Bloglovin'

Google are taking away their lovely reader! So in order to keep up with my wee blog fixes, I've had to set up a fancy Bloglovin' account.

If you fancy following me, you can use the button over at the side there -->

Hmm.. No Science. So let me leave you with the snippet that hippo milk is pink: probably because of acidic secretions that Hippos make that act as sunscreen.

Over and out. *nods*

The curious case of the missing turtle

Extinction.
It's not a friendly word is it? It's a word to be intoned rather than lilted. 
But extinctions are a natural process. One of the forces of nature, turning the wheels of evolution. To put it bluntly: you can't have survival of the fittest if everyone wins, all of the time.
However, it will come as no surprise to you to learn that while extinctions CAN be a natural process, we as a species have wasted no time getting involved and scrawling Homo sapiens all over the gravestones of many species past.
Humanity, eh? We like to wade on in there, with our big boots, crushing bugs, shouting at things and just generally having a lovely time, like toddlers who've been given too much sugar then let loose in a soft play area. Except of course, in a soft play area, everything's designed to be squishy and forgiving. Damage in the real world can be a lot more long-lasting.
For a variety of reasons, it's really hard to estimate extinction rate, but we know it's fast. So fast, in fact, that some scientists believe we are currently going through a 6th big extinction event, like that which did for the dinosaurs. See here to find out what the WWF (the charity people, not the wrestling people) have to say.
Awareness of biodiversity has shot up since the days of the Dodo, and many groups of people now tirelessly work to minimize humanity's scribble across the world. However, when it comes to extinction, some animals are more equal than others. It's much harder to raise funds to protect a blood-sucking leech than it is to get a similar pot of gold together for saving Pandas, for example. Probably more important though, is that some groups of animals are just more vulnerable. Maybe they have naturally small populations, maybe they breed slowly, maybe they're quite specific in where they have to live, or what they have to eat. Whatever it is, they're more likely to go extinct than, for example, pigeons. Or rats.
Turtles are some of the unlucky, being amongst the worst-hit vertebrates in extinction terms. Mock Turtles are fast running out of things to mock: it's rumoured that many of them are considering a career change to the less demanding 'Mock Guinea Pig' field.
However, one species has recently 'come back from the dead'. Or rather, it has been demoted to the state of never having been dead. Or alive for that matter. Confused? Well...

Dead or alive? Figure taken from original article which can be accessed at http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0057116 

At the end of the 19th century, 3 specimens of the Seychelles Mud turtle, or Pelusios seychellensis to give them their Sunday name, were found. These can still be seen in Natural History Museum in Vienna and the Zoological Museum in Hamburg.
Outside museums though, an intensive search has found no more turtles since 19c, so the species was classified as extinct.
However, there is a twist in this stubby turtle tail. Scientists examined the DNA of one of the turtles from the museum in Vienna, and discovered that actually, Pelusios seychellensis never actually existed as a species. In fact, these turtles were just members of the West African species Pelusios castaneus that had ended up a long way from home. People had noticed the remarkable similarity of the 'extinct' turtle to the West African species before. But these are little turtle chaps, and so it was assumed that the distances between West Africa and the Seychelles was just too far for them to travel. Travel they clearly did though, hopping (well not hopping, they probably moved in a more turtle-appropriate manner) to the Seychelles for a 19th century holiday. But how did they end up so far from home? We might never know, although it seems likely us humans were probably involved with our well-meaning world spanning antics. But we can at least put the ghost of one extinct species to rest. The other uncountable (for the moment at least) legions? Well, extinction for them is probably not such an easily reversable process.

To learn more there's the reference for the article, right down there. Enjoy!

Stuckas, H., Gemel, R., Fritz, U. (2013) 'One Extinct Turtle Species Less: Pelusios seychellensis Is Not Extinct, It Never Existed'. PLoS ONE, 8(4). Click me! 

Tobacco plants and the secret to (almost) eternal youth

Tobacco plants are real 'live fast, die young' sort of characters in the plant world. Your average tobacco plant will have just 3 or 4 months to work out their place in the world and put roots down before they bloom. Then they die, having done their bit for the continuation of the species and cigarette manufacturers.

