WIRED Science

May

2010

Ravens Console Each Other After Fights

WIRED Science blog, May 17, 2010.

After ravens see a friend get a beat down, they approach the victim and appear to console it, according to new research.

Orlaith Fraser and her co-author Thomas Bugnyar watched the aftermath of 152 fights over a two year period between 13 hand-reared young adult ravens housed at the Konrad Lorenz Research Station in Austria. What they found was the first evidence for birds consoling one another.

“It’s not a good thing for your partner to be distressed,” Fraser explained. “It’s interesting to see these behaviors in animals other than chimpanzees. It seems to be more ingrained in evolutionary history.” Read More >

May

2010

Mice Show Pain on Their Faces Just Like Humans

WIRED Science blog, May 10th, 2010.

Mice in pain have facial expressions that are very similar to human facial expressions, according to scientists who have developed the “mouse grimace scale.” The pain expressions of mice could help researchers gauge the effectiveness of new drugs.

People have been using similar facial-expression coding systems in babies and other humans who are unable to verbally express their pain. “No one has every looked for facial expression of pain in anything other than humans,” said Jeffery Mogil of McGill University, co-author of the study published on May 9 in Nature Methods. Read More >

Apr

2010

Gene Grows Worm Heads

WIRED Science blog, April 29th, 2010.

A worm named Schmidtea mediterranea has the unique ability to regenerate not just its body, but also its head and brain. Now, scientists studying the worm have discovered one of the genes that allows it to accomplish this amazing feat.

The gene, called “smed-prep,” regulates the location and structure of the flatworm’s brain during regeneration. When the gene is absent, the worm forms a stump with random junk from other parts of its body, but no brain. When it’s expressed in other areas of the body, heads can be made to sprout from anywhere.

“One of the main goals in the lab was to understand the mechanisms that allowed this worm to regenerate its head, brain and sensory organs,” said molecular biologist Aziz Aboobaker of the University of Nottingham, lead author of the paper published in PLoS GeneticsApril 22. “It’s a big problem because you have to make this all from the old tissue. The cells have to mobilize, migrate to the right place and differentiate.” Read More >

Apr

2010

Sea Creatures Travel Far to Colonize After Volcanic Eruptions

WIRED Science blog, April 22, 2010.

When volcanic eruptions wipe out life at hydrothermal vents, some of the new species that set up camp afterward may come from as far as 200 miles away.

“We don’t understand how they get from one vent to another,” said biological oceanographer Lauren Mullineaux of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “But because we now see that they can move these long distances, it expands the scale of connectedness between different vents.” Read More >

Apr

2010

Photos Surface Of The Day Einstein Died

WIRED Science blog, April 16th, 2010.

Ralph Morse, an ambitious photojournalist for Life magazine, covered a funeral in New Jersey on April 18, 1955. Now, 55 years later, Life.com is finally publishing the pictures he took that day during the funeral and cremation of Albert Einstein.

Einstein died of heart failure at age 76 earlier that morning at Princeton Hospital. The hospital’s pathologist removed his brain for preservation and study, in the hopes that scientists could figure out why he was so smart. Read More >

Apr

2010

Bats, Birds and Lizards Can Fight Climate Change

WIRED Science blog, April 9th, 2010.

BIRDS, BATS AND lizards may play an important role in Earth’s climate by protecting plants from insects that forage on foliage. A new study suggests that preserving these animals could be a low-tech way to fight climate change.

“The presence, abundance and diversity of birds, bats and lizards, the top predators in the insect world, has impacts on the growth of plants,” said ecologist Daniel Gruner of the University of Maryland, co-author of the paper published April 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “If you don’t have plants, you don’t have organisms that are recapturing carbon.” Read More >

Apr

2010

Mystery Object Defies Astronomical Classification

WIREDScience blog, April 7, 2010.

A mysterious object discovered near a brown dwarf doesn’t fit into any known astronomical category.

The newly discovered mystery companion forms a binary system with the brown dwarf, located 460 light-years away in the Taurus star-forming system. The object is too light to be another brown dwarf, but it’s too young to have formed by accretion, the way a typical planet does.

“Although this small companion appears to have a mass that is comparable to the mass of planets around stars, we don’t think it formed like a planet,” said astronomer Kevin Luhman of Penn State University, co-author of the study April 5 in The Astrophysical Journal. “This seems to indicate that there are two different ways for nature to make small companions.” Read More >

Apr

2010

Sequencing the Video Genome

WIREDScience blog. April 5, 2010.

THINK ORGANISMS ARE the only ones with genomes? Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology are sequencing the “video genome” to put an end to video piracy on the internet.

The technique works by detecting features that remain basically unchanged by typical color and resolution manipulations. Current methods rely on action recognition algorithms, which match video sequences by the movement they contain. Read More >

Dec

2009

Photo: Shining Lake Confirms Presence of Liquid on Titan

WIREDScience Blog, December 17th, 2009.

SAN FRANCISCO – A glint of light from a large lake confirms the presence of surface liquid in Titan’s northern hemisphere. This image, released Thursday here at the American Geophysical Union meeting, was captured on July 8, using the Cassini spacecraft’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer.

“This one image communicates so much about Titan – thick atmosphere, surface lakes and an otherworldliness,” said Cassini project scientist Bob Pappalardo, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a press release. “It’s an unsettling combination of strangeness yet similarity to Earth.” Read More >