea pigs. And cats are usually divided into those that purr (Felinae) and those that roar (Pantherinae); no cat species can do both. The latter category includes lions, tigers, jaguars, and leopards, and scientists have suggested that the roaring capability is due to an incompletely ossified hyoid bone in the larynx. "Purrers," by contrast, have a completely ossified hyoid, although the purring snow leopard is a rare exception.

We know the fundamental frequency at which cats purr—between 20 to 30 vibrations per second, although purrs can go up to about 150 Hz—but that is lower than expected based on vocal cord anatomy. As a general rule, larger animals have longer vocal cords and thus create lower-frequency sounds. But cats are relatively small, typically weighing on the order of a few kilograms, and their vocal cords are also relatively short. Hence the curiosity about how they produce such low-frequency purrs.

………

The authors successfully produced purring sounds in all eight of the excised larynxes when air was pumped through them, with no need for muscle contractions—given that all the adjacent muscles had been removed when excising the larynxes. So what was driving the purrs? They concluded that it was the presence of connective tissue embedded in the vocal cords, which also served to lower the frequency of the purring sounds. In other words, cats rely on the same MEAD-based mechanisms to purr as other mammals do for their vocalizations.

The prior theory was that cats used specialized muscular contractions to create these sounds, but it appears to be a normal vocalization where the vocal chords are tightened or loosened like a guitar string.

The reason that cats can purr is because of the cartilage in their vocal chords.

It's kind of the difference between between a yew English longbow and a composite Mongol bow, which is made out of a combination of horn, sinew, and bamboo along with glue.

But Not Life as We Know It*

The Webb Space Telescope has detected an exoplanet with water, methane, and traces of a chemical that only arise from life on earth.

That chemical, dimethyl sulfide (DMS), is produced by phytoplankton, basically algae, on earth.

Needless to say, this could be yet another false alarm. There may be other golological or astronomical processes that can produce DMS, but I am a bit excited about this.

Also, this gives me the opportunity to quote Star Trek ……… Sort of.

It turns out that the line comes from a Star Trek filk, but still, I'm stoked to say the line:

A new investigation with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, has revealed the presence of carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb’s discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface.

The first insight into the atmospheric properties of this habitable-zone exoplanet came from observations with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which prompted further studies that have since changed our understanding of the system.

K2-18 b orbits the cool dwarf star K2-18 in the habitable zone and lies 120 light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo. Exoplanets such as K2-18 b, which have sizes between those of Earth and Neptune, are unlike anything in our solar system. This lack of equivalent nearby planets means that these ‘sub-Neptunes’ are poorly understood, and the nature of their atmospheres is a matter of active debate among astronomers.

The suggestion that the sub-Neptune K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet is intriguing, as some astronomers believe that these worlds are promising environments to search for evidence for life on exoplanets.

"Our findings underscore the importance of considering diverse habitable environments in the search for life elsewhere," explained Nikku Madhusudhan, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the paper announcing these results. "Traditionally, the search for life on exoplanets has focused primarily on smaller rocky planets, but the larger Hycean worlds are significantly more conducive to atmospheric observations."

The abundance of methane and carbon dioxide, and shortage of ammonia, support the hypothesis that there may be a water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere in K2-18 b. These initial Webb observations also provided a possible detection of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth, this is only produced by life. The bulk of the DMS in Earth’s atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments.

Spectra of K2-18 b, obtained with Webb’s NIRISS (Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph), display an abundance of methane and carbon dioxide in the exoplanet’s atmosphere, as well as a possible detection of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). The detection of methane and carbon dioxide, and shortage of ammonia, support the hypothesis that there may be a water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere in K2-18 b. K2-18 b, 8.6 times as massive as Earth, orbits the cool dwarf star K2-18 in the habitable zone and lies 120 light-years from Earth.

Credits: Illustration: NASA, CSA, ESA, R. Crawford (STScI), J. Olmsted (STScI), Science: N. Madhusudhan (Cambridge University)

The inference of DMS is less robust and requires further validation. “Upcoming Webb observations should be able to confirm if DMS is indeed present in the atmosphere of K2-18 b at significant levels,” explained Madhusudhan.

While K2-18 b lies in the habitable zone, and is now known to harbor carbon-bearing molecules, this does not necessarily mean that the planet can support life. The planet's large size — with a radius 2.6 times the radius of Earth — means that the planet’s interior likely contains a large mantle of high-pressure ice, like Neptune, but with a thinner hydrogen-rich atmosphere and an ocean surface. Hycean worlds are predicted to have oceans of water. However, it is also possible that the ocean is too hot to be habitable or be liquid.

