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Talk about escaping by the skin of your teeth! Scientists have discovered a new type of gecko - an evasive little lizard who can escape predators' grip not just by dropping its tail, but by shedding the scales on its skin.

The new species Geckolepis megalepis, described in the journal PeerJ, has big, fish-like scales, larger than any of the other gecko species in its genus. It's also the first new Geckolepis species to be described in 75 years, and the first currently recognized species in 123 years.

G. megalepis lives in northern Madagascar, where it appears to be found only around the limestone karst of the Ankarana massif. While other geckos do have scales that can slip off passively, Geckolepis seems to have a certain amount of control over the process.

"It seems to be a very extreme behavior in living geckos," said study coauthor Juan Diego Daza, a herpetologist at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.

This has created problems for scientists trying to study the genus Geckolepis; capturing the lizards without losing their scales in the process has been a total pain for more than 120 years.

"Indeed, the process of collection often damages even the most intact specimens," the study authors wrote. "Voeltzkow (1893) captured his specimens with bundles of cotton ('Wattebäuschen'), and even this was not sufficient to prevent some scale loss."

Among its scale-shedding brethren, however, G. megalepis's scales are king. The oversized scales seem to come off at the slightest perturbation, leaving smooth, pink skin beneath.

These scales can be torn off so easily partly because of their size, the scientists said. Bigger scales have much more surface area relative to the edge where they're attached to the skin than smaller scales do, which makes them easier to rip away.

But the scientists think there's also a control mechanism at play, in which the gecko contracts a layer of connective tissue beneath the skin to help release the scales, and the skin's uppermost blood vessels are squeezed to prevent bleeding.

How and why this particular group of geckos developed this trait remains a mystery, Daza said. Their scales aren't just made of keratin (the kind of protein found in teeth and nails) - they also have some bone in them, which is more costly for living things to produce. So when a gecko drops its scales, it's forfeiting a pretty heavy energetic investment. The lizard might also risk dehydration, if the scales were also helping its body retain water.

A partly naked gecko looks kind of like a half-picked scab, but at least the look doesn't last forever.

"The scarless regeneration of the whole integument occurs within a few weeks, apparently starting from stem cells of the deeper layers of the connecting tissue and is considered as unique among vertebrates," the study authors wrote.

That stem-cell-fueled regenerative power could be of interest to scientists studying applications in human medicine.

Scientists think that these scales are meant as a defensive measure, but they've only documented their use as a means of escape a handful of times in the literature: from a scorpion ( Grosphus flavopiceus), a bird ( Dicrurus forficatus) and a large nocturnal Blaesodactylus gecko. For that last case, the G. megalepis lizard actually slipped out of the predator's mouth about 30 seconds after it had been caught.

"The predator, or whoever it is, is left with a mouthful of scales - and the animal escapes," Daza said.

Perhaps these slippery little lizards could teach Houdini a thing or two. In the meantime, scientists say they hope to keep studying how this remarkable gecko skin works, and what's driving the evolution of these extra-large scales.

For now, however, Daza said he was concerned for the immediate future of these species, many of whom are under stress due to habitat loss.

Feb. 8, 8:35 p.m.: This story was updated with comment and context from study coauthor Juan Diego Daza.

This article was originally published Feb. 7 at 5:45 p.m.

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Fish-scale gecko in Madagascar evades predators by getting naked - Los Angeles Times

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Talk about escaping by the skin of your teeth! Scientists have discovered a new type of gecko - an evasive little lizard who can escape predators' grip not just by dropping its tail, but by shedding the scales on its skin.

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At-risk species, including wolves and sharks, are being targeted by hunters using signals sent by radio tags to home in on the animals.

The behaviour of non-endangered species is also being skewed as nature fans use the signals to get close to wild animals, say biologists.

A group of scientists has now begun collecting evidence to measure how tagged species are being harmed.

They are calling for changes to tagging systems to make them harder to abuse.

Hunting and fishing

Prof Steven Cooke, a biologist at Carleton University in Canada, said growing numbers of scientists who use tagging were getting increasingly worried about the "unintended consequences" of the technology.

"We go out and do the science and provide the information and assume all is good but there are many ways in which this process can be corrupted," Prof Cooke told the BBC.

Tagging with transponders that communicate via satellite or radio was becoming an increasingly common way to study species, he said, and had produced "incredible" insights into the movements and lifestyles of many different creatures.

In some cases, he said, tags were used to keep an eye on small populations of endangered animals but there were also many cases in which tagging was used on a much more ambitious scale.

For instance, he said, more than 100,000 tagged fish were released in to the Columbia River basin every year to help monitor fish stocks, movements and migration patterns. The Great Lakes were also home to more than 5,000 tagged fish, he added.

Many different groups of people were interested in using the signals sent out by tags to locate all kinds of animals, said Prof Cooke.

A paper co-written by Prof Cooke and other biologists for the Conservation Biology journal detailed some of the "troubling" ways in which tags had become an inadvertent aid to poachers, hunters, photographers and nature lovers.

"This is not something that a lot of papers have been written on," he said. "We found a lot of the examples by searching on the net and on news sites and less traditional sources."

Examples gathered by the scientists included:

sharks tagged during a conservation programme in western Australia were found and then killed by people homing in on radio signals

attempts by poachers in India to hack GPS data sent by collars on Bengal tigers

commercial fishing vessels using radio data to find fish known to feed near the species they want to catch

efforts by "wolf-persecution" groups in the US to decode signals to help them hunt down the predators

Some national parks had taken steps to limit abuse by banning the radio receivers that can pick up the "beeps" sent out by some types of tag, said Prof Cooke.

As a result of the paper, other biologists shared information about other ways tagged animals were being targeted, he said.

Prof Brendan Godley, director of the centre for ecology and conservation at the University of Exeter, said the lifestyles of some species made it easier to abuse tag data.

Knowing the approximate location of a shark, he said, would help track it down as they were likely to respond to lures, such as baited lines or food trails, put in the water close to them.

By contrast, he said, other species may be far harder to find, despite being tagged, because they did not respond in the same way.

Prof Godley added that tagging had an impact far beyond improving our understanding of how animals live.

Tagging can directly contribute to conservation efforts and make them much more effective, he said.

"Within two weeks of tagging leatherback sea turtles we were able to show that the marine park that was set up for their benefit was inadequate," he said.

Data provided by tagging showed which locations fishing fleets were told to avoid when turtles were nearby.

However, he added, it was clear that tagging had become a contentious issue that had to be tackled.

"Scientists need to do a better job of getting the public aware of why they are doing the research and we need to do a better job of sharing the dividends of our work," he said.

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At-risk species, including wolves and sharks, are being targeted by hunters using signals sent by radio tags to home in on the animals. The behaviour of non-endangered species is also being skewed as nature fans use the signals to get close to wild animals, say biologists.

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http://www.livescience.com/57881-endangered-saiga-catastrophic-die-off.html

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/20/fish-under-threat-oxygen-depletion-oceans-study

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Feb 21, 2017 08:35 AM EST

Despite being great and majestic creatures, elephants find themselves constantly threatened by poachers who want them for their ivory tusks. The forests of Gabon, Africa is supposed to be their safe haven, but a recent study published in Current Biology revealed that the forest elephants are dying out even in this corner of the world.

Scientists focused their study on the isolated Minkébé National Park (MNP) in Gabon, which was created primarily to be a sanctuary for forest elephants.

Nearly half of Central Africa's forest elephant population were believed to be in this national park, but the team found that more than 25,000 of the creatures have died between the years of 2004 and 2014. Declining from around 35,000 in 2004 to just 7,000 in 2014, the 78-81 percent population drop over the decade is an alarming phenomenon that is thought to be due to cross-border poaching.

"[This is] one of their last strongholds," George Wittemyer, an elephant conservationist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who was not part of the study, told Science Magazine. "Their last bastions are now being eroded."
Read: Hurray! China Announces Complete Ban on Ivory Trade by 2017
Forest elephants are different from the savannah or bush elephant that also lives in Africa. According to a report from The Atlantic, the former is much more elusive with ivory that has a pinkish tint and prized by poachers and collectors.

Because they are so difficult to get a hold of, the scientists came to their conclusions by counting piles of dung, converting them to elephant numbers in 2004 and 2014. The results were a surprise to the scientists who weren't expecting such a steep decline in numbers.

"It was an enormous shock," John Poulsen, co-author from Duke University, said. "To be quite honest, I would have guessed that other studies had overestimated the loss. I was expecting a decline, but I didn't expect it to be that high."

