LOL-abies

You know that movie Signs? Imagine how much cooler it would have been if, instead of a preachy horror (ish) movie about aliens, Mel Gibson found wallabies making the circles in his fields, just chilling out, playing some hacky sack, listening to Phish. Picture it with me now: maybe one of them has dreadlocks, they’re wearing a lot of tie-dye and hemp. Can anyone say Academy Award? Take that, M. Night. All right, I guess Mel would have to be growing opium poppies and living in Tasmania. But he is Australian, so there’s that. Call it creative license, or something.

“What is she rambling on about?” Yeah that’s right, I can hear your thoughts. Well, I’m getting there. Tasmania, home of Bugs Bunny’s nemesis (didn’t you know that Elmer Fudd was from Oceania? Man, I slay me), is also a huge producer of legal opium (used for painkillers like morphine). Australia produces about fifty percent of the world’s legally grown opium. Awesome.

Wallabies, which are like little kangaroos (that is the official scientific classification), have been wandering into fields of these poppies, ingesting a few, and making crop circles. In the words of Tasmania’s attorney general, Laura Giddings, these animals are “getting as high as a kite, and going around in circles. Then they crash.” Aw, sleepy little marsupials.

There are a few instances of other animals having a little “Dorothy Moment” in the poppy fields, like sheep, but wallabies are the most frequent offenders. Can you blame them? I mean, it’s Friday, they ain’t got no job …

(I wrote this for Science Buzz)

Evolution: ain't it grand?

When I think about evolution, I think about that beardy guy, you know, what’s his face, Chuck Darwin, and his Snoopy ship, studying finches or whatever at Easter Island. Or the Galapagos, whichever one has the giant super old turtles. Or I think about Lucy, or that picture where the guy gets increasingly better posture. Anywho, all that stuff happened like forever ago, right? And it takes a gazillion years for things to change perceptibly. That's what I thought, too. Turns out, we were wrong.

A new study shows that guppies (little fishies; not to be confused with yuppies, who are also evolving as they lose a little bit more relevance every single day), can adapt to new environments pretty quickly.

Scientists at the University of California, Riverside performed an experiment on 200 guppies in Trinidad. They removed the guppies from one river and introduced them to a river where no guppy population existed. They split the guppies into two groups, and placed one half in a predator-free area. They placed the other group in an area where fish who might consider the occasional guppy to be a tasty snack lived.

Just eight years later, the scientists found that the guppies had changed their reproductive habits. The guppies in the area where predators existed produced more eggs all at once, because they might only have the one chance to reproduce. The guppies in the less dangerous part of the river produced less embryos, in order to conserve energy and resources.

The scientists then wanted to see if these changes were actually making the guppies more successful at survival, so they took a new sample from the first river, marked them, and placed them in the second river with the population that had been there for eight years. The adapted guppies had a significantly higher rate of survival. The adolescents, especially, had a 54-59 percent increase in survival rate.

It’s pretty amazing that such a change was achieved after only eight years, but the scientists who conducted the study want to remind us that this time frame actually represents about 13-26 guppy generations. So such a rapid change in a longer lived species would be pretty unlikely.

(I wrote this for Science Buzz)

The Dinosaur Mystique

I was like you once, suffering under the misguided notion that sauropods, like Brachiosaurus or Apatosaurus, held their heads low to the ground and their necks horizontally. Turns out, that was just another body myth perpetuated by Hollywood and the mainstream media. And museums, and public television. Scientists now think that these giant creatures held their heads high. And rightly so. I would be proud if I weighed twenty tons. That is quite the feat.

New evidence suggests that these dinosaurs held their necks vertically like giraffes. That means that they would have been up to 49 feet tall. Which is really, really tall, in case you were wondering.

Scientists studied x-rays of vertebrae from ten different groups of vertebrates, or animals with backbones, and found that animals with the same upright leg posture as these dinosaurs, like mammals and birds, have vertical vertebrae.