Normally they grow to about two metres tall. Now, I'm not going to argue that this is particularly lacking in the height department. I'm all out of stones to throw at glass houses (I used them up at Christmas time with a full scale spun sugar model of the Notre Dame*) and if the concept of my height was a house it would be covered, nay riddled, with windows. But we can at least agree that tobacco plants are not necessarily on the 'Mighty Oak' scale of plant-bigness**.

Tobacco without access to the fountain of youth. Image  by Magnus Manske via wikimedia.

However, some clever folks at the Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (IME) in Munster have been tinkering with some tobacco plants. And the result of this tinkering has been a complete lifestyle overhaul for said tobacco plants. They modify the expression of a certain gene, and this delays flowering. An upshot of this is that the plant just keeps growing. Like some kind of fairy-tale bean stalk. The oldest plant in the researchers' greenhouse is 8 years old and still going strong. It's also six metres tall and they reckon it would be even taller were it not for the roof of the greenhouse. How's that for taking the glass ceiling literally? Even the leaves of these plants don't show the tell-tale signs of age. Normally they'd turn yellow and drop off pretty quickly, but in the genetically modified plants they stay lush, green and (most importantly) attached. If you could bottle that, and humans grew leaves instead of hair, you'd be on to a sure fire marketing success.

Now, at this point you may have a question on your mind. 'That's all very well,' you may think, 'but why should I in any sense care about the ageing process of some tobacco plants?'. Of course, I may have got you all wrong, the ageing of tobacco plants might be one of your foremost concerns. It would, however, be understandable if you have more important things to think about. The really exciting thing about this work appears, like a rabbit from a top-hat***, when you think about it's applications. As has been mentioned before, feeding the many people who want to be fed on the Earth is tricky. This method could help in, for example, getting potato plants to make more potatoes. And in fact this is one of the things that the researchers are working on right now. The fact that the plants in question don't flower is a great benefit, because without flowers, there can be no pollen or seeds. And without those bad boys we're very unlikely to see those naughty genes escaping and entering the wild population. Of course,  any crop in which flowers play a significant role is a no-go. But the potential for the production of biomass is still massive!

So hurrah for the tobacco fountain of youth. We might not be able to drink from it personally**** but it looks like it may help to quench a thirst for humanity in general. And I'll drink to that. Cheers!

*this may not strictly be true. It may have been the Eiffel Tower.
** 'Bigness' is almost certainly a world. Perhaps not right here, right now, but at some point in the space-time continuum 'bigness' is a word.
*** the real trick? It was there all along.
**** and I don't think taking up smoking the leaves of these modified plants is going to help...

For more information (and less silliness) on this story, go to:
http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2013/january/giant-tobacco-plants-that-stay-young-forever---research-news-jan.html

Tis the season to be jolly: frosty feelings and heart-warming memories

Baby, it's cold outside. And inside, and most places in between to be honest. Once again, it's reached that time of year when I wonder why people have yet to invent clothes made out of duvets. Yes, they might pose problems in terms of mobility, but if the Victorian ladies could cope with crinolines, then I'm fairly certain I could learn to waddle around swaddled in microfibre goodness.

Luckily for us, the glow of nostalgia is available in abundance at the moment to warm the cockles of our hearts. No, really.

Researchers from the University of Southampton have done some work which suggests that taking a trip down memory lane to happier places in your head results in a physiological effect: you actually feel physically warmer.

And what do they have to back these claims up? Well, they asked participants to keep a diary of when they felt nostalgic; then put people in rooms of differing temperatures and asked how nostalgic they felt. Both sets of participants reported surfing more warm fuzzy nostalgic waves* when temperatures were colder. Very interesting, but hardly conclusive proof. Perhaps people just engaged in more heart-warming games of chess with grand-dad / snowman building competitions with cherished chums / biscuit decorating in jolly kitchens when it was cold. Perhaps shivering your seating pads off brings nostalgic memories flooding back?

Of course, the researchers didn't stop there though. They went on to play music to 'evoke nostalgia'** at people over the internet. The people for whom nostalgia was evoked (which sounds far more invasive than it was) also reported feelings of physical warmth.

Getting warmer, perhaps..