Poachers from Cameroon make their way to Gabon despite military presence. Commercial logging is one of the main threats to the elephant population, bringing in more people to the area and giving way to roads that lead hunters straight to the home of forest elephants.

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Huge Chunk of Forest Elephants Die From Poaching in Their Supposed Haven

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Feb 21, 2017 08:35 AM EST Despite being great and majestic creatures, elephants find themselves constantly threatened by poachers who want them for their ivory tusks. The forests of Gabon, Africa is supposed to be their safe haven, but a recent study published in Current Biology revealed that the forest elephants are dying out even in this corner of the world.

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San Francisco Makes It Law For Pet Shops To Only Adopt Out Rescued Dogs & Cats! - World Animal News

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We are very excited to announce that San Francisco has officially banned the retail sale of dogs and cats in pet stores that come from puppy mills. So what is a puppy mill? They are large scale commercial dog breeding facilities that profit off of breeding and selling dogs usually to retail pet shops.

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Cropan's boa (Corallus cropanii) inhabits a forest range in Brazil, and scientists recently glimpsed the first living specimen seen since 1953.

Credit: Lívia Corrêa/Instituto Butantan

Brazil's elusive tree boa, Corallus cropanii - also known as Cropan's boa - is one of the world's rarest boas, infrequently sighted and known from only a handful of dead specimens collected after the snake was first seen and described in 1953.

However, the species is alive and well, scientists recently discovered. One of the slippery serpents was captured in January - the second living specimen ever seen, and the first glimpsed in 64 years.

The boa was brought to local scientists by rural residents of the Ribeira Valley Region, in response to extensive outreach efforts coordinated by researchers from the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo and the Butantan Institute (BI), a biological research center, BI representatives explained Feb. 3 in a Facebook post.

Scientists developed the outreach program to raise local awareness about Cropan's boa - to educate community members about the snake's ecological importance and to encourage them to help biologists learn more about its habits. The boa would likely never have been captured alive without this essential collaboration, BI representatives said on Facebook. [ See Photos of Snakes from Around the World]

In fact, the boa was nearly killed by one of the people who first spied it in January, according to a report in the journal Science. But two bystanders recognized the snake from fliers and posters, and intervened before the boa could be harmed. The rescued snake, a female, measured about 5.6 feet (1.7 meters) in length and weighed 3.3 lbs. (1.5 kilograms).

Cropan's boa is found only in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, in a 116-square-mile (300 square kilometers) region in São Paulo; it is the rarest type of boa in the New World and possibly the rarest on Earth, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. The organization classifies the boa as "Endangered" because its habitat is restricted to one location that is declining in quality, and though the population size is unknown, the scarcity of sightings hints that there probably aren't a lot of these snakes to be found.

The species was described in 1953 from a single adult male specimen. Scales along its back were an olive-beige color, with dark-brown spots "that appear from the neck as far as the tail," according to a study published in May 2011 in the journal Salamandra. After that first sighting of a living animal, the only Cropan's boas seen by scientists - five in total, and all thought to come from the same Atlantic Forest region - were already dead, the study authors wrote.

Cropan's boas have never been observed in the wild. But when the recently captured female is released, she'll be carrying an implanted radio transmitter, which could provide scientists with a few more clues about how these snakes survive in their forest home.

"The snake will be studied in order to discover more information about its biology and habits. As it has never been observed in nature, we do not have much information about its behavior," Livia Corrêa, a biologist at the Butantan Institute, told Carta de Notícias. "It will be released in its natural habitat and receive equipment with radiotelemetry that will enable its tracking in nature and the transmission of information to researchers," she said.

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World's Rarest Boa Snake Seen for 1st Time in 64 Years

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Brazil's elusive tree boa, Corallus cropanii - also known as Cropan's boa - is one of the world's rarest boas, infrequently sighted and known from only a handful of dead specimens collected after the snake was first seen and described in 1953. However, the species is alive and well, scientists recently discovered.

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The researchers thus identified the purposes of bioluminescence in this fish species. The same question still remains open for many other glowing marine creatures. The researchers published their report in the current Plos One edition.
Light organs rotate backwards
Flashlight fish, also referred to as lantern-eye fish, live in swarms of eight to 50 animals that hunt plankton on coral reef roofs at night. During the day, the fish withdraw to a depth of up to 400 metres, where they presumably rest in underwater caves. They have light organs below their eyes which can be rotated backwards and which contain bioluminescent symbiotic bacteria. By rotating their light organs, the fish generate flash patterns in different frequencies. To date, researchers could only speculate about the light organs function. "Deploying methods of behavioural biology, we have now successfully demonstrated that Anomalops katoptron uses its light organs while foraging, and it adjusts the flash frequency to the context in which it operates," as Stefan Herlitze and Jens Hellinger explain. For their analysis, the researchers utilised watertight infrared spotlights, developed in collaboration with the faculty workshop for this specific purpose.
Constant glow during feeding
They observed that the fish blink 90 times per minute on average during the night. Once the researchers add zooplankton to the water, the animals promptly reduce their flash frequency and emit an almost continuous glow while feeding. Non-glowing control animals of the same species hardly ever caught any prey. They didn't exhibit any changes to blink frequency in the presence of zooplankton, either. The blink frequency in non-glowing fish can be determined by monitoring light organ rotation. "The results clearly indicate that Anomalops katoptron relies on its light organs while foraging for food," conclude Stefan Herlitze and Jens Hellinger.

Moreover, the researchers have demonstrated that the animal' blink frequency is also regulated by the lighting conditions in their environment. During the day, the animals rest in the reef aquarium in a dimly lit cave, keeping their light organs closed for the most part, interrupted only by brief blinks. During their active phase at night, on the other hand, the fish exhibit a high blink frequency. The precise function of that blink pattern is not yet fully understood. Additional analyses will reveal whether the fish use blink patterns to communicate or whether they confuse predators by blinking in a swarm.
Close symbiosis
Anatomical thin-section analyses that the researchers performed on light organs of luminescent and non-luminescent fish have revealed marked differences in the macroscopic and microscopic structures: light organs of luminescent fish contain tightly packed tubules which house living, glowing bacteria; once the light organs stop glowing and lose the bacteria, holes form in the tubule structure. The structural transformation following the loss of luminescence suggests a close symbiosis between fish and bacteria. The loss of luminescence is caused by food shortage.
Bioluminescence explained
Generation of light by organisms is common in nature. The by far most instances of luminescent organisms occur in marine habitats and can be found in numerous systematic groups. Approx. 90 per cent of all deep-sea animals are bioluminescent. Among vertebrates, fish are the only ones to display bioluminescence. Fish either possess photophores where they generate light, or they accommodate symbiotic bacteria that emit light. That light may be used for communication, for luring in prey organisms, or for defence; in many instances, the precise function is not obvious, and it is difficult to analyse it in deep-sea organisms. "Due to extreme pressure differences, it's virtually impossible to bring the fish to the surface without harming them," say Stefan Herlitze and Jens Hellinger. The flashlight fish Anomalops katoptron is an exception. As it lives in relatively shallow waters, it can be kept in an aquarium.

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fish; marine biology; fisheries; sea life; wild animals; zoology; bacteria; extreme survival

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Behavioral biology: The firefly among fish

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The flashlight fish Anomalops katoptron, which inhabits the coral reefs of the Pacific, uses flashing signals to forage for food at night. The moment it finds food, the flashing signal changes to a permanent glow while the fish is feeding. In addition to the lighting conditions in its surroundings, the presence of food also determines the bioluminescence of the fish.

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http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2017/feb/After-decades-of-decreases-mercury-rises-in-Great

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scientists discover dinosaur trapped in amber in unprecedented find - cnn

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Scientists discover dinosaur trapped in amber in unprecedented find

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The tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur has been found entombed in amber, an unprecedented discovery that has blown away scientists.

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When deciding what path to take during collective movement, individual baboons will likely follow the road most travelled by their group mates, according to new findings published in eLife.

The study also suggests that environmental factors, such as roads and the vegetation density of their habitat, play a key role in how baboons move together as a group.

To investigate this behaviour, researchers from the US and Germany tracked 25 wild olive baboons belonging to a single troop with second-by-second global positioning system (GPS) tracking at the Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia, Kenya. They also used drone-based imaging technology to provide a high-resolution, three-dimensional reconstruction of the physical and vegetation structure of the baboons' environment. The data were then combined with a modelling system to help predict the animals' steps.

