Here’s a forensic riddle: Ten people eat an autumn dinner of roasted quail in Turkey. Hours later, four diners start to vomit. They grow weak. Their muscles ache. At the emergency department, they’re diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis—a life-threatening syndrome that afflicted people who survived being crushed under rubble during the London bombing raids in World War II. Except this is 2007 in Turkey. And instead of Luftwaffe raids, these four men are the victims of a poisonous bird. The European quail has been killing some—but not all—of its human predators for millennia. But only in the past three decades have researchers looked for other poisonous birds in the Americas, Australia, and New Guinea. These are birds that possess unfamiliar toxins and should, biologists say, be explored and understood for their medical potential. These are birds that can tell us about our genetics. And they are birds that, biologists caution, “are being lost by the minute, as each hectare of felled rainforest may be taking with it the jewels of toxinology.”.....Do Gambel’s Quail Experience Grief? by Susan E. Swanberg at The Tenacious Telomere:
Morning and evening, our yard is full of Gambel’s quail, known in scientific circles as Callipepla gambelii. We keep our bird feeders full, luring the ubiquitous house finch, sparrows of several species, the gray and red Pyrrhuloxia and our favorite, the Northern cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis. As the perching birds quarrel over the best seats on the feeder, seed often spills to the ground, drawing the ground-feeding quail.....What's In A Name? The Reclusive Ridgway's Rail by Chris Clarke at Rewild | KCET:
Formerly known as the California clapper rail, the Ridgway's rail isn't just dependent on salt marshes in general: it requires a certain configuration of salt marsh, namely edges -- "ecotones," in the jargon -- between cordgrass and mudflat or slough. Gray-brown chicken-sized shorebirds with long, downward-curved bills, California Ridgway's rails (Rallus obsoletus obsoletus) use the open mudflats and sloughs, and low stands of pickleweed as a larder, foraging for clams, crabs, mice, lizards, small fish; just about anything they can fit down that downward-curved beak. When they're feeling a little bit too exposed, they head into the adjoining cordgrass to hide out. ....
On July 4th, 1776, Thomas Jefferson had a lot on his mind. At 33, he was the youngest Virginia delegate at the Second Continental Congress. The War of Independence was raging all around him, and its resolution would either see him helping to lead a brand new nation or dragged back into a monarchical regime he detested. And now the greatest minds of all the thirteen American colonies were poring over his draft of the Declaration of Independence, preparing to vote on whether to make his vision a reality. It was a full day. However, the odds are pretty good that somewhere underneath that powdered wig, Jefferson was also thinking about mammoths. ....Kircher's giants by John McKay at Mammoth Tales:
Athanasius Kircher is perhaps the most interesting mind of the Seventeenth Century. The German born Jesuit wrote over forty books on comparative linguistics, volcanoes, music theory, magnetism, China, diseases, and anything else that crossed his path. He claimed to be able to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, he used the newly-invented microscope and suggested that the tiny "animacules" caused plague and other diseases, he was the first European to publish Sanskrit, he coined he word "electromagnetism", he built a museum of mechanical gadgets, and he designed the cat piano. A recent collection of conference papers about him was entitled "The Last Man Who Knew Everything."....Decoding the Remarkable Algorithms of Ants by Emily Singer at Quanta Magazine:
Ants are capable of remarkable feats of coordination. They can forge complex paths through the jungle, build sophisticated structures, and adapt foraging patterns to fit their environment, all without orders from a centralized source. Deborah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University, hopes to uncover the simple rules that produce complex patterns from simple individual actions. Ants in particular excel at collective search, automatically tailoring their search strategy to efficiently cover large areas of ground. Gordon has found parallels between the algorithms ant colonies use for foraging and the man-made ones that underlie the Internet. Given how long ants have been solving these kinds of problems, Gordon hopes that she will uncover new algorithms that will ultimately make large-scale computing networks cheaper and more efficient.......
Scientists discover that male and female mice process pain differently by Arielle Duhaime-Ross at The Verge:
The nervous system's dials for communicating chronic pain to the body work differently in male and female mice, according to a study published today in Nature Neuroscience. If this difference is also found in humans, it could lead to chronic pain treatments that are better tailored to the patient. But the most immediate impact might be in basic research — the earliest stages of work — since right now, the mice being used are almost exclusively male.....What Do Snails Think About When Having Sex? by Robert Krulwich at Curiously Krulwich:
It starts with a light, soft touch, one tentacle gently reaching out, hesitant, hopeful, hanging lightly in the air. There’s a pause. Skin touches skin. One softly strokes the other and slides closer, and then, carefully, they wrap themselves together, stroking, probing, entwining. They glisten as they move, and because they are snails, everything happens very slowly. The rubbing, the rapture, the intensity of it all—snail sex is extraordinarily lovely to look at. (If you aren’t at your office desk or on a train where people can see your screen, I’ve got one about a garden snail named Chip who’s trying to lose his virginity, or take a quick peek—30 seconds will do—of this coupling in a garden.)....Polarised light and the super sense you didn’t know you had by Juliette McGregor at The Conversation:
Ever fancied having a superpower? Something you can call upon when you need it, to hand you extra information about the world? OK, it’s not X-ray vision, but your eyes do have abilities that you might not be aware of. We are all familiar with colour and brightness, but there is a third property of light – the “polarisation” that tells us the orientation in which light waves are oscillating. Animals, like bees and ants, use the polarisation patterns in the sky as a navigation aid. But few people, even in the scientific community, are aware that humans can perceive the polarisation of light with the naked eye.....Scientists in Flying Telescope Race to Intercept Pluto’s Shadow by Nadia Drake at National Geographic:
Christchurch, New Zealand—The Boeing 747’s engines roared to life a few minutes after 10 p.m. Monday, blades slicing through the frigid winter air. It was time to rise above the clouds to see Pluto slide across the face of a distant star—a rare celestial alignment that scientists around the world had been anticipating for years......
Insects may be able to feel fear, anger and empathy, after all by Carla Clark at Quartz:
A recent survey suggests that, for most of us who have ever had a pet companion, it’s a no-brainer that mammals and birds are emotional creatures, sharing emotions with multiple species and not just their own. Yet despite the thousands of YouTube videos and hundreds of recent scientific studies presenting easily accessible evidence and examples, not everyone thinks so. It was only in 2012 that scientists finally agreed that nonhuman animals are conscious beings. Meanwhile, in the laboratory, we have only just discovered that dogs display immensely complex, human-like emotions like jealousy, and we are only just deciphering how cows express positive emotions through the whites of their eyes. But what about insects?.........Louis Agassiz and a brief history of early United States marine biology by David Shiffman at Southern Fried Science:
In today’s world, the United States of America is a leader in scientific advancement, but this wasn’t always the case. The story of early American science is a story of fascinating personalities, backroom political bargaining, triumph, and heartbreak. It is also a story about studying the oceans and the animals that live in them.....