"Although this kind of planet does not exist in our solar system, sub-Neptunes are the most common type of planet known so far in the galaxy," explained team member Subhajit Sarkar of Cardiff University. “We have obtained the most detailed spectrum of a habitable-zone sub-Neptune to date, and this allowed us to work out the molecules that exist in its atmosphere.”

Characterizing the atmospheres of exoplanets like K2-18 b — meaning identifying their gases and physical conditions — is a very active area in astronomy. However, these planets are outshone — literally — by the glare of their much larger parent stars, which makes exploring exoplanet atmospheres particularly challenging.

The team sidestepped this challenge by analyzing light from K2-18 b's parent star as it passed through the exoplanet's atmosphere. K2-18 b is a transiting exoplanet, meaning that we can detect a drop in brightness as it passes across the face of its host star. This is how the exoplanet was first discovered in 2015 with NASA’s K2 mission. This means that during transits a tiny fraction of starlight will pass through the exoplanet's atmosphere before reaching telescopes like Webb. The starlight's passage through the exoplanet atmosphere leaves traces that astronomers can piece together to determine the gases of the exoplanet's atmosphere.

"This result was only possible because of the extended wavelength range and unprecedented sensitivity of Webb, which enabled robust detection of spectral features with just two transits," said Madhusudhan. "For comparison, one transit observation with Webb provided comparable precision to eight observations with Hubble conducted over a few years and in a relatively narrow wavelength range."

"These results are the product of just two observations of K2-18 b, with many more on the way,” explained team member Savvas Constantinou of the University of Cambridge. “This means our work here is but an early demonstration of what Webb can observe in habitable-zone exoplanets.”

The team’s results were accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team now intends to conduct follow-up research with the telescope's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) spectrograph that they hope will further validate their findings and provide new insights into the environmental conditions on K2-18 b.

"Our ultimate goal is the identification of life on a habitable exoplanet, which would transform our understanding of our place in the universe," concluded Madhusudhan. "Our findings are a promising step towards a deeper understanding of Hycean worlds in this quest."

Yeah, I know, it's not supposed to be about my ability to pseudo-quote Star Trek, but it IS about about my ability to pseudo-quote Star Trek for me.

Don't mock me for this.

OK, you can mock me for this.

^*I've been waiting my whole life to say that.

Warm Blooded Mega Shark

Based on isotopic studies of the remains of C. Megaladon, it appears that the largest shark that ever existed could maintain a relatively constant body temperature regardless of the outside water temperature.

This is not unknown among fish, a number of fish, including Great White Sharks and Bluefin Tuna, still have this ability:

The largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon, famous for its utterly enormous jaws and correspondingly huge teeth.

Because of incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely sure how large megalodon was and can only make inferences based on some of its living relatives, like the great white and mako sharks. But thanks to some new research on its fossilized teeth, we're now fairly confident that it shared something else with these relatives: it wasn't entirely cold-blooded and apparently kept its body temperature above that of the surrounding ocean.

Most sharks, like most fish, are ectothermic, meaning that their body temperatures match those of the surrounding water. But a handful of species, part of a group termed mackerel sharks, have a specialized pattern of blood circulation that helps retain some of the heat their muscles produce. This enables them to keep some body parts at a higher temperature than their surroundings. A species called the salmon shark can maintain a body temperature that's 20° C warmer than the sub-Arctic waters that it occupies.

Megalodon is also a mackerel shark, and some scientists have suggested that it, too, must have been at least partially endothermic to have maintained its growth rates in the varied environments that it inhabited. But, as we mentioned, the megalodon remains we have aren't even sufficient to let us know how large the animal was, much less whether it had the sort of specialized circulatory structure needed for shark endothermy.

So, a team of researchers decided to directly test whether there were signs it regulated its body temperature using things we actually do have: its teeth.

The work relies on a phenomenon known as isotope clumping. If an environment is warm enough, the small weight differences between atomic isotopes don't matter, as the heat is warm enough to thoroughly mix isotopes within a material. But as things cool down, heavier isotopes tend to pool together, forming clumps within a material. We now have equipment that can track the distribution of isotopes within a material at high resolution, allowing a direct measure of its clumpiness. That, in turn, can be used to generate an estimate of the temperature at which the material formed.

So giant warm-blooded sharks who can hunt marine mammals because they don't suffer from hypothermic torpor.

Science and nature are wonders.