These methods reveal for the first time how the habitats of baboons and the animals' social interactions (in particular their tendency to follow each other closely) combine to influence the movements of individuals in a troop and ultimately determine the overall group structure.

They show that the most important predictor of baboons' decisions about where to move is where other troop members have gone in the recent past -- specifically, within the last five minutes. The more baboons have walked through a certain spot in this time, the more attractive it is to individuals.

"We also found that baboons tend to use human-made roads and, to a lesser degree, animal paths, allowing them to effectively 'commute' to and from their group's sleeping site," says first author Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin, PhD, from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, but now located at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany.

"The animals' movements are also constrained by habitat features such as vegetation density in the area. In particularly dense environments, for example, the troop moves slower and individuals become less aligned in their direction of travel, showing how local environmental complexity can impact the overall structure and motion of groups."

The study highlights the importance of combining habitat and social features for understanding animal movement at both the individual and group level, which Strandburg-Peshkin says is a "crucial step" in predicting how changing environments might affect social animals.

Senior author Professor Iain Couzin, from the Department of Collective Behaviour at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, and the University of Konstanz, adds: "While our work illustrates the insights that can be gained from technologies such as drone-based remote imaging and GPS tracking, we were limited to a relatively short period of data collection mainly due to the equipment's limited battery life.

"An exciting future direction would be to conduct longer-term or repeated sampling of animal groups across the year to capture changing environmental conditions, such as very wet or very dry weather. This would allow us to investigate with even more accuracy how these changes impact individual decisions and group-level structures."

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wild animals; nature; animals; monkeys; life sciences; extinction; endangered animals; behavioral science

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Habitat features and social behavior impact how baboons move as a group

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When deciding what path to take during collective movement, individual baboons will likely follow the road most travelled by their group mates, according to new findings published in eLife. The study also suggests that environmental factors, such as roads and the vegetation density of their habitat, play a key role in how baboons move together as a group.

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"Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored." ~ Alice Walker

I've been involved in animal advocacy for over 20 years - more than half of my life. Like most activists, I've come to understand that animal liberation is a long-term struggle. And long-term struggles require a long-term perspective of how things change. That's why Faunalytics created the Animal Tracker, now in its ninth year.

This post finalizes our coverage of the 2016 Animal Tracker results. The first blog covered the overall results and methods. Our second post focused on knowledge and the third examined the importance of protecting animals. The fourth blog looked at rates of agreement with various animal statements and the fifth post covered perceptions of the movement's impact and support for advocates' goals.

In this post, we try to make some sense of it all. But first, a few caveats. In addition to the general limitations we outlined in our first post, we must acknowledge that animal issues are not "top of mind" for most people. That's true for pretty much every social justice issue, as summarized by public opinion researchers Aaron Wildavsky and Nelson Polsby: "Most people don't think about most issues most of the time."

Many people probably have well-formed opinions about the presidential race or about their favorite sports team. But when we ask about less familiar topics, like animal issues, attitudes may be formed on the spot. Public opinion surveys like the Animal Tracker ask people to think about something they rarely consider. This can lead to what some refer to as the "illusion of public opinion."

Of course, animal protection is a diverse cause area. People are much more familiar with companion animal welfare than wild animal suffering, for instance. But we can say with confidence that most people don't think about most animal issues most of the time. That lack of consideration and urgency for animal protection is one of the most important hurdles faced by animal advocates.

With that important caveat in mind, following are some observations from the 2016 Animal Tracker, which included five questions. For each question we have four data points from 2008, 2010, 2013, and 2016 to help us understand trends. However, most differences over time are modest and within the margin of error. Below we focus on the larger demographic and longitudinal differences and their implications.

Lastly, see the final sections below for access to the full results, the dataset, and our newly updated graphing tool!

Low Knowledge & Awareness

Underscoring the illusion of public opinion, Animal Tracker results show that most adults in the U.S. know little about animal issues. In fact, most people say they are "not very" or "not at all" knowledgeable about all types of animals except companions. Moreover, self-reported knowledge is at or near an all-time low for most of the animals covered in the survey. Animal protection remains a topic about which most people have relatively little knowledge.

Most U.S. adults are either too busy working multiple low-paying jobs or wasting hours keeping up with the Kardashians to think about animals. If they have time to think about causes at all, then they probably gravitate to one of the higher visibility issues. Despite the enormity of its ethical implications, animal liberation lags behind other movements. Our movement lacks the institutional influence of climate change advocates, the social momentum of LGBTQ rights advocates, and the political power of gun rights advocates.

So it's no wonder that people have generally low knowledge of animal issues. That said, some demographic groups stand out as having slightly more self-reported knowledge. Specifically, women, people who live with companion animals, and those with more formal education are more knowledgeable of animal issues. When it comes to race, there is some indication the Black people report being less knowledgeable about animals, while Latino/Hispanic respondents are slightly more knowledgeable.

When looking at trends, one factor to consider is that the baseline year of the Animal Tracker was 2008. This was a voting year in the U.S. in which animal issues received unusually high visibility thanks mostly to state ballot initiatives. If true, this could explain the decline in self-reported knowledge since 2008. It also suggests that our more organized and coordinated efforts can move the needle and increase knowledge of animal issues. Even if that increase is only temporary, it might be taken as an encouraging sign for animal advocates.

Despite decreasing knowledge about animal issues, however, belief in the importance of animal protection actually appears to be increasing over time, albeit modestly. Knowledge of animal issues may not be necessary for people to support protecting animals, at least rhetorically. But it's probably important for people to think more deeply about animal suffering if we are to turn that rhetorical support into widespread behavior change.

What Cognitive Dissonance?

This disconnect between attitudes and behavior is evident throughout the Animal Tracker results. Knowing that difference is essential to understanding the broader human-animal dynamic. To put it simply, people hold simultaneous but opposing beliefs when it comes to animals. For instance, most people say they oppose all animal suffering while continuing to believe it's okay to consume meat, test on animals, wear fur, hunt wildlife, etc.

It's what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance." Just as a fundamentalist Christian will favor creationism over evolution, and vote accordingly, other people believe that their personal behavior does not cause animal suffering - despite evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately, what often happens when people are made aware of their own conflicting attitudes and behavior is that they adapt their attitudes to fit their behavior. And they process new information through a lens that reinforces existing beliefs.

Here are some examples of cognitive dissonance from the 2016 Animal Tracker results:

More than half (55%) of U.S. adults say protecting animals is important to them when voting for a political candidate, but in reality animals are not a major political issue.

Nearly three-fourths (73%) say protecting animals is important to them when buying meat, eggs, and dairy products, but most do not even buy "higher welfare" products.

More than half (52%) agree that people have an obligation to avoid harming all animals, but most of them participate in some form of animal abuse.

Four in five (81%) U.S. adults support the goal to minimize and eventually eliminate all forms of animal cruelty and suffering, but they are not considering wild animals.

Half (50%) of U.S. adults agree that farm animals deserve the same consideration as pets and other animals, but very few people eat their companion animals.

Animal advocates should take heed. It's not enough to speak the truth and then expect people to internalize it and change their behavior. Persuasion is a more nuanced process that requires a deep understanding of one's target audience, a message that resonates rather than conflicts with existing beliefs, and an ongoing "discussion" with people instead of just a one-time message. Making progress for animals will require connecting with people on a deeper level than simply providing more evidence of animal suffering.

Animal Use Isn't "Necessary"

Dr. Melanie Joy developed the concept of "carnism," which is predicated in part on the belief that eating meat is "natural, normal, and necessary." Unfortunately (and inaccurately), the perception that some types of animal use are "necessary" is a common one. It applies not just to animals used for food, but also animals used in experiments, animals in zoos and aquariums, and certain types of human behavior like hunting and fishing.

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults agree that "using animals for food is necessary for human survival" (after removing those who say "do not know" or "no opinion"). That's a discouraging number, but the trend is encouraging: the agreement rate has declined consistently, from 70% in 2008 to 64% in 2016. More than a third of U.S. adults now disagree that eating meat is necessary. If the trend continues, carnism itself may start to fragment.

The Animal Tracker also explores the perceived "necessity" of animal testing for medical advancement. Interestingly, the agreement rate was unchanged from 2008 to 2013, with a slight majority of 55% agreeing that animal research is necessary. In 2016 this figure dropped below a majority, to 47%. Our findings are consistent with a large drop in the perceived moral acceptability of animal testing from 2001 to 2015, conducted by Gallup.