This means that, in the words of Dr. Mike Taylor, who was instrumental to this research, “Unless sauropods carried their heads and necks differently from every living vertebrate, we have to assume that the base of their neck was curved strongly upwards. In some sauropods this would have meant a graceful swan-like S-curve to the neck, and a look quite different from the recreations we are used to seeing today.”

The research also showed that sauropods would have had a much greater range of movement than previously thought. By observing the structure of neck vertebrae in animals like ostriches and giraffes, researchers discovered that the ball and socket joint structure of sauropods was probably more flexible than scientists believed.

The next step in this research is to determine, through engineering studies, whether holding the neck vertically or horizontally is more efficient. Imagine having a thousand pound neck to support! Oy. I can't even bench press the bar! Of course, sauropods have a little bit of a weight advantage, I mean, I only weigh half a ton. But still.

(I wrote this for Science Buzz)

Mmm, fungus-y

I knew there was a reason not to eat mushrooms. I mean, they are rubbery and weirdly tasteless. And they are funguses. Fungi? Whatev. Me grammarian am not. Wanna hear a HILARIOUS joke? So a mushroom walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “We don’t serve your kind here,” and the mushroom says, “Why not? I’m a fungi!” Get it? It’s funny because mushrooms don’t talk! Whew, good one Elana. But anyway, besides the obvious fact that mushrooms are gross, scientists have figured out why ingesting Russula Subnigricans can lead to convulsions, nausea, impaired speech, and even death! BUM BUM BUMMMMM (That is ominous mood music, FYI).

Okay, so we already knew that you weren’t supposed to eat these mushrooms. And there are all sorts of poisonous mushrooms, but Russula Subnigricans mushrooms, which are found in China and North America, contain a toxin which leads to the breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue, called rhabdomyolysis, which is uncommon in poisonous mushrooms. So basically, they’ll kill you in a completely new way. Awesome.

The cause of this muscular breakdown was a little tricky for scientists to isolate. The compound likes to bind to other things, and previous research done on the toxin was actually done on misclassified mushrooms. Which, of course, was not helpful.

The discovery and isolation of this toxic compound, cycloprop-2-ene carboxylic acid, is pretty cool for two reasons. It’s never been found in the natural world before, although it is used for building other compounds synthetically. But perhaps more importantly, many mushrooms that produce toxic compounds also produce beneficial compounds. Which means that pretty soon, we could be reading about the wonderful new drug that comes from a compound in Russula Subnigricans. Or something.

So I guess you can keep eating those Shitake mushrooms (bonus: super fun to say), but watch out for skeletal muscle tissue breakdown. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

(I wrote this for Science Buzz)

Jump around (word to your moms)

So I was searching YouTube for clips of Alex Trebek (what? I just love Canada. And knowledge. Is that so wrong?), and I clicked on one of the related videos, because I am a spontaneous and fun-loving person. I take big risks. Anyway, the video I found was of an animal called a pygmy jerboa. I watched it, and then I watched it again. Thing is mesmerizing. It hops!

So, being the good investigatory journalist that I am, (Zoolander? Anybody?) I decided to put the old Google-box to work. Lo and behold, I discovered that the pygmy jerboa is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole bunch of different kinds of jerboas! They belong to the family Dipodidae, also known as the most awesome rodent family ever. Why? Two words: Bipedal jumping. Yup, that’s right. Cute little mouse-y things that can hop on two legs. Like kangaroos, but way smaller. And without that whole pouch thing, so not really like kangaroos at all.

Why did the Jerboa hop across the desert? To get away from the predator, of course. Or at least, that’s why scientists think that the animal moves the way it does. Jerboas live in deserts throughout Asia and northern Africa, and they have to cover a lot of ground to find food, the better to use long hind legs and big feet to hop with.

Jerboas, like many desert animals, are nocturnal. They burrow during the day to escape the hot sun. They actually create two different kinds of burrows: permanent, camouflaged burrows to hang out in during the day, and temporary ones to hide from predators in at night.

