Pay attention. Notice the little things not just those big changes that smack you in the face. Be playful as a way to notice change. Design a device that lets you perceive the world dolphin-style. Ponder how lizards keep from being blown away by hurricanes and how to surf fluids on acoustic waves. Scientists are ideally suited to notice changes because we focus on minute details embedded within a larger experience. Doesn’t mean we have to be stuffy. I see playfulness among scientists all the time but it isn’t frivolous nonsense. It’s seriously playful. Have fun paying attention — it’s how we make our lives new and how we make discoveries.
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Science Daily
Researchers have developed new techniques to track the mobilization of jumping genes. They found that during a particular period of egg development, a group of jumping-genes called retrotransposons hijacks special cells called nurse cells that nurture the developing eggs. These jumping genes use nurse cells to produce invasive material (copies of themselves called virus-like particles) that move into a nearby egg and then mobilize into the egg's DNA driving evolution, and causing disease.
We may not be able to change recent events in our lives, but how well we remember them plays a key role in how our brains model what's happening in the present and predict what is likely to occur in the future . . . "Memory isn't for trying to remember . . . It's for doing better the next time." [...]
Known as "Event Memory Retrieval and Comparison Theory" or EMRC, the model builds on previous research . . . that suggests the brain continually compares sensory input from ongoing experiences against working models of similar past events that it builds from related memories.
When real life does not match the "event model," prediction errors spike and change detection sets off a cascade of cognitive processing that rewires the brain to strengthen memories for both the older model events and the new experience, the theory contends. [...]
...the brain breaks up the activities of daily life into a hierarchy of distinct smaller events or "chunks," and that our ability to identify transitions or "boundaries" between these chunks has consequences for how these experiences gets encoded in our memories.
For instance, just walking through a doorway, which the brain perceives as an "event boundary," has been shown to diminish our recollection for information being processed just before we entered the new room. Thus, we sometimes find ourselves forgetting the reason we entered a room in the first place..
Engineers at Duke University have developed a way to manipulate, split and mix droplets of biological fluids by having them surf on acoustic waves in oil. The technology could form the basis of a small-scale, programmable, rewritable biomedical chip that is completely reusable for disparate purposes from on-site diagnostics to laboratory-based research.
Eureka Alert
Results from this study show that if the temperatures are colder in the northern part of the hemisphere, it rains more in the southern portion — and vice versa. “The study detected dry and wet periods in the Brazilian paleoclimate by analyzing the oxygen isotopes in calcium carbonate molecules found in speleothems.”
A new study published in Geophysical Research Journal shows that the so-called Little Ice Age - a period stretching from 1500 to 1850 in which mean temperatures in the northern hemisphere were considerably lower than at present - exerted effects on the climate of South America.
Based on an analysis of speleothems (cave formations) in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Goiás, the study revealed that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the climate of southwestern Brazil was wetter than it is now, for example, while that of the country's Northeast region was drier.
The same Brazilian cave records showed that the climate was drier in Brazil between 900 and 1100, during a period known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), when the northern hemisphere's climate was warmer than it is now.
A new study of the role microbial communities play on the leaves of plants suggests that fertilizing crops may make them more susceptible to disease.
University of California, Berkeley, biologists found that spraying tomatoes with microbes from healthy tomatoes protected them from disease-causing bacteria, but that fertilizing the tomatoes beforehand negated the protection, leading to an increase in the population of pathogenic microbes on the plants' leaves.
"When we change the nutrient environment that plants are in, we are fundamentally altering the plant-microbiome interaction and also, importantly, the microbiome-mediated protection of natural plant/microbe interactions," said senior author Britt Koskella, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of integrative biology.
Tweets originating in California during the state's 2015 wildfire season suggest that social media can improve predictions of air quality impacts from smoke resulting from wildfires and have the potential to improve rescue and relief efforts, according to research by two USDA Forest Service scientists. [...]
"With wildfire seasons becoming longer and more people living in fire-prone areas, smoke is becoming a greater public health concern," Sachdeva said. "Models for predicting the extent and range of impact of smoke dispersion from wildfire events can be a critical tool in safeguarding public health, and we're finding that information people share in social media has great potential for improving those models." [...]
...The study suggested that social media could help predict air quality in remote areas that are not monitored for air quality, and that tweets could also have potential in linking people who need help with people who have the resources to offer assistance.
nighthawks migrate 20,000 km/year returning to the same place in canada they occupied the previous season.
stfu about mitigation banking — conservating habitat some where else isn’t necessarily the same as habitat right here
Phys.org
In seasonal environments, timing is everything: Ecosystem dynamics are controlled by how well predators can match their prey in space and time. A recently published study, led by University of Hawai'i at Mānoa oceanographer Anna Neuheimer, revealed that fish parents "predict" a beneficial environment for their offspring with populations "adjusting" spawning time so that the young can meet their prey. Survival at this early stage affects population size and shapes how many fish will be available to fisheries in later years.