Why are we changing our beliefs about the necessity of using animals? We need more data and can only offer speculation, but I think it may be due largely to technology. I think most people already know, on some level, that animal farming and animal testing are morally questionable. But technology - through plant-based meat and animal testing alternatives - is helping show people that using animals isn't so necessary after all.

Who Supports Animals?

The Animal Tracker examines a range of different demographic groups that allows animal advocates to identify its supporters and detractors, overall and for each issue area. The biggest demographic determinant of someone's support for animals and animal protection is gender. Put simply, women are far more pro-animal than men.

Women are more likely to believe that protecting animals is important. This was true for every type of animal covered in the survey. Women are more likely to agree that animals are capable of thought and emotion, that farm animals deserve consideration, and that people have an obligation to avoid harming animals. They're less likely to think that it's necessary for humans to eat, dissect, or experiment on animals.

I take this as an encouraging sign. Despite Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 election, women are increasingly taking on positions of power in local and national governments and in corporations. While the progress is slow, I think this will have a long-term and positive effect on policies toward animals.

Another group that is consistently supportive of animals and animal protection is people who currently live with one or more companion animals. It raises the question of whether encouraging non-traditional companion animals (e.g., farmed animals) might expand our sphere of compassion. The differences between the two groups are modest, however, underscoring that our love for companion animals doesn't always extend to other types of animals.

When it comes to ethnicity, there is no clear and consistent distinction. Black and Latino/Hispanic respondents are more likely to support the goals of the animal protection movement than are White respondents. Black and Latino people are also less likely to agree with the "necessity" of both testing on animals and eating animals. However, Black people are less likely to think animals are capable of thought and emotion and are less inclined to protect endangered species.

People with more formal education are generally less supportive of some animal protection measures. For instance, they are more likely to think that animal research, dissection, and wearing fur are acceptable. But those with less formal education (which correlates with age and ethnicity) are less likely to agree that animals are capable of thinking and feeling emotions and less likely to support protecting endangered species.

Lastly, those in the Southern and especially the Midwestern United States are usually less supportive of animal protection than those living in the Northeast or West. The regional differences are surprisingly modest, however, and centered around animals used for food given the focus on farming in the Midwest.

How to Get More Information

We provide all Animal Tracker data publicly. Depending on your interests and goals, you can get the summary data, download the complete dataset, or explore the data with our graphing tool. To see our analysis of the 2016 Animal Tracker results, please visit the set of blogs mentioned in the intro above. To see the previous analyses of past years of the Animal Tracker, please visit our independent studies page.

Crosstab Data: This Google spreadsheet provides the topline Animal Tracker results for all years (see separate tabs), including the detailed results for different demographic groups. Results are weighted.

Full Dataset: Our full Animal Tracker dataset is available in R and SPSS formats, providing respondent data at the individual level for analysis purposes. Access the full data on our datasets page.

Graphing Tool: Our Animal Tracker graphing tool lets you visualize all years of the Animal Tracker data to explore differences by group and over time. The tool was generously developed by Animal Visuals.

How to Cite this Information

We're excited to have you share the Animal Tracker results! You are welcome to share our blogs freely. If you are citing the results in a more formal setting, we recommend you follow research best practices. Ideally, you would provide all of the following information and a description of the methodology:

The full verbatim questions for all results that are being shared (provided in each blog)

The dates during which the survey was conducted (for 2016: 5/6/2016 - 5/8/2016)

Note that Faunalytics designed and manages the study using the GfK KnowledgePanel for data collection

Note that results were weighted to key demographics of the U.S. adult population including gender, age, education, race/ethnicity, income, and region

We recommend using the following standard language when sharing Animal Tracker results: "The Animal Tracker survey was conducted by Faunalytics using the GfK KnowledgePanel. The survey was fielded May 6, 2016 to May 8, 2016, with a total national adult sample of 1,019 respondents. For results based on the entire sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±3.1 percentage points. The data has been weighted to key demographics of the total U.S. adult population. Note: In addition to sampling error, question wording and other factors can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls."

Sponsorship Details

The Animal Tracker is the only longitudinal opinion survey dedicated to animal issues. It is also a collaborative study. Faunalytics manages the project, but we rely on donations from individuals and funding from sponsors to continue the study. Sponsors get early access to detailed survey results and the exclusive option to add their own question(s).

Year ten of the Animal Tracker will be fielded in the first quarter of 2017 and will cover topics including trends in animal-related behavior, belief in the importance of humane education, and support or opposition to different advocacy tactics. Faunalytics will be accepting new sponsors for the 2017 Animal Tracker until January 31, 2017. To learn about sponsorship and how to add your own questions, please contact us.

The 2016 Animal Tracker was generously supported by EJF Philanthropies, Alley Cat Allies, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, American Anti-Vivisection Society, Animal Legal Defense Fund, Animal Welfare Trust, the Humane Society of the United States, Maddie's Fund, the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, Pettus Crowe Foundation, RedRover, Tigers in America, and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

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Animal Tracker 2016: Analysis & Takeaways - Faunalytics

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"Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored." ~ Alice Walker I've been involved in animal advocacy for over 20 years - more than half of my life. Like most activists, I've come to understand that animal liberation is a long-term struggle.

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http://www.livescience.com/57606-cicada-season.html

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http://www.livescience.com/57584-ancient-giant-otter-was-wolf-size.html

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University of Delaware researchers are part of an effort that will use weather radar to identify wetland hotspots used by waterfowl during the winter, which in turn can alert poultry growers about the potential risk of avian influenza to their farms.

UD is partnering with the University of California, Davis, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on the research, which will study wetlands in the Central Valley of California during the winter.

The researchers are able to identify the birds' location based on their well synchronized take-off movements.

"In the case of waterfowl, they engage in feeding flights in the winter. They'll roost in the wetlands during the day and they fly out to agricultural fields -- primarily flooded rice fields in California -- at night. When they take off and fly into the radar, we get an instant snapshot of where they were on the ground. That's how we map their distributions," said Jeff Buler, assistant professor in UD's Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology.

Buler, who is leading the research at UD, added that the data is collected 24 hours a day every 5-10 minutes.

By identifying where waterfowl are in the valley, waterfowl biologists from USGS are able to take samples from the birds to look for prevalence of avian influenza, helping to build pathogen risk models for the poultry industry in the region.

Buler's lab group is processing the radar data for the project and mapping where the waterfowl are on the ground in relation to poultry farms. The lab at UD is unique in that it's practically the only active lab using weather radar data to map bird distributions at the ground level.

Buler said the hope is for the technology now being used in California to one day be utilized in the Delmarva region.

"It's something that if we do develop it and the poultry industry likes it, we could replicate it here at UD because poultry is certainly a big industry and it's also an important wintering area for waterfowl here in Delaware," Buler said.

Another component of the project is that the researchers can compare the data they are collecting to the data they collected during a previous effort in California, looking at waterfowl distributions from 1995 to 2007 that were closely tied to the availability of water.

"Given the recent droughts there, there are concerns about there being enough habitat for waterfowl. An important concern is that when the birds are concentrated in high densities, that's a scenario for all sorts of other avian diseases like botulism to occur. If there is an outbreak of avian influenza and they're very concentrated, it can quickly spread," Buler said.

The research group is also looking at how waterfowl use natural and restored wetlands in the valley in order to examine other questions that are more tied to the biology of the waterfowl.

"We're interested in looking at how the drought is affecting their populations and also the distributions throughout the valley in addition to being concerned about the spread of avian influenza," Buler said.

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bird flu research; birds; food and agriculture; agriculture and food; nature; drought; animals; biology

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Researchers use weather radar to track migrating waterfowl, avian influenza

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Researchers are part of an effort that will use weather radar to identify wetland hotspots used by waterfowl during the winter, which in turn can alert poultry growers about the potential risk of avian influenza. The lab involved in the study is one of the only labs anywhere using weather radar data to map bird distributions at the ground level.

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'a dog's purpose' author: 'shocking' leaked video 'mischaracterizes' on-set animal safety  - cnn

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'A Dog's Purpose' author: 'Shocking' leaked video 'mischaracterizes' on-set animal safety

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W. Bruce Cameron says full footage from the set paints much different picture on movie's approach to animal safety.

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Tanner Royal

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http://www.livescience.com/57554-most-primates-threatened-with-extinction.html

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Jan 19, 2017 11:27 AM EST

Our fellow primates are dying. A new study revealed the distressing condition of the primate populations worldwide with 60 percent of the 500 different primate species already facing possible extinction. It's also unsurprising that humans are one of the reasons for their demise.