All jerboas have very long tails. African jerboas tend to have only three toes on their hind feet while Asian jerboas have five. They all have long, silky fur. Some jerboas have huge ears, like the Long-eared Jerboa, but some have regular ear-sized ears. Some jerboas are omnivores, but most are simply seed-and-nut-etarians.

Both the Five-toed Pygmy Jerboa and the Thick-tailed Pygmy Jerboa are considered to be at risk for extinction. And that is just not cool. Why, you ask? Because they are cute and weird and survive in the harshest climates in the world.

So what have we learned today? Nothing bad ever comes from Alex Trebek.

(I wrote this for Science Buzz)

A monkey's uncle

There you were, thinking that lemurs were barely your relatives. It’s okay, I understand. I mean, Prosimians? Really? Sure, we’re all members of the primate family, but, like, two steps removed, like those cousins in Kentucky your mom pretends don’t exist. Or something. Prosimians are the non-human evolutionary line, how primitive. Prosimians are like NASCAR, and Anthropoids, like apes and humans, are like the DAR.

But, just like every president has an embarrassing brother, so too are we related to those furry simple primates. Now, we have proof! Scientists have found a 47 million years old human ancestor, the link between these early primates and human evolutionary lineage.

“Ida,” or Darwinius masillae, was actually discovered in 1983 by a private collector, although the fossil now belongs to the Natural History Museum of Oslo. An international team of scientists has been secretly conducting an in-depth study of Ida for the past two years. Now her skeleton is 95 percent complete.The fossil is significantly older than most fossils that explain human evolution, and, unlike Lucy and other famous primate fossils, this fossil was not found in Africa’s Cradle of Mankind; Ida is a European fossil (someone call Guinness, I just set a world record for using the word “fossil” the most times in a sentence).

Ida was preserved with a full stomach, so we know that she was an herbivore. I hope that in 47 million years, scientists discover me and determine that humans subsisted mainly on a diet of Cheetos and grape soda. That would be pretty awesome. Her skeleton is pretty similar to that of modern-day lemurs, but she lacks a grooming claw and a row of teeth fused together called a “toothcomb.” She also has nails instead of claws, and teeth similar to small monkeys. She had forward facing eyes, like ours, and opposable thumbs.

What really links Ida to humans is a bone in her foot, called the talus. Her talus is nearly identical to your talus, only a lot smaller. Ida serves as a sort of “missing link,” a key part of the story of human evolution. So, you know, no big.

(I wrote this for Science Buzz)

Twitter: It's out of this world!

Twitter is, like, totes the new Myspace. Everybody’s using it. Your grandma, aunt Milly, that cute girl in your science class, John McCain. Thing is ubiquitous. You can’t escape it. So if you haven’t capitulated yet, now is the time. Pretty soon, we’ll all be communicating in 140 characters or less, haunted by dreams of that cutesy error message. “Not the whale. NOT THE WHALE!”

So you can follow Lil Wayne, and you can follow Shaquille O’Neil (seriously, do it. You will not be disappointed), and now you can follow Astro_Mike, a real live astronaut named Mike Massimino, currently a member of the space shuttle Atlantis crew, en route to the Hubble Space Telescope to make repairs. Yeah. That’s right. Tweeting from outer space.

Last Tuesday afternoon, Massimino made history. Yeah, he entered the earth’s orbit, and that’s pretty cool, or whatever, but more importantly, he sent an 139-character post to his Twitter account, the site’s first extraterrestrial activity. Well, maybe. I mean, Dennis Kucinich does have an account (cue rimshot). Thanks, folks, I’ll be here all summer.

I can hear you now: “Okay, Elana, that’s great and all, but why should I care?” Well, my dudes, the answer to that question is twofold. First off, you can read material straight from the mouth (or fingers) of a real person in Earth’s orbit. That is pretty awesome. Astro_Mike ’s Twitter is a record of the day-to-day life of an astronaut. Secondly, I think this story speaks pretty strongly to the power of the internet and social networking devices to learn and link the entire universe (literally!) together. Or maybe not. What do you think?

(I wrote this for Science Buzz)