Scientists Gaslight Snails

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

A group of neuroscientists have implanted memories in snails. 

This is a highly complex biochemical procedure, using RNA to transfer memories from a trained snail to an untrained sale, but to the layman, this is chemically assisted gaslighting.

Also, who trains snails?

Transferring memories from one living thing to another sounds like the plot of an episode of “Black Mirror.” But it may be more realistic than it sounds — at least for snails.

In a paper published Monday in the journal eNeuro, scientists at the University of California-Los Angeles reported that when they transferred molecules from the brain cells of trained snails to untrained snails, the animals behaved as if they remembered the trained snails’ experiences.

David Glanzman, a professor of neurobiology at U.C.L.A. who is an author of the new paper, has been studying Aplysia californica, a sea snail, and its ability to make long-term memories for years. The snails, which are about five inches long, are a useful organism for studying how memories are formed because their neurons are large and relatively easy to work with.

In experiments by Dr. Glanzman and colleagues, when these snails get a little electric shock, they briefly retract their frilly siphons, which they use for expelling waste. A snail that has been shocked before, however, retracts its siphon for much longer than a new snail recruit.

Recently, the scientists realized that even when they interfered with their trained snails’ brain cells in a way that should have removed the memory completely, some vestige remained. They decided to see whether something beyond the brain cells’ connections to each other — namely, RNA — could be hanging on to the memory.

………

To understand what was happening in their snails, the researchers first extracted all the RNA from the brain cells of trained snails, and injected it into new snails. To their surprise, the new snails kept their siphons wrapped up much longer after a shock, almost as if they’d been trained.

Next, the researchers took the brain cells of trained snails and untrained snails and grew them in the lab. They bathed the untrained neurons in RNA from trained cells, then gave them a shock, and saw that they fired in the same way that trained neurons do. The memory of the trained cells appeared to have been transferred to the untrained ones.

Importantly, when the researchers gave the new snails a drug that keeps chemical tags from being added to DNA, the memory did not transfer. That is in line with other experiments that have suggested that blocking the formation of such tags blocks the formation of long-term memory in snails and some rodents, said Dr. Glanzman. That suggests that what they are seeing is in fact related to memory, and not something else to do with the influx of new RNA.

Science was glorious, isn't it?

No, Just No

Seriously, whoever thought that making a Jane Goodall Barbie was a good idea needs to be disabused of this concept:

British primatologist Jane Goodall has got a Barbie in her likeness, fulfilling a longtime wish of having her own doll to inspire young girls.

Mattel Inc unveiled the new Barbie, which the toymaker says is made from recycled plastic, as part of its Inspiring Women Series, nodding to Goodall's groundbreaking studies of chimpanzees and conservation efforts.

While I appreciate her contributions to the field of  primatology, making her a Barbie doll is really, really creepy.

No. Just No.

I do not know what possessed some Japanese scientists to create a robotic finger in human skin, but I do not like it on bit.

I do not like it with a bat,
I do not like it with a cat,

I do no like it here of there,
I do not like it anywhere.

Roboticists from the University of Tokyo have taken a tiny step toward creating the Terminator. They’ve built an articulated robot finger that’s seamlessly covered in living human skin.

There are many reasons why our current attempts to build humanoid robots with lifelike appearances always seem to end up somewhere in the uncanny valley, where their imperfect resemblance to real human beings invokes a strong negative emotional reaction from us. The way a humanoid robot moves certainly contributes to its not-quite-right appearance, but more often than not it’s the artificial materials used to recreate human skin that make humanoids especially creepy.

Because nothing says, "Not creepy," like a covering of human skin.

………

So we can either continue to work on improving artificial skin to make it more believable, or admit that there will never be a substitute and just use the real thing. That’s the route this team of researchers from the University of Tokyo has chosen, and in a recently published paper in the journal Matter, they detail a new approach for seamlessly wrapping a robotic finger in living skin tissue.

Seriously, this is a very bad idea.

I do not know how this will go wrong, but it will go wrong, and it won't be pretty.

Do Not F%$# with Corvids

Researchers in Australia fitted Magpies with electronic trackers.  

The birds were not amused, and helped each other remove the tracking devices.

Corvids are known to use tools, carry on multi-generational grudges, and now, they are outsmarting scientists.

A group of crows is called a, "Murder," a group ravens is called an, "Unkindness," or a, "Conspiracy," and a group of Magpies is called a, "Parliament," a, "Tribe," or a, "Mischief."

Whatever you call them, they are smart, highly social, and vindictive.  