According to a report from Science Daily, an international research team that includes scientists form the German Primate Center (DPZ) published their findings in Science Advances. They observed data from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List as well as the United Nations' database to create a forecast for the upcoming 50 years. Many primates are predicted to flirt or experience extinction in that time frame.

The study revealed that about 75 percent of all primate species are already in decline and 60 percent are threatened with extinction, a report from New York Times said. All species of apes are threatened including gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and 19 species of gibbons. Roughly 87 percent of lemur species are as well, while a number of other primate species are critically endangered.

Human exploitation of their habitats play a huge role in the decreasing numbers of many creatures. From deforestation and agricultural expansion to illegal hunting and primate trade, human activity has taken over the habitats of many primate species.

"The lifestyle and the economy in the industrialized countries contribute to the threat for primates," co-author of the study Eckhard W. Heymann explained to Science Daily. "Many of the resources and products such as mineral resources, beef, palm oil and soya that are destroying the habitats of primates are ultimately consumed in industrialized countries."

He added, "Conservation is an ecological, cultural and social necessity. When our closest relatives, the non-human primates, become extinct, this will send a warning signal that the living conditions for humans will soon deteriorate dramatically."

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The World's Primates Threatened With Extinction Crisis

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Jan 19, 2017 11:27 AM EST Our fellow primates are dying. A new study revealed the distressing condition of the primate populations worldwide with 60 percent of the 500 different primate species already facing possible extinction. It's also unsurprising that humans are one of the reasons for their demise.

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Have you ever imagined what the world must look like to hummingbirds as they zoom about at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour? According to new evidence on the way the hummingbird brain processes visual signals reported in Current Biology on January 5, you can't. That's because a key area of the hummingbird's brain processes motion in a unique and unexpected way.

"In all four-limbed vertebrates studied to date, most of the neurons in this [motion-detecting] brain area are tuned to detect motion coming from behind, such as would occur for an impending collision or when being attacked from behind by a predator," says Douglas Altshuler of the University of British Columbia. "We found that this brain area responds very differently in hummingbirds. Instead of most neurons being tuned to back-to-front motion, almost every neuron we found was tuned to a different direction. We also found that these neurons were most responsive to very fast motion."

The brain area in question is known in birds as the lentiformis mesencephalic, or LM for short. (In mammals, it's called the nucleus of the optic tract.) The LM is responsible for processing visual signals sent to the brain as images move across the retina.

The primary interest of the Altshuler lab is in understanding flight. To understand how birds fly, the researchers needed to understand how they see the world. Hummingbirds were of special interest because of their remarkable ability to zoom quickly and then stop to hover in place while sipping nectar in midair.

Earlier studies showed that the LM in hummingbirds is enlarged in comparison to that of other birds. Scientists also knew that hummingbirds monitor and correct for any minor drift in their position as they hover. Those findings had led researchers to suggest that the hummingbird brain might be specially attuned to pick up on slow movements.

To test that hypothesis in the new study, post-doc and first author of the new study Andrea Gaede recorded neural activity in the LMs of six Anna's hummingbirds and ten zebra finches as the birds watched computer-generated dots move in various directions. Contrary to expectations, the recordings showed that hummingbirds are most sensitive to fast visual motion. What's more, unlike other birds, the hummingbirds responded to movement in any direction about equally. That is, their LM neurons aren't specially attuned to movements in the forward direction as in other animals. The researchers suggest that their visual abilities may play a role in dynamic behaviors, including competitive interactions, high-speed courtship displays, and insect foraging.

"This study provides compelling support for the hypothesis that the avian brain is specialized for flight and that hummingbirds are a powerful model for studying stabilization algorithms," Gaede says.

Gaede says her next step is to investigate the response properties of other nuclei involved in this visual motion-processing pathway, with the ultimate goal of understanding how neural activity in the hummingbird brain is translated into specific flight behaviors.

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behavioral science; birds; mice; animal learning and intelligence; nature; biochemistry research; biology; zoology

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Hummingbirds see motion in an unexpected way

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Have you ever imagined what the world must look like to hummingbirds as they zoom about at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour? According to new evidence on the way the hummingbird brain processes visual signals you can't. That's because a key area of the hummingbird's brain processes motion in a unique and unexpected way.

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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-form-hydrogen-created

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Negatively charged clusters might exist in outer space

Scientists have produced a new form of hydrogen in the lab - negatively charged hydrogen clusters.

Each cluster consists of hydrogen molecules arranged around a negatively charged hydrogen ion - a single hydrogen atom with an extra electron - at temperatures near absolute zero, the researchers report in the Dec. 30 Physical Review Letters. Similar, positively charged ion clusters have previously been found, but this is the first time scientists have seen negative hydrogen cluster ions beyond the simplest possible pairing of one molecule and one ion.

Physicist Michael Renzler of the University of Innsbruck in Austria and colleagues infused tiny droplets of liquid helium with hydrogen gas. Then, the scientists bombarded the droplets with a beam of electrons, which converted some hydrogen molecules into negatively charged hydrogen ions. Neighboring hydrogen molecules (two bonded hydrogen atoms)

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Negatively charged clusters might exist in outer space Scientists have produced a new form of hydrogen in the lab - negatively charged hydrogen clusters. Each cluster consists of hydrogen molecules arranged around a negatively charged hydrogen ion - a single hydrogen atom with an extra electron - at temperatures near absolute zero, the researchers report in the Dec.

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Scientists have made a grisly discovery: the first recorded instance of a tarantula eating a snake in the wild.

Leandro Malta Borges, a graduate student at Brazil's Federal University of Santa Maria, stumbled across the macabre scene on October 23, 2015, while he and his colleagues were walking through a grassland in southern Brazil called Serra do Caverá. (Watch a giant spider drag a mouse.)

Underneath a rock, they found a foot-long specimen of Erythrolamprus almadensis, a non-venomous snake-but its front and middle regions had been ripped to shreds by a large species of tarantula called Grammostola quirogai.

As Borges looked on, the tarantula huddled over the decomposing snake, chowing down on the exposed, liquefied guts.

In their description of the scene, published in Herpetology Notes in December 2016, the researchers chalk up the snake's demise to an accidental break-in. In Serra do Caverá, many tarantula species, in particular sedentary females, hide in the rocks.

"Most likely, the snake was surprised upon entering the spider's environment and hence [was] subdued by it," the researchers write.

To kill the snake, the tarantula undoubtedly wielded its 0.8-inch-long fangs, but it's difficult to say what exactly caused the snake's death.

Voracious Appetites

Scientists have known for decades that snakes can fall prey to tarantulas. In 1926, Brazilian researchers Vital Brazil and Jehan Vellard found that captive tarantulas occasionally ate snakes.

A 1992 study further reported that the Goliath birdeater tarantula ( Theraphosa blondi) could eat fer-de-lance vipers, if nudged to do so. "They eat pretty much anything they can grab and overpower," tarantula expert Chris Hamilton, a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History, says in an email.

"We also know that they eat frogs and lizards, and I've found them eating a small mouse."

But Borges and his colleagues note that their observation is unique, since saw tarantulas eating snakes in the wild. "It is very gratifying to contribute to this record, since, as far as we know, there are only cases documented from situations in captivity," says Borges in an email. ( Watch a freshly eaten snake make an amazing escape.)

The researchers were extremely lucky: Most likely, snakes probably don't end up on tarantulas' menus all that often.

"One reason I think that we don't see this very often is that it's just rare," says Hamilton, who wasn't involved with the study.

"Tarantulas don't need to eat very much, so they probably have a lot more opportunities to grab small arthropods than they do vertebrates."

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Tarantula Found Eating a Snake in Wild for First Time

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Scientists have made a grisly discovery: the first recorded instance of a tarantula eating a snake in the wild. Leandro Malta Borges, a graduate student at Brazil's Federal University of Santa Maria, stumbled across the macabre scene on October 23, 2015, while he and his colleagues were walking through a grassland in southern Brazil called Serra do Caverá.

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A vaquita entangled in a fishing net. Vaquitas are the most endangered marine mammal in the world.

Credit: Proyecto Vaquita

A team of Navy dolphins may be the last hope of survival for the planet's arguably cutest porpoises, called vaquitas ( Phocoena sinus).

Considered the world's most endangered marine mammal species, vaquitas, which have dark rings around their eyes and mouth, live only in the upper parts of the Gulf of California in Mexico, according to the Cetacean Specialist Group. The porpoise is often killed in fishing nets, according to Science magazine.