At this point, the researchers decided to get people cold again. I hope that their research grant had a bit ear-marked for cups of tea to warm up shivering volunteers. Just in case nostalgia on its own wasn't enough for some of them. They made people sit in cold rooms, told some to think of happy memories, and some to think of neutral past events. When they were asked to guess the temperature of  the room, the people with the warm fuzzy thoughts perceived the room to be warmer. And the luckiest group of volunteers got to plunge their hands into basins of ice-cold water to see how long they could stand it. Those with heads full of nostalgic clouds could last significantly longer than the other volunteers.

We already know that there's a link between nostalgia and psychological comfort, but this study suggests that there could be a link between nostalgia and physical comfort too. So altogether now: 'You know, in my day...'

Was it really though? Or did it feel the dread hand of impostor syndrome?
Image: memegenerator.net.

And if that doesn't work, there's always mulled wine.

*is it just me who now has a mental image of someone surfing on waves of teddy-bears?

** probably ABBA. Ok, probably not ABBA, but I think we can all agree we'll be a lot happier if we pretend it was.

Reference: to find out more go to: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/mediacentre/news/2012/dec/12_210.shtml

Second skin

If Shakespeare's Shylock, lusting after his pound of flesh, were around today he'd probably happily hunker down in the press.  Perhaps he would find his place extracting pithy quotes from page 3 models for 'The News in Briefs'. Either that or he'd be working in a strip bar. 

I'm possibly being a wee bit unfair on poor Shylock. Actually, he always struck me as a pretty decent bloke just trying to run a business.* But the point remains that skin is potentially a very profitable asset in today's world. You can show some skin that would normally be covered up or you can cover your skin with useful pointers to anybody willing to pay. 

Okay, I'll hold my hands up, the economic value of your** skin might be slightly debatable. But it's still highly valuable stuff. It's the largest organ in your body. It keeps all your insides on the inside. It provides a home for some of the many bacterial tenants of our bodies. 

Not only this, but it's able to repair itself. And it's covered in nerve endings, so it can sense if something's likely to require it to get its self-heal funky stuff on.

Until recently, human technology has been woefully lacking when it comes to matching up to the properties of skin. Hardly surprising when you consider that the natural world has a fair few million years on us. Damn sneaky evolution, happening before we got our boots on. But, good news humanity! We're catching up, in the three legged race that is people plus technology.*** A synthetic, plastic 'skin' has been developed that combines some of the awesome properties of real skin, self-healing and touch sensitivity.

Loving your work, skin..

Up until now, the synthetic skins that have been developed (and there have been lots) have had some downfalls. They have only been able to heal themselves once, for example. And they haven't been conductive to electricity. We people like our electricity and if we want to be able to use skins for applications with digital doo-dahs (for instance, if we want to make skin covered robots), these skins need to be conductive. 

Researchers at Stanford University have changed all this. They have created a recipe for skin which combines the 'best of both worlds', a plastic polymer capable of self healing, and the electric conductivity of metal (nickel, if you're interested). The plastic consists of long chains of molecules, joined together by hydrogen bonds (put very simply, bonds caused by the attraction of the positive charge on part of one atom to the negative charge on part of the next atom). These hydrogen bonds are dynamic: the molecules can break apart fairly easily, but when they come back together the bonds can reform and the material can get its structure back. The result? A resilient, bendy plastic: boom. But they didn't stop there. Ooh no. They also added tiny bits of nickel, jutting between the molecules, providing 'stepping stones' for electricity to flow through the material.

Because the path is broken up, it means that if the material is stretched, twisted or pressure is put upon it, the electricity finds it a little bit harder to find its way through. The electrical resistance of the material changes according to the pressure put upon it so we have a way to measure subtle changes in pressure and twistedness of the material. Sensitivity win.  And how about how well the skin reacts to being cut? Well, after being cut and then pressed back together, the material regained its strength in 30 minutes. And it could be cut repeatedly in the same place, and still repair itself. Healing win!

The skin is sensitive enough to feel the pressure of a handshake, so could be used in prosthetic limbs. What's more, the skin doesn't just have to be used to cover bodies. If it covered electrical wires, they could effectively 'self-repair' if their flow was broken, pretty handy if said wires are buried beneath a metre of concrete.