Stay on their good side:

The Australian magpie is one of the cleverest birds on earth. It has a beautiful song of extraordinary complexity. It can recognize and remember up to 30 different human faces.

How did they determine that it was 30, and not 20 or 40?

But Australians know magpies best for their penchant for mischief. An enduring rite of passage of an Australian childhood is dodging the birds every spring as they swoop down to attack those they view as a threat.

Magpies’ latest mischief has been to outwit the scientists who would study them. Scientists showed in a study published last month in the journal Australian Field Ornithology just how clever magpies really are and, in the process, revealed a highly unusual example in nature of birds helping one another without any apparent tangible benefit to themselves.

In 2019 Dominique Potvin, an animal ecologist at University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, set out to study magpie social behavior. She and her team spent around six months perfecting a harness that would carry miniature tracking devices in a way that was unintrusive for magpies. They believed it would be nearly impossible for magpies to remove the harnesses from their own bodies.

Dr. Potvin and her team attached the tracking devices and the birds flew off, showing no signs of obvious distress. Then everything began to unravel.

“The first tracker was off half an hour after we put it on,” she said. “We were literally packing up our gear and watching it happen.”

In a remarkable act of cooperation, the magpie wearing the tracker remained still while the other magpie worked at the harness with its beak. Within 20 minutes, the helping magpie had found the only weak point — a single clasp, barely a millimeter long — and snipped it with its beak. Dr. Potvin and her team later saw different magpies removing harnesses from two other birds outfitted with them.

The scientists took six months to reach this point. Within three days, the magpies had removed all five devices.

Coordinate sophisticated altruistic behavior, which is very rare nature.

Don't grieve for the researchers though, they ended up publishing an article about Magpies helping each other escape from the trackers.

I F%$#ing Love Nature

It appears that there is a flower that has been hiding its carnivorous nature from us puny humans.

I'm considering cross breeding it with Marijuana, and creating Cannibal Sativa:

This wildflower looks innocent. Found in wetlands not far from major cities in the Pacific Northwest, it lures in pollinators with white blossoms atop a long, sticky stem. You can even buy seeds of the Western false asphodel in garden stores.

But according to new research published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, botanists have overlooked a distinguishing feature of the perennial: It is the world’s newest and most unexpected carnivorous plant.

………

While the Western false asphodel is found in the sorts of environments where other carnivorous plants turn up, Dr. Lin said, nobody suspected it might be carnivorous, too. “This plant has long been ignored, because they don’t have any uses and people just don’t know much about them.”

During the summer flowering season, Western false asphodels produce leafless flowering stems up to 31 inches tall, which are covered in sticky hairs. While herbarium specimens often have small flies or beetles stuck to those hairs, it was generally believed that the hairs were part of the plant’s defense strategy, killing insects that might attack the leaves and flowers, Dr. Lin said.

The first clue that the plant had an appetite for insects came when T. Gregory Ross, also at the University of British Columbia, noticed markers in the plant’s genetics sometimes associated with carnivorous plants. That was enough for Dr. Lin and his colleagues to take another look.

To prove that a plant is carnivorous, you have to show that nutrients travel from animals to plant. To test this, Dr. Lin and his colleagues laced fruit flies with nitrogen-15 isotopes and placed them on the false asphodel’s stems, as well as on the carnivorous sundew and the more innocuous wandering fleabane.

When they checked all three plants’ nitrogen levels, Dr. Lin said, they found that the sundew and the false asphodel had absorbed roughly the same amount of nitrogen isotopes. And to clinch it, the hairs on the false asphodel’s stem secreted a phosphatase, a digestive enzyme many carnivorous plant species use to pull phosphorus from insects. The Western false asphodel was indeed digesting prey.

This cool as hell, and just a little bit creepy.

 

Headline of the Day

When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray

—New York Times

It's an interesting article, but I have to think that they spent WAY more time on the headline than they did on a story about Moray Eels hunting on land.

Some People Cannot Resist Posting Kittens

For me, it's farts:

A woman on TikTok has left people in stitches with her story about a time she ripped a fart in a spin class that led to a total evacuation of all people on the premises.

………

"This one time I went to a spin class after a heavy night of drinking and 4am kebabs..."

Then it happened.

"...And I farted a fart that smelled so bad that a girl threw up and they had to evacuate the gym because they thought they had a sewage problem."

She was apparently glad to finally get it off her chest.

"I was too embarassed to tell them it was just me. So now, eight years later, I'm telling you guys."