The group of military dolphins, dubbed the Seal Team 6, was specially trained by the U.S. Navy to use their deep-diving and sonar skills to locate undersea mines and other objects, according to the Navy. In this last-ditch effort to save the porpoise species, conservationists hope that the dolphin squad would locate the remaining individuals - the latest report suggests just 60 individuals remain in the wild - in order for officials to relocate a handful of them to breed in captivity, Science magazine reported. [ Vaquita Photos: World's Most Endangered Marine Mammal]

The project is scheduled to begin in the spring, though experts involved say they are still in the planning stages. "Jim Fallin of the U.S. Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific said Tuesday that the dolphins' participation is still in the planning stage," the Associated Press reported on Jan. 3.

Not everyone is sold on the "seal team," however. "I don't like this idea at all," said Omar Vidal, director general of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Mexico in Mexico City, as reported by Science magazine. "The risk of killing a vaquita while catching them is very high. With only 50 or 60 animals left, we can't play with that."

Vaquitas are the smallest cetaceans, with an average body length of 3.9 to 4.9 feet (about 120 to 150 centimeters) and weighing in at just 120 pounds (55 kilograms), according to the Zoological Society of London.

Original article on Live Science.

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Jeanna Bryner, Live Science Managing Editor

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Navy-Trained Dolphins May Help Save Endangered Porpoises

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A team of Navy dolphins may be the last hope of survival for the planet's arguably cutest porpoises, called vaquitas ( Phocoena sinus). Considered the world's most endangered marine mammal species, vaquitas, which have dark rings around their eyes and mouth, live only in the upper parts of the Gulf of California in Mexico, according to the Cetacean Specialist Group.

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http://www.livescience.com/57184-reindeer-shrinking-due-to-climate-change.html

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The skull of a large Probiscidean, such as a mammoth or a mastodon, was recently unearthed while construction workers were digging a new line to the Los Angeles Metro.

Credit: Metro

Fossils from giant, ice age-beasts were uncovered while workers were digging an extension to the Los Angeles subway system.

The finds include a 3-foot-long (1 meter) section of mammoth tusk, as well as a skull and partial tusks from a much younger animal, which might have been either a mammoth or a mastodon, according to The Source, a transportation blog about the L.A. Metro.

Though the ice-age fossils (whose exact age has not yet been determined) are certainly treasures that are rarer to unearth under the subway than rat "fossils" and "coprolites," old chicken wings or discarded coffee cups, the finds actually aren't all that surprising. The area around the site of the fossil discovery, near the La Brea/Wilshire station, is not too far from the La Brea Tar Pits, an area of central Los Angeles where natural asphalt has been seeping up from the ground for the last 40,000 years. [ See Photos of the Ice-Age Animal Skull Uncovered During Subway Construction]

Over the eons, this constant ooze of asphalt has created sticky pits in valleys that would often become obscured by leaves, branches and other ground cover. As a result, unwary animals stepped into the sticky death traps. The viscous ooze trapped small animals and insects immediately, while larger beasts like mammoths sank inches into the tar, struggling to get out before becoming stuck, researchers have noted. The dead or dying animals attracted predators as well - some of which also became stuck in the asphalt. All told, more than 1 million fossils have been found in the tar pits, according to the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum.

Mammoths and mastodons are both Proboscideans. Though both were majestically large and had shaggy coats and impressively curved tusks, mammoths are much more closely related to modern-day elephants, having arisen about 5 million years ago in Africa. By contrast, mastodons arose about 27 million to 30 million years ago.

During the Pleistocene epoch, between 1.8 million and 11,700 years ago, mammoths and mastodons roamed over the part of North America that was not covered by ice sheets, including coastal California. [ Skin & Bones: Look Inside Baby Mammoths]

Because of the subway line project's proximity to the La Brea Tar Pits, Metro officials were anticipating fossil finds and brought on paleontologists from the firm Cogstone to make sure that any discovery of prehistoric fossils would be safely excavated and preserved, according to the blog post. The new finds were immediately covered with plaster for preservation and sent to the nearby Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

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Mammoth Fossils Found at Site of LA Subway Dig

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Fossils from giant, ice age-beasts were uncovered while workers were digging an extension to the Los Angeles subway system. The finds include a 3-foot-long (1 meter) section of mammoth tusk, as well as a skull and partial tusks from a much younger animal, which might have been either a mammoth or a mastodon, according to The Source, a transportation blog about the L.A.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/06/taronga-zoo-says-it-will-not-fire-keeper-filmed-punching-kangaroo

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http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/32952/20161128/190-000-birds-euthanized-netherlands-avoid-bird-flu-outbreak.htm

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Liquids shared mouth-to-mouth by social insects contain proteins and small molecules that can influence the development and organisation of their colonies, according to new findings published in eLife.

The study from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, suggests Florida carpenter ants can collectively influence their communities by shifting the cocktail of proteins, hormones and other small molecules that they pass mouth-to-mouth to one another and their young through a process called trophallaxis.

"Food is passed to every adult and developing ant by trophallaxis. This creates a network of interactions linking every member of the colony," says senior author Laurent Keller, Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution.

"A lot of researchers consider trophallaxis only as a means of food-sharing," adds Professor Richard Benton of the Center for Integrative Genomics, also a senior author of the study. "But trophallaxis occurs in other contexts, such as when an ant is reunited with a nest-mate after isolation. We therefore wanted to see if the fluid exchanged by trophallaxis contains molecules that allow ants to pass other chemical messages to each other, and not just food."

To answer this question, the team, led by first author and postdoctoral researcher Dr Adria LeBoeuf, analysed fluid from pairs of ants engaged in trophallaxis. Surprisingly, they identified a large number of proteins that appear to be involved in regulating the growth of ants, along with high levels of juvenile hormone, an important regulator of insect development, reproduction, and behaviour.

To see what effect this hormone has on the growth of larvae fed by trophallaxis, the scientists added it to the food of larvae-rearing ants and discovered that the hormone made it twice as likely that the larvae would survive to reach adulthood.

"This indicates that juvenile hormone and other molecules transferred mouth-to-mouth over this social network could be used by the ants to collectively decide how their colony develops," says LeBoeuf. "So, when the ants feed their larvae, they aren't just feeding them food, they are casting quantitative ballots for their colony, administering different amounts of growth-promoting components to influence the next generation.

"The effects of juvenile hormone that we see are consistent with previous studies in other ants and in bees where larvae treated with an analogue of this hormone tend to develop into larger workers and even queens."

Along with growth proteins and juvenile hormone, the team also identified small molecules and chemical signals in the carpenter ants' trophallactic liquid that help them recognize their nest-mates. They demonstrated for the first time the presence of chemical cues in the fluid that are known to be important in providing ants with a colony-specific odour that allows them to distinguish family from non-family members.

"Overall, we show that liquid transmitted among ants contains much more than food and digestive enzymes," adds LeBoeuf. "Our findings suggest that trophallaxis underlies a private communication channel that ants use to direct the development of their young, similar to milk in mammals."

"More generally, this opens the possibility that the oral exchange of fluids, such as saliva, in other animals might also serve previously unsuspected roles."

Journal Reference:

Adria C LeBoeuf, Patrice Waridel, Colin S Brent, Andre N Gonçalves, Laure Menin, Daniel Ortiz, Oksana Riba-Grognuz, Akiko Koto, Zamira G Soares, Eyal Privman, Eric A Miska, Richard Benton, Laurent Keller. Oral transfer of chemical cues, growth proteins and hormones in social insects. eLife, 2016; 5 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.20375

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insects (including butterflies); invasive species; animals; genetics; molecular biology; food; agriculture and food; biology

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Ants communicate by mouth-to-mouth fluid exchange

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Liquids shared mouth-to-mouth by social insects contain proteins and small molecules that can influence the development and organisation of their colonies, according to new findings published in eLife. The study from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, suggests Florida carpenter ants can collectively influence their communities by shifting the cocktail of proteins, hormones and other small molecules that they pass mouth-to-mouth to one another and their young through a process called trophallaxis.

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http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/33458/20161205/bees-found-living-deep-under-ocean.htm

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African Leopards One Step Closer to Endangered Species List, Protection From Trophy Hunters

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Leopards are at risk of extinction across their African and Asian range, having suffered a population decline in sub-Saharan Africa of more than 30 percent in the past 25 years, in part due to unsustainable trophy hunting by Americans.

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About 64 million years ago, a sea turtle with a triangular-shaped head swam along the arid coastline of what is now Angola. The creature likely crunched on hard-shelled animals, such as crabs and lobsters, with its extra-long palate - the roof of its mouth.