Don't worry, the skin on your body is still just as fab as it ever was (mutual appreciation time!) but the fact that we have the technology in place to almost rival the natural stuff is undeniably enough to raise a wee thrill induced goose-bump. But for now, I'll keep my science induced goosebumps firmly on my person thanks.

*please note, I haven't read 'The Merchant of Venice' in some time.. 

**and my skin, for that matter. I'm fairly certain my skin is too ghost-like to be of use for anything but macabre dust sheets.
***did anyone get a mental image of a person strapped to a robot there? Or was that just me?

To find out more go to: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/november/healing-plastic-skin-111112.html

The sound of the under-water: dinosaur acoustics in the modern sea

*Darlin' it's better down where it's wetter, take it from meeee*

Ahh, there's nothing like a good old disney warble to brighten up your Sunday and endear yourself to your neighbours. But, casting aside the obvious innuendos, are the words which I warble true? Is life better in the big old blue?

Let's keep that question rhetorical for now. Only you can answer whether, in spite of millions of years of intervening evolution, your heart still yearns to be among the sperm whales and salty tang of the waves. I know it's not quite the same, but I can offer you the answer to another question to make up for hitting you with a silly rhetorical one. The question being:

Are things in the oceans going a bit mental?

And the answer is a resounding yes, with capitals, bold, underling and about a million exclamation points. Oceanic neighbourhoods are changing at a rate of knots (haha, see what I did there?) possibly even faster than our little patches of mud are.

Sea levels rising, ocean currents changing. It's the stuff of apocalyptic films except it's real.. if happening ever so slightly more slowly than Hollywood has the attention span for. And then there's the chemical changes. As we all know humans have a habit of burning long dead plants and animals, and this results in the release of  CO₂. Thankfully for our poor battered atmosphere, not all of this heads straight upwards, some heads to carbon 'sinks', one of which is the ocean (and always has been, carbon gets chucked around various sources and sinks all of the time). Since the industrial revolution, extra CO₂ has found its way to the ocean.
Some of this dissolves into carbonic acid. Currently, our oceans are slightly alkaline, so these extra wee shots of acid push the pH downwards, towards 7.

So what will this do? We don't really know. We've got some ideas: animals which use calcium to build themselves up, such as that sea urchin chap down there and these rather cute plankton are almost certainly going to be in trouble. Sorry about that guys..

Sea urchins: admittedly not the cuddliest critters,
but pretty damn cool. Image: wikimedia, author Janek Pfeifer.

And some things we're just finding out. The sound of the ocean is changing. In fact, the ocean is getting a lot noisier. Let's just hope that the Little Mermaid has got all that singing out of her system.. Acoustically, the ocean is currently undergoing some pretty major changes. It would be like removing all the soft furnishings from a room*. Sounds are zipping round the ocean without being slowed down by taselled cushions. Or, in the case of the ocean, boron. Oceanic boron comes in two flavours: ionized and unionized. As the pH goes down, so too does the ratio of ionized to non-ionized boron. The clumps around ionized boron decrease the punch of sound waves. The sound wave can't resist giving boron ion-water clumps a wee squeeze as it travels past. This robs the sound wave of some of its puff, so it can't travel as far. Reduce the number of boron ions, the sound doesn't get distracted, and it can go further. In fact, the whole ocean will be more 'transparent' to low frequency sound. Which means that whales calls will travel further, but so too will our sonar signals. Scientists have analysed the sediment composition of the ocean floor and have worked out that the oceans may soon have the same acoustics as they did in the cretaceous. Which means that divers could hear with the same clarity that Plesiosaurs used to. Which is a little bit mind-boggling.

There aren't many Plesiosaurs left in the ocean, and who knows how our current ocean dwellers will react to hearing their noisy whale neighbours better. Certainly, if you are planning to build an underwater house (and quite frankly, who could blame you with views like these?), then you might want to invest in some pretty serious earplugs in addition to the heavy duty damp proofing. 

* I'll admit, acoustic engineering is not a strong point of mine.. If it is one of your strong points and my ignorance pains you here, please let me know! (preferably nicely)

Reference: the original story comes from here: Acoustical Society of America (ASA). "Dinosaur-era acoustics: Global warming may give oceans the 'sound' of the Cretaceous."ScienceDaily, 18 Oct. 2012. Web. 21 Oct. 2012.

