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Tag: biology
Russia loses contact with Photon-M
Russia has lost contact with its Photon-M biology spacecraft, launched last week with a four geckos on board.
The Russians say that the receipt of telemetry from the spacecraft shows it is successfully operating autonomously without help from the ground. And since the Russians have a great deal of experience building spacecraft that can function on their own, I have no reason to disbelieve them in this. What is not clear is whether the spacecraft can come home on its own.
Newly discovered dinosaur tracks
A cluster of dinosaur tracks discovered recently in Alaska has revealed to paleontologists a wealth of new information about their behavior.
The thousands of impressions, created on a 180-meter-long portion of near-coastal flood plain, today pepper a steep mountainside. Most of the tracks, made somewhere between 69 million and 72 million years ago, were left by hadrosaurs, commonly known as duck-billed dinosaurs (the crested creatures in this artist’s representation).
The consistent and excellent preservation of tracks suggests all the footprints were created within a short time period. Varying in width from 8 to 64 centimeters, the footprints cluster within four distinct size ranges, which researchers suggest represent specific age groups within a multigenerational herd. About 84% of the tracks were made by adult and near-adult hadrosaurs and 13% by young presumed to be less than 1 year old. A mere 3% of the tracks represent juvenile hadrosaurs, a rarity that strongly suggests the young of this species experienced a rapid growth spurt and therefore spent only a short time at this vulnerable size, the researchers report online this week in Geology.
More fraud in peer-reviewed science
The science journal Nature today announced the retraction of two controversial stem cell papers.
The two papers reporting the stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) phenomenon appeared online on 29 January. Questions about the papers arose almost immediately, leading to an investigation by RIKEN, the headquarters of the network of the nationally funded laboratories that is based in Wako near Tokyo. Investigators documented several instances of fabrication and falsification in the papers and concluded that some of these constituted research misconduct on the part of [Haruko] Obokata [the lead author].
Japanese media recently reported that authors had agreed to retract the papers but were discussing the wording of the notice. In the note that appeared today, the authors point to errors previously identified by RIKEN investigations in supplementary documents. They also identify additional errors in both papers, including mix-ups in images, mislabeling, faulty descriptions, and “inexplicable discrepancies in genetic background and transgene insertion sites between the donor mice and the reported” STAP cells. [emphasis mine]
The list of errors now documented sound astonishing. In fact, I can’t see how any serious review by any competent specialist in this field could have missed them all, which suggests that for this research at least the peer-review process is mostly a sham. In fact, in the article Nature admits that its
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Hippos in South America?
A wild herd of hippopotamuses that once belonged to a Colombian drug lord are now spreading across the countryside and no one knows what to do with them.
Situated halfway between the city of Medellin and Bogota, the Colombian capital, Hacienda Napoles was the vast ranch owned by the drugs baron Pablo Escobar. In the early 1980s, after Escobar had become rich but before he had started the campaign of assassinations and bombings that was to almost tear Colombia apart, he built himself a zoo.
He smuggled in elephants, giraffes and other exotic animals, among them four hippos – three females and one male. And with a typically grand gesture, he allowed the public to wander freely around the zoo. Buses filled with schoolchildren passed under a replica of the propeller plane that carried Escobar’s first US-bound shipments of cocaine. While Don Pablo masterminded the operations of the Medellin Cartel from his villa on the hill, the locals gazed at the strange animals and even stranger concrete dinosaurs that Escobar built for his son.
When Hacienda Napoles was confiscated in the early 1990s, Escobar’s menagerie was dispersed to zoos around the country. But not the hippos. For about two decades, they have wallowed in their soupy lake, watching the 20sq km (8 sq mile) park around them become neglected and overgrown – and then transformed back into a zoo and theme park, complete with water slides. All the while, the hippos themselves thrived, and multiplied.
The hippos also escaped from the zoo, and because the environmental conditions in Colombia are ideal for these invasive hippos, they are prospering wherever they go.
Tracking animals from space.
The tree that hitched a ride for 11,000 miles.
The tree that hitched a ride for 11,000 miles.
This is a fascinating science story that illustrates the element of randomness and chaos in all things, despite the efforts of humans to assign logic and organization to existence.
Why the crickets on the Hawaiian islands stopped singing twenty years ago.
Why the crickets on the Hawaiian islands stopped singing twenty years ago.
Believe it or not, they actually evolved.
A new harvest of vegetables in space!
A new harvest of vegetables in space!
Notice that this research is a partnership of the Russians and an American university. NASA is not included. When I wrote about this subject for Air & Space a few years ago, the American researcher explained that there was too much bureaucracy working with NASA. Moreover, the Russians were much more knowledgeable about crop research in space, as they had been doing it for decades already on their Salyut and Mir stations.
Were the dinosaurs covered by feathers or scales? Scientists disagree.
Were the dinosaurs covered by feathers or scales? Two scientists find that most had scales.
Palaeontologists Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London and David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto created a database of all known impressions of dinosaur skin tissues. They then identified those that had feathers or feather-like structures, and considered relationships in the dinosaurian family tree.
The results, which Barrett revealed at the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology’s annual meeting in Los Angeles in late October, indicate that although some ornithischians, such as Psittacosaurus and Tianyulong, had quills or filaments in their skin, the overwhelming majority had scales or armour. Among sauropods, scales were also the norm.
The uncertainty of science: Don’t bet any money on this result. The number of dinosaur fossils actually known is relatively tiny — making the overall database tiny as well — and further discoveries could change everything.
Anthill art
An evening pause:
Cats can recognize their owner’s voice, but choose to ignore it.
Science discovers the obvious: Cats can recognize their owner’s voice, but choose to ignore it.