The finding is remarkable, but even more breathtaking is its link to early sea turtles that lived before the asteroid hit Earth about 65.5 million years ago, the researchers of the new study said. That link indicates that this particular turtle group survived the mass extinction that killed the nonavian dinosaurs, the researchers said.

The study, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, was presented Friday (Oct. 28) at the 2016 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting. [ Read the Full Story on the Ancient Sea Turtle from Angola]

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Photos: Ancient Sea Turtle Discovered Along Angolan Coast

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About 64 million years ago, a sea turtle with a triangular-shaped head swam along the arid coastline of what is now Angola. The creature likely crunched on hard-shelled animals, such as crabs and lobsters, with its extra-long palate - the roof of its mouth.

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The strange-looking fossil was hailed as a once-in-a-lifetime find: a rare snapshot of the way snakes evolved from four-legged lizards. But barely more than a year after it was unveiled, a fresh look at the animal suggests that it is no snake.

Perhaps even more troubling, the fossil may have first reached scientists' hands under unethical-and possibly illegal-circumstances.

Originally, the 110-million-year-old fossil known as Tetrapodophis was interpreted to be a burrowing snake with two pairs of small limbs, potentially showing that snakes started out on land. If true, the six-inch-long animal would bring clarity to the scientific debate over whether snakes lost their limbs on land- the current favorite hypothesis -or in water.

The new reanalysis instead suggests that Tetrapodophis could be the oldest known dolichosaur, an extinct type of aquatic lizard that lived during the Cretaceous period. If it's not a snake, the evolutionary waters get that much muddier. (Also see an amazing "nesting doll" fossil that reveals a bug in a lizard in a snake.)

"It doesn't have to be a snake to be cool-it's a very interesting thing all by itself," says Mike Caldwell of the University of Alberta, who co-authored the latest analysis. "A four-legged snake will be really cool, and we will find one. But this one isn't."

Slippery Specimen

The as-yet unpublished findings, announced on October 26 at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting in Utah, mark the latest development in a controversy that has swirled around the fossil since July 2015, when it was first described in the journal Science. In that paper, a team led by University of Portsmouth paleontologist David Martill claimed that the fossil was a pivotal intermediate stage in snake evolution.

"This little animal is the Archaeopteryx of the squamate world," Martill said at the time to National Geographic. Squamates are snakes and lizards, and Archaeopteryx is the famous feathered fossil from Germany that represents one of the best known evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds.

In August 2015, Caldwell and collaborator Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto Mississauga flew to Germany to examine the fossil, which was then housed at the Bürgermeister-Müller-Museum in Solnhofen-a small museum largely housing loaned specimens from private collections.

Much of what Caldwell and Reisz found directly contrasted with the original analysis. For instance, Martill claimed that Tetrapodophis had teeth that curved sharply toward the throat, a classic trait shared by modern and extinct snakes. But when the pair examined the fossil through compound microscopes, they found that the teeth didn't curve much at all from their base.

Instead, the tooth bases were caked in cementum, a bony material that affixed the teeth to the jaw, and Caldwell says that the teeth appeared to have been dislodged during fossilization. Combined, Caldwell argues, the two factors ultimately created the illusion that the teeth were sharply curved-undercutting one of Martill's lines of evidence.

"The teeth are wrong, the jaw is wrong, the skull is not right ... and you can see that it has a complete series of bones between the eye and where the jaw is suspended from the skull," says Caldwell. "You don't find that in snakes."

A Matter of Interpretation?

In an emailed statement to National Geographic, Martill-who did not attend the conference and did not see Caldwell's presentation-stands by his assertion that Tetrapodophis is a snake. (Also see "Why Snakes Don't Have Legs (For Now).")

"Caldwell is simply very wrong," he writes. "We did, of course, consider a dolichosaur. It is not a dolichosaur. Just take look at it."

Martill's co-author, University of Bath paleontologist Nick Longrich, agrees: "Long story short, I stand behind the paper we wrote," he says in an emailed statement. "Maybe we didn't get every single detail right, but we got most of it right, and I'm proud of that."

Longrich-who also did not attend the conference-writes that based on what he knows of Caldwell's interpretation, he deems it "highly creative" and biased toward Caldwell's long-running stance that snakes evolved in water as opposed to on land.

"It sucks that some people are so wedded to their ideas that they aren't open to new facts-and actually need to reinterpret the facts to fit their argument-but this type of thing happens in science," Longrich adds.

But paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Cambridge is now less sure of the first interpretation.

"[Caldwell] is more right than the original publication, for sure," says Head, an expert on squamate evolution who wasn't involved with the 2015 study or the new analysis. "There was a lot of anatomical interpretation [in the original] that I have a hard time seeing from the photos."

Yale paleontologist Jacques Gauthier, a world-renowned squamate expert, agrees with Head. "I think [Caldwell] makes a pretty good argument that it's a dolichosaur rather than a snake," he says.

However, Gauthier notes that Caldwell's argument-which emphasizes snakes' distinctiveness from water-dwelling dolichosaurs-undercuts Caldwell's own ideas that snakes have aquatic origins.

"The very reasons [Caldwell] argues it's a dolichosaur are the very same reasons that reject his hypothesis," says Gauthier. "There's the rub."

'It's Not Science'

In addition to the scientific sniping, the situation became even stickier in August 2015, when officials announced that they are actively investigating whether the Tetrapodophis fossil left Brazil illegally.

In 1942, the Brazilian government outlawed the sale or export of Brazilian fossils without government permission. Yet the Crato Formation, the fossil's putative place of origin within Brazil, wasn't excavated intensively until the period spanning the 1950s to 1970s, says University of Alberta paleontologist Tiago Simões, one of Caldwell's students and colleagues on the new analysis. That suggests the fossil left Brazil after World War II, most likely without permission-one of perhaps hundreds, if not thousands, of others like it reported in the scientific literature.

Jean-Claude Rage, a paleontologist with France's National Museum of Natural History, also has concerns. "From what I know, the specimen was really exported illegally," he writes. "Obviously, this should be checked, but if the story [of illegal exportation] is true, this may be an important problem."

For his part, Martill argues that laws such as the one in Brazil unnecessarily restrict access to specimens. In a 2015 interview with the Brazilian newspaper Estadão, Martill said that he was "critical of all laws that interfere with the science of paleontology," adding that they can "lead to xenophobia-Brazil fossils for Brazilians, British fossils for Brits. It should be fossils for all."

Many of Martill's peers, including Head, take umbrage with his views.

"The study of the history of life from the fossil record is a global process, and people from just about every nation on Earth are involved," he says. "If you can't respect the laws, customs, and culture of the country-the people-whence the fossil came, you are doing damage to that global study."

The specimen is gone, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Making matters even more contentious, the specimen in question is the only known Tetrapodophis fossil, and it was on loan to the museum in Germany by its owner.

However, if a scientifically studied fossil is privately owned, the owner can deny access to the fossil on a whim, making it all but impossible for future scientists to reevaluate Martill and Caldwell's contrasting results. That's why studying privately owned fossils is frowned upon by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

And earlier this year, the fossil's owner removed the specimen from the Bürgermeister-Müller-Museum. (At press time, National Geographic was unable to confirm the owner's identity. In an email, Longrich writes that the owner wishes to remain anonymous.)

Prior to the Science publication, Gauthier had informally consulted Martill's team on Tetrapodophis, at the time believing-like Martill-that the fossil had been formally ceded to the museum. Martill and Gauthier both point out that the museum had given the fossil a specimen number, which is almost always a sign of a fossil's permanent place in a museum's collection.

Now Gauthier says that because the fossil cannot be reliably reexamined, it should be treated as scientifically out-of-bounds. " Tetrapodophis is an invalid name that doesn't exist, as far as I'm concerned," he says.

Head agrees: "It's not science once you've gotten to that point. Part of the scientific process is repeatability and the possibility of falsification. The specimen is gone, and there's nothing we can do about it."

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Famous 'Four-Legged Snake' May Really Be Dino-Era Lizard

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The strange-looking fossil was hailed as a once-in-a-lifetime find: a rare snapshot of the way snakes evolved from four-legged lizards. But barely more than a year after it was unveiled, a fresh look at the animal suggests that it is no snake. Perhaps even more troubling, the fossil may have first reached scientists' hands under unethical-and possibly illegal-circumstances.

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Every July, young common swifts leave their European roosts and migrate to western and central Africa. They'll only be back in the following June, and they'll spend the intervening 10 months almost continuously in the air. They might travel to Africa, but their feet never meet African soil.