The research team found evidence that the reproductive timing of Atlantic cod is adapted to allow their young to match the seasonal occurrence of their food, a critical component of survival.
"This timing match is a challenge for the parents, as eggs take weeks to develop before the young fish need to feed—that is, they must "predict" when their young's food will occur weeks in advance," said Neuheimer.
While this finding was predicted by a century-old hypothesis called the Match-Mismatch Hypothesis, this study provided some of the first evidence of timing adaptation consistent with this idea.
As the climate changes, seasonal timing is advancing 30-40 percent faster in the ocean than on land. This study, at the nexus of ecology and evolution, provides new tools that can be used to help predict fisheries catch changes in the future.
Sauropods are a class of dinosaur—they are known as very large vegetarians with long necks and massive bodies. Diplodocids are regarded as a super-family of sauropods representing some of the largest animals that have ever lived on land. They have been classified as neosauropods because of their more recent evolutionary history compared to other sauropods. But their absence in eastern Asia suggested something had prevented them from moving into that area. But now, it appears that assumption is wrong. The researchers working at the Lingwu dig site in China found several fossilized bones, some of which belonged to a creature they named "Lingwulong shenqi," which translates to "Lingqu amazing dragon." Testing of the fossils indicated that they were from 174 million years ago, putting them in the Middle Jurassic. The find proves that diplodocids did exist in what is now eastern Asia, during the time before Pangaea broke apart. That means they had to have arrived at least 15 million years earlier than previously thought.
Discover
On June 23, a group of international geoscientists discovered a meteorite in Botswana that had been dwelling in space just weeks earlier. The fresh fragment broke off of asteroid 2018 LA as it plummeted to Earth on June 2, turning into a fiery meteor and exploding as it entered our atmosphere.
The geoscientists spent five days combing the land beneath the meteor’s impact area before finding the tiny meteorite — marking only the second time remnants from a predicted asteroid impact have been recovered. Since such freshly fallen meteorites are so uncommonly found, researchers now have the rare opportunity to study its properties and composition first-hand.
The Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, a NASA funded Planetary Defense project that locates and tracks near-Earth objects, discovered the asteroid only eight hours before it made impact with Earth. Any potential threat was quickly dismissed, though, when telescope observations deemed it to be just 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter, making it small enough to safely break apart in Earth’s atmosphere.
Sierra
A team of researchers from the United States, China, South Korea, Switzerland, and France examined air samples from nearly two dozen cities, including San Francisco, Paris, Warsaw, Zurich, Beijing, Brisbane, and Seoul. They discovered airborne concentrations of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in each of the cities at varying levels, produced by concentrated animal feeding operations, hospitals, wastewater treatment plants, and other sources.
Their findings indicate that antibiotic-resistant genes can spread from one bacterium to another and that this bacteria has the ability not only to travel through the air, but also to travel across continents, even across the globe—exposing millions of people to antibiotic-resistant genes whether they live in proximity to those sources or not. [...]
Beijing was found to have the highest complex mix of ARGs, with up to 18 different subtypes detected in the air. The most commonly detected antibiotic-resistant genes in all 19 cities were those with a resistance to β-lactams and quinolone antibiotics, with the highest prevalence found in San Francisco, which Yao speculated could indicate heavy use of antibiotics in hospitals there without the proper systems in place to control for airborne emission. The most powerful antibiotics on the market, which are supposed to be reserved for only the most serious medical cases, were detected in six of the 19 cities.
Nature
Anole lizards that survived hurricanes in the Caribbean had bigger toepads, longer forelimbs and shorter hindlimbs than those observed before the storm. Researchers used a leaf blower to confirm that these physical proportions help lizards to hang on to a branch in high winds. The physical changes offer evidence that recent hurricanes have selected for certain traits.
Southern Fried Science
Walking around, you definitely do start building up a sense of what all the clicks mean, and with a little practice, you can easily pick out thinks like open doorways with your eyes closed*.
We don’t actually know what dolphins “see” when they project sounds at complex objects. From experiments and models, we know that they can perceive thickness as well as distance from target objects. Without being inside a dolphins brain we have no real way of knowing if they can form complex, 3-dimensional models of the world through biosonar alone or if it acts more like the sweeping pings of a ship’s SONAR.
These kinds of projects are not nearly as daunting as you might think. From conception to realization was less than 2 days (excluding shipping time). The code is barely 15 lines, most of which if cobbled from existing code. The lasercut pieces are nice, but not necessary. The entire build cost less than $100. Documentation took almost as long as actually building the thing.
So get out there and make weird things!