When I was young, Pluto was still a planet and nine was my lucky number, so I really liked that we had nine planets in our solar system – it made it easy for me to remember. My love of astronomy out-lasted Pluto’s status as a planet, and as I write this I am actually wearing a solar system necklace; each planet is represented, yet it only has eight planets on it.
Imagine an alien. If you’ve been influenced by movies and television at all, the creature you’re picturing is probably two-legged, two-armed, bipedal and with a reminiscently human layout – head, eyes and mouth somewhere near the top. And while most of us recognise that this vision of extra-terrestrial life is a bit silly, conversations about life elsewhere in the universe are often still painfully unimaginative.
Genetically modified organisms, especially plants, get a lot of hate. People – even some very environmentally conscious people – seem to fear or hate GM crops. Yet, as someone who is very worried about climate change, very worried about the human-induced mass extinction event that is happening before our eyes, and worried about the livelihoods of farmers and about those people that have so little food they go to bed hungry every night…
Electricity is something we rely upon on a daily basis, but what if we could manufacture it inside our own bodies? A surprisingly long list of animals is capable of doing just that… although not necessarily the ones you might expect.
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A new paper published in Current Biology this month shows how one species of pitcher plant has evolved to attract a species of bat and use it as a source of fertiliser.
The Bornean pitch plant in question (Nepenthes hemsleyana) is part of a mutualistic relationship with the Common woolly bat (Kerivoula hardwickii), in which the pitcher offers the bat a safe place to roost, and in return the bat provides fertiliser in the form of guano (bat poop). Dr Michael Schöner and his team tested the pitcher with a sonar beam and found that it acts as a multidirectional ultrasound reflector. They then experimentally modified the shape of the pitcher, and found that one particular region, known as the orifice, helped bats locate the pitcher.
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Question:
What is a Nut?
Answer:
In Botanical terms, a nut is a hard-shelled fruit, which does not open to release its seed. There are relatively few true nuts because dehiscent fruit (where the shell does split open) is far more common; true nuts include chestnuts, pecans and hazelnuts. Not all nuts are closely related to each other on the family tree of plants though – indehiscence has evolved multiple times as a strategy for seed dispersal.
However, the word nut is used to refer to a huge range of hard fruits and seeds, from legumes (e.g. peanuts) to drupes (e.g. coconuts and cashews).
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The time is finally here. After fourteen years, Spielberg has opened up the Jurassic World for us again, and everybody’s talking about it. In the twenty years since the release of Jurassic Park, we’ve learned a huge amount about how dinosaurs looked, moved, behaved and reproduced. We’ve learned about how their appearance changes through development, about their social behaviour and how they held themselves, and we’ve learned more from their genetics than we ever thought imaginable when Michael Crichton was writing his Jurassic novels.
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Question:
Why Does Sour Food Make Us Cringe? (asked by Anonymous)
Answer:
Turns out, not many people have directly looked at this – the scientific literature has relatively little to say on the topic of cringing at sour food. However, what it does say is this: the cringing facial expressions are part of a general ‘disgust’ response that we make towards unpleasant smells and tastes. Some aspects of the face we pull when we eat sour sweets or a particularly tart tangerine are also produced when we smell off milk or bite into a rotten apple. The disgust response is designed to stop us from eating poisonous or rotten food, and to communicate with others around us that the food is bad. It probably formed a key part of social foraging, enabling early humans to avoid bad food and share information within their social group.
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Nice guys finish last? Not for the hermit crab – shy males produce more sperm and are more successful with the ladies.
While we accept the individual differences in behaviour between humans without question, terming it ‘personality’, the idea personality in animals has been met with great scepticism. However, evidence for consistent behavioural differences between individuals, known as personality or behavioural syndromes, is now widespread, the question remaining is why? What is the benefit of personality? Some scientists suggest that different personalities represent different life strategies relating to risk taking and investing in the future, others suggest that personalities exist because environmental conditions are variable and different strategies fair better under different conditions.
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Reproduction takes two, right? Well, not always. Many arthropods and microscopic animals called rotifers reproduce clonally and although it is relatively rare in vertebrates, clonal reproduction has been confirmed in several species of fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles. Known as parthenogenesis, clonal reproduction in vertebrates can occur when an offspring develops from an unfertilised egg. Parthenogenesis has never been observed to occur naturally in mammals, although it is possible to induce it artificially in the lab.
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Probably one of the most widely used and trusted of the alternative medicines are manipulative therapies such as osteopathic and chiropractic interventions. More than 30,000 people visit an osteopath every day, with complaints ranging from back and neck pain to headaches and even asthma. Both practices come with an expensive qualification and official licensing, and many people I have spoken to have simply assumed that these treatments are part of the scientifically proven body of treatments we know as ‘modern medicine’. But both chiropractors and osteopaths in fact practise alternative medicine.
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Question:
How much would a mole of moles weigh? (asked by Anonymous)
Answer:
There are two ways to interpret this question, both of which are equally silly. Maybe you mean a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the subterranean mammal), or perhaps you mean, how much would a mole of mole molecules weigh? I’ll deal with each possibility in turn.
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Natural selection is incredibly good at adapting organisms to their environment, even those environments that are harsh and difficult to live in. But the changes currently happening to the World’s climate, hydrology and land-use may be too rapid for natural selection to act, in most cases. For some species, natural selection has provided the tools to adapt more rapidly, through behavioural or physiological changes. A few species have gone further still, evolving the ability to edit their own genes as they are expressed. Recent research shows this ability is used rampantly by certain species of squid, which may explain why they have responded relatively well to human impacts on the environment so far.
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