@maximevdd

Tell me your greatest fart stories. Can you beat that? #fyp #gym #gymproblems #fart #spinclass #hangover #embarrassing #ohno #fartsfordays #drunk

♬ Oh No - Kreepa

How is this woman still single?  Not mocking her.  Women who find farts funny are rare and should be treasured.

Also, it beats my story of Prednisone fueled farts, when I let one site slip out silently that violated the chemical weapons convention at the same time that my my dad loudly farted while we were in the car, and he took the blame from the rest of the family for 15 minutes until I fessed up.

Yeah, I had to Write About this One

It turns out that many, if not most of the Soviet/Russian submarine incursions that occurred 1980s and 1990s were probably herring farts.

Anyone who knows me knows that I HAD to write about this, it juxtaposes my interest in thing military and things fart.

This story is me.

It's perfectly feasible that in the 1980s a major diplomatic incident between nuclear superpowers could have been triggered by fish farts. In fact, Russia and Sweden nearly came to blows over this very thing. They just didn't know it at the time. 

Before we move on to farts, first, some background. In 1981, a Soviet submarine ran aground on the south coast of Sweden, just 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from a Swedish naval base. The Soviets claimed that they were forced into Swedish territory by severe distress, and later navigation errors, while Sweden saw it as proof that the then Soviet Union was infiltrating Swedish waters. It didn't help that when Swedish officials secretly measured for radioactive materials using gamma-ray spectroscopy, they detected what they were 90 percent sure was uranium-23[sic, probably U-238] (used for cladding in nuclear weapons) inside the sub, indicating that it may be nuclear armed.

The submarine was returned to international waters, but the Swedish government remained alert, convinced that Russian subs could still be operating near their territory. Which is when they started to pick up elusive underwater signals and sounds. In 1982, several of Sweden's subs, boats, and helicopters pursued one of these unidentified sources for a whole month, only to come up empty-handed.

………

But it was farts.

In 1996, Magnus Wahlberg, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, became involved in the investigation of the strange signals.

………

He and a colleague began the task of figuring out what could be making bubbles on a scale that would make Sweden think it was dealing with a nuclear submarine.

"It turns out herring have a swim bladder... and this swim bladder is connected to the anal duct of the fish," Wahlberg said. "It's a very unique connection, only found in herring. So a herring can squeeze its swim bladder, and that way it can blurt out a small number of bubbles through the anal opening."

In layman's terms, they let one rip. Herrings swim in gigantic schools that can reach several square kilometers and up to 20 meters (65 feet) deep. When something near them frightens them – say, a hungry school of mackerel or a submarine on the lookout for Russian spies – they can generate a lot of gas.

………

The good news was that Sweden wasn't under threat from Russia, the bad news was it had spent 10 years deploying its military in pursuit of fish farts. Since it figured out what was and wasn't fish farts, there have been zero reports of hostile intruders in Swedish waters.

This story was literally made just for me.

Interesting Chemisty? Yes. Life? No.

Not Life as We Know It

The fact that the Royal Astronomical Society has announced that the atmosphere of Venus contains significant amounts of phosphine (PH₃), a substance that, on earth at least, is only produced through the action of anaerobic life and complex industrial processes, where it is a precursor to a number of organophosphorus compounds.

It could be a sign of life, but with no free liquid water, and atmosphere that is largely CO₂, Nitrogen, and Sulfuric Acid, I'm dubious.

On the other hand, it is clear that Venus has been the red-headed stepchild of planetary studies, with Mars getting most of the attention, so if we see a few more probes sent to Venus as a result of this finding, I'll take it.

Their press release is after the break:

Important Covid-19 Related News

Charles, my son, has successfully cultured two sourdough starters, one from wheat (Willie) and a gluten free one from millet (Mike).

Charlie has not named the starters, I did.

He managed to produce a pretty decent loaf of sourdough this evening from Willie.

I still say that we should put googly eyes and pipe-cleaner whiskers on the jars, and do a meme video, but Charlie is unconvinced.

What the F%$# Do You Put on Your Resume

I was reading an article about how researchers, using shark vomit, have determined that baby tiger in the Gulf of Mexico sharks eat lots of song birds. (NOT seabirds)

Normally, I would file this under, "Huh, that's interesting," and I might post a link in my linkage posts.

But then a thought hit me, which is that a fairly large number of researchers are involved in this, including research assistants, graduate students, and maybe some undergrads as well.

Doubtless these folks will be going to other jobs, and other schools, where they will want to relate this experience to future employers or educators.

This raises a question for me, what is the best way to put, "Shark Vomit Analyst on a resume?"