Stories tagged Research findings
Did some big discovery just happen recently? Write up a quick description (1 or 2 lines) and link to a larger story elsewhere.
Otzi the IcemanCourtesy South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology via WikipediaOtzi, the five-thousand year-old corpse found frozen in a glacier in the Alps in 1991 has given up more secrets. Using a nano-sized probe, scientists at The Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy have successfully extracted from the 5300 year-old "Iceman" the oldest samples of human blood known. The find surpasses that of Egyptian mummies by 2000 or so years, the previous record holder. What's more, the researchers have determined that Otzi died fairly quickly after taking an arrow in the back. Fibrin, a blood clotting protein that appears in fresh wounds then disappears as healing progresses, was present in the samples. This means the healing process stopped soon after Otzi was shot.
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Nat Geo story
New Scientist article
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DNA's double-helixCourtesy ProLithic 3D via FlickrUsing a synthetic polymer known as xeno-nucleic acid (XNA) researchers at the UK Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology report that, "genetic information can be stored in and recovered from six alternative genetic polymers based on simple nucleic acid architectures". In other words, the XNAs displayed the same ability to evolve and pass on hereditary information as natural nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) do. This is pretty wild. Besides being a big step forward in the field of synthetic genetics, it also gives a big boost to the idea that life (in some form other than DNA) could conceivably develop elsewhere in the universe. The study appears in the journal Science
SOURCE
BBC story
Orangutan: On break at the job site.Courtesy Eleifert via WikipediaOrangutans in the jungles of Sumatra have been observed carefully engineering the construction of their nests by selecting thick, sturdy branches for the scaffolding of their tree homes, and thinner, lighter branches for soft filler. The study, which appears in the journal PNAS, was done by researchers from the University of Manchester. The research was led by PhD student Adam van Casteren, who spent a year in the wild studying the creatures. Read about it here and view video of one of the primates at work.
The New York Times reports that new science findings – that of a "cold mirage" – may have played a factor in the sinking of the Titanic 100 years ago this week. Here's the full report.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas and Virginia Tech have created an underwater robot that mimics the movement of a jellyfish. RoboJelly, as it has been dubbed, uses the hydrogen and oxygen gases from water as its fuel. So, theoretically, it would never run out of energy!
To make the robot move, the researchers covered a shape memory alloy, or smart metal (an alloy that "remembers" its original, pre-deformed, cold-forged shape), with multi-walled carbon nanotubes coated with a nano-platinum catalyst powder. When a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen contact the platinum, an exothermic reaction results, which causes the smart metal to change its shape. When the "muscles" relax, the alloy returns to its original form. No electricity, no batteries, and the only waste released is more water - super cool!
This research is sponsored by the US Navy in the hopes that it can be used in underwater rescue missions, or for surveillance purposes.
World's most powerful bite: the age-old confrontation between a gentle, grazing Triceratops horridus (cool name, by the way) and the massive jaws of a vicious, chomping-machine known as Tyrannosaurus rex is played out in a Science Museum of Minnesota postcard.Courtesy Science Museum of MinnesotaEverybody’s favorite and most fearsome dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus rex, is back in the news, this time to claim yet another trophy. Scientists in Great Britain have determined that old T. rex had a bone crushing bite-force second to no other terrestrial animal living or extinct. For a long time T. rex’s bite was thought to be comparable to that of a modern alligator. But using computer modeling, studying bite mechanics, and the carnivore’s growth rate and feeding patterns, Dr Karl Bates of the University of Liverpool, and colleague Peter Falkingham of University of Manchester claim an adult T. rex would have generated “sustained bite forces of 35,000-57,000 Newtons at a single posterior tooth.” To get an idea what that would be like, imagine a mid-sized elephant using your head as a small chair. No wonder the Triceratops horridus in the postcard image at right is trembling. Let’s face it, T. rex is like a great white shark on legs – a massive and very powerful set of jaws attached to a digestive system.
SOURCES
BBC report
Study in Biology Letters
A 32,000-year-old fruit, stored in the burrow of a ground squirrel and frozen until its recent discovery, has been cultivated into living plants through a laboratory cloning procedure. The pretty little white flowers of the narrow-leafed campion are by far the oldest seeds ever to have been grown into new plants. Read the New York Times story here.
Addict or non-addict brain?: A new study finds addicts and their siblings share the same brain abnormalities. This is a nifty picture of my gray matter (I'm so proud!) but you'll have to guess what it shows.Courtesy Mark RyanIs the circuitry of an addict's brain different because of drug abuse or is drug abuse caused by innate differences in the brain? This is one of the questions raised during a new study out of the University of Cambridge. Researchers there compared the brains of 50 addicted individuals with the brains of a non-addicted brother or sister. What they found was that both the addict and their non-addict sibling display the same abnormalities in the brain areas that control behavior. Yet, despite possessing this similar inborn brain disorder, the non-addict siblings somehow managed to avoid getting hooked into a self-destructive lifestyle. If the scientists can figure out how the siblings did that, it could open up new ways of treating addiction. The study appears in the journal Science.
SOURCE
BBC story
Blue whale: AMNHCourtesy Ken Zirkel via FlickrLook at the top photo. That's the famous and rightly impressive life-size model of a blue whale at New York's American Museum of Natural History. The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is the largest living vertebrate known on Earth, reaching up to 109 feet in length and weighing around 210 short tons. (Some sauropod dinosaurs were probably larger in some dimensions but they're extinct so they don't count.) 
Paedophryne amanuensisCourtesy Christopher Austin et al/PloS OneNow look at the bottom photo. That's a cute little frog named Paedophryne amauensis. The frog averages about 0.27 of an inch in length - about the size of a housefly (I gave up trying to find its average weight, if you find it, add it to the comments). Anyway, because of its extreme diminutive size, Paedophryne amauensis now holds the title of the world's smallest vertebrate. It was discovered recently in New Guinea by researchers from Louisiana State University. The previous record holder for smallest vertebrate was a tiny Indonesian fish named Paedocypris progenetica. The LSU team, led by Chris Austin, curator of herpetology at LSU's Museum of Natural Science, published its research in a recent issue of PLoS One. Since we're flinging around superlatives, New Guinea is the world's largest and tallest tropical island. Oh, and even though the frog's existence was just announced a couple days ago, a challenger to the "tiniest" title has already come forward.
Ohio Earthquakes: evidence links recent tremors to fracking.Courtesy USGS Earthquake Hazards ProgramThe dumping of waste-water used in the process known as fracking is suspected of causing recent earthquakes in Ohio. Two minor tremors (magnitude (2.7 and 4.2) were felt over the holidays in the Youngstown area which is about 50 miles east of Akron. Hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) is the process of extracting natural gas from rock deposits by fracturing the rock with high-pressure liquid injections. Waste water from the fracking process gets disposed underground into deep wells. The discarded water seeps into strike-slip faults several kilometers beneath the surface where it builds up pressure and also acts as a lubricant. allowing the rock on both sides of the fault to move more easily past each other, resulting in an earthquake. Smaller quakes had been detected in the area during the past year so Ohio's DNR requested Columbia University's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) to set up portable seismographs in the area. Four of the sensitive instruments were installed on Novermber 30 within a half-mile of the injection site. The seismograph recordings showed that the two holiday quakes were centered within 100 meters of each other, implicating the disposal process as the catalyst. While scientists make further study of the problem, fracking has been discontinued at the injection site.