Filthy / Gorgeous?

Warning: euphemisms may abound in the following blogpost. I take no responsibility for their actions.

People are disgusting, aren't they? But really, they are though. The thought occurs to me if I am looking after a child and they gleefully hand me a freshly excavated snot-clump or a toy dripping with saliva. People are gross. You cannot convince me that people get less gross as they get older. You still produce large quantities of unsavoury fluids and solids. It's just that most people get better at hiding them.

I made you a present.. File: wikimedia, author Gerrynobody

It's human nature to find certain things a bit icky. In fact the disgust response has a whole load of evolution cheering it on. Finding things that might make you sick disgusting? That's just good sense. It means that if you find a rotting corpse on the ground, you shudder and walk away, rather than chowing down only to discover the literal interpretation of 'you are what you eat'.

Most of the time, we stumble round in thrall to our evolutionary impulses. Disgust is one of these impulses. The need to feed ourselves and keep warm is another. And, the favourite impulse of advertising agencies and lad's mags the world over, sex is up there too. So succintly put by the Bloodhound Gang; you and me baby ain't nothing but mammals so let's do it like they do on the discovery channel. Ah, such poetry! When will we see the like? *wipes a solitary tear away* Actually, since the human population climbs daily like a window-cleaner expanding their business to include the moon (very dusty place, I'm told); reproduction is a bit of a tricky issue in terms of the success of the human race. Nevertheless, our genes jump around in our bodies, itching to get 'friendly' with someone and create new little gene carrying machines to spread the word.

Which brings us to a bit of a sticky situation*. The desire to have sex with your ideal man / woman / inflatable novelty is a very strong motivator indeed **. However, chances are that your ideal man / woman / other is a little bit disgusting. Objectively, sex includes many of the big hitters on the disgust chart: saliva, sweat, semen and body odour. Our desires to avoid disgusting things and have sex are fundamentally incompatible. It's a wonder anyone gets as far as doing the nasty at all without a bottle of bleach, a couple of kitchen rolls and a scourer. But the fact that, as of yet, I have not seen dettol for sale in a vending machine in a dodgy pub toilet suggests that there are people who proceed in making the beast with two backs with NO CLEANING SUPPLIES AT ALL. Incidentally, I have seen 'bottled pheromones' and inflatable sheep in pub toilet vending machines which might give you some idea of the calibre of my night-life.

So, what's the answer to this puzzle? Well, the explanation could be quite simple. It could be that on being in the mood for some 'loving', disgust cues lose their clout. Or it could be that when things get hot and heavy, the aversion to disgusting things weakens. Or it could be a combination. Recent studies have tested this by getting subjects hot under the collar*** and then getting them to do disgusting things. I bet the subjects felt like they had won the experiment lottery when they got to eat a biscuit with a live worm on it (not kidding). And these studies found that those people who were in the mood rated sex-related disgust cues (such as sticking their finger into a bowl of 'used' condoms.****) as less disgusting than people who had watched a neutral film clip. Not only this, but they showed less disgust avoidance behaviour than those who were unaroused. That is, people were more likely to do the tasks as scientists requested them when they were aroused. Ooh-er missus, that's a dangerous thing to know is it not?

Anyway, it's good to know that we have a built-in mechanism for coping with the overall disgusting nature of being people. Perhaps this is the original form of 'sexual healing'? Something for you to ponder in the pub toilet of your choosing perhaps?

Ciao for now folks!

*please do pardon the pun.
** for the majority of people anyway. It should be said that there are those people who are perfectly content having sex with no-one. As there are people who are perfectly content having sex with anyone who agrees to it.  Without derailing into a huge sexual politics rant: so long as everyone's consenting, whatever rocks your horse is fine by me. (Because I'm sure my approval was very important to you, I'm just putting your mind at rest)
*** by showing them photos and videos, you filthy-minded lot!
****The condoms weren't actually used, don't worry

Want to know more? Borg C, de Jong PJ (2012) Feelings of Disgust and Disgust-Induced Avoidance Weaken following Induced Sexual Arousal in Women. PLoS ONE 7(9)