"They feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air," says Susanne Åkesson from Lund University in Sweden. "They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can't really land on the ground." That's because their wings are too long and their legs are too short to take off from a flat surface.

As a result, common swifts are among nature's greatest aeronauts, superbly adapted for a life spent largely in the skies.

People have long suspected that swifts stay airborne for long stretches of time, but no one could confirm it. Åkesson and her husband, Anders Hedenström, both from Lund University, did so by fitting 19 of the birds with lightweight data loggers in 2013, and recapturing them one or two years later. The loggers had regularly recorded local light levels, which the duo could use to pinpoint the birds' global position. And they had recorded the swifts' acceleration, activity, and body positions, which revealed if they were flying or resting.

The data revealed that some swifts were almost never inactive during their long migrations. For example, between September 2013 and April 2014, one of the birds rested for just four nights in February. The following year, it never rested for a full night; over the same period, it stopped for just two hours.

A few other swifts didrest more often. Åkesson and Hedenström suspect that this was because they hadn't finished replacing their wing and tail feathers during their annual molt. The old feathers might have compromised their ability to stay permanently aloft, or their inability to molt fully might reflect some underlying health problem that affected their flight. Either way, it's not like they were actually grounded. If they rested, it was just for a few hours. At most, they spent just 0.64 percent of their migration on terra firma.

Other scientists have found similar results. In 2013, Felix Liechti from the Swiss Ornithological Institute used similar data loggers to show that three alpine swifts probably flew nonstop for 200 days, on their long migration from Switzerland to Africa and back again. That was especially surprising because alpine swifts are twice the size of common swifts, with wingspans of up to 22 inches.

Such long nonstop flights imply that swifts must be able to sleep while flying. This August, Niels Rattenborg of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany proved that frigate birds-large seabirds with piratical tendencies-do the same. He fitted brainwave sensors to 15 frigatebirds and showed that they sleep mid-flight, for about 40 minutes a day and just a few seconds at a time.

There's no brain sensor small enough to record their mental activity of a flying swift, but they surely must be taking midair naps too. Maybe they do what dolphins do, sending one half of their brains to sleep at a time so they can stay continuously alert.

Why bother? Why should a bird evolve to be continuously airborne, rather than to land occasionally? "When you're airborne, you're extremely mobile, and you can explore a dynamic food environment," says Åkesson. Swifts eat insects, which might concentrate in dense swarms and move from one place to the next. By patrolling large swathes of sky, and never wasting time on the ground, swifts might be able to snap up more insect prey.

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These Birds Fly Almost a Year Without Landing

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Every July, young common swifts leave their European roosts and migrate to western and central Africa. They'll only be back in the following June, and they'll spend the intervening 10 months almost continuously in the air. They might travel to Africa, but their feet never meet African soil.

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Kyle Winn

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An anti-poaching team saved a young elephant from drowning this month, and it was caught on video. The rescue was made by the Air Shepherd team in Zimbabwe's vast Hwange National Park.

Air Shepherd is a partnership between the Lindbergh Foundation and the company UAV and Drone Solutions, which is working to deter poachers in Hwange and other parks around Africa.

During an early morning scouting mission, Air Shepherd drone pilots Tom Lautenbach and Gift Kgadima were driving in Hwange, getting a feel for the land that they have been flying their drones over for the past few weeks.

"To our surprise we noticed four extremely large grey legs sticking out of the manmade water trough, which is there to supply clean drinking water," Lautenbach said in an email. "We then realized that the legs were of an elephant."

At first, Lautenbach and Kgadima thought the elephant had been killed by poachers, possibly poisoned with cyanide. It's a big problem, says Otto Werdmuller Von Elgg, the director of Air Shepherd and CEO of UAV and Drone Solutions. Cyanide is used in gold mining so it is readily available in southern Africa. Poachers typically drop a few kilos in a watering hole, where it "poisons everything in sight," says Von Elgg, from large mammals to fish and frogs.

But after a moment, the elephant started thrashing around, trying to free itself. Lautenbach and Kgadima sprang into action. If they hadn't, the elephant "absolutely would have drowned" within a short time, Von Elgg says.

The elephant's head was below the water, but it was able to breathe by extending its trunk above the surface. The drone pilots tied a rope around the bull's foot and tried to drag it out of the water with their vehicle. When that didn't work, the pilots sought help.

Returning with staff from the national park, the larger team tied another rope to the elephant and was able to pull the bull to its feet.

"He was of course exhausted and frightened and was not able to stand for a while," says Lautenbach. "We waited for a bit for the elephant to regain his strength and then we decided to push him out from the one end out to the shallower end, where he could easily walk away, which he did."

Von Elgg says Air Shepherd crews have been using drones to fight poachers in South Africa for about four years, starting in the iconic Kruger National Park. The team uses small, silent drones and often flies at night, so the craft are very hard to detect. Still, word of their use in a particular area tends to spread quickly among poachers' networks, often driving the would-be criminals away.

During the dry season, which is happening now, animals tend to concentrate around watering holes, where they can be sitting ducks for poachers. So Air Shepherd patrols those areas heavily, particularly the watering holes that are closest to villages or easiest for poachers to get to.

And to those who have suggested poachers might follow the drones toward their quarry, Von Elgg says the pilots don't follow animals, they follow people and known poaching routes. "So that is highly unlikely," he says.

UAV and Drone Solutions has been doing conservation work with drones for about four years and supplements its funding by taking on commercial projects, such as surveillance of mines.

"It's incredibly difficult work, but our teams have amazing experiences everyday," says Von Elgg. ( Support Air Shepherd.)

Read more stories about wildlife crime and exploitation on Wildlife Watch. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas tongwildlife@natgeo.com.

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An anti-poaching team saved a young elephant from drowning this month, and it was caught on video. The rescue was made by the Air Shepherd team in Zimbabwe's vast Hwange National Park. Air Shepherd is a partnership between the Lindbergh Foundation and the company UAV and Drone Solutions, which is working to deter poachers in Hwange and other parks around Africa.

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sixth extinction: 20 years to stop ecological collapse - cnn

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John Sutter: The Earth's next mass extinction -- the first caused by people -- is on the horizon. And three-quarters of species could vanish.

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Uncovered in the Gobi desert, the tracks of the titanosaur show that the beast certainly lived up to its name

smithsonian.com

Millions of years ago, one of the largest animals to ever exist strutted around what is now the Gobi desert. And it left behind some massive footprints.

The Gobi desert has long been a popular place for paleontologists to search for dinosaur bones. Since the 1920s, scientists have trekked to the central Asian desert to scrounge up fossilized skeletons. Recently, a joint group of researchers from Japan's Okayama University of Science and the Mongolian Academy of Science came across a massive footprint that may have been left behind by a long-dead titanosaur, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

"This is a very rare discovery as it's a well-preserved fossil footprint that is more than a meter long with imprints of its claws," the Okayama University of Science wrote in a statement, according to the AFP.

The enormous footprint stretches over four feet long and is nearly as large as one of the scientists who discovered it when he curls up in a ball. While the researchers have yet to find a nearby skeleton that could have been left behind by the animal who made it, the shape and size of the fossil footprint suggests that it was made by a titanosaur, Nicole Puglise reports for The Guardian.

While the name "titanosaur" may be intimidating, the massive dinosaurs were herbivores, preferring to snack on plants and leaves than munch on meat. First discovered in the 2000's, the long-necked titanosaur stretched nearly 100 feet from tip to tail and stood almost 70 feet tall, Puglise reports.

Because of their enormous size, some of these dinosaurs walked around on large stump-like legs that looked a bit like horseshoes. They also lacked toes, which might break under their weight. The fossil footprint itself was created somewhere between 70 and 90 millions years ago during the Cretaceous period. After a giant titanosaur strolled through some wet mud, it probably filled in with sand, preserving the imprint, the AFP reports.

This isn't the first time researchers have uncovered fossil footprints left behind by titanosaurs: similar specimens have been found in the past in Morocco and France. But this latest find not only larger than previous discoveries, but one of the tracks is the most detailed yet uncovered. As Okayama University paleontologist Shinobu Ishigaki tells The Japan Times, the footprint still retains marks left behind by nails and could help paleontologists learn more about how the massive animals walked about the world.

Ishigaki says the researchers will continue to survey the area where the footprint was discovered to see if it might be hiding other fossils. In the meantime, there is much to learn from this gargantuan footprint.

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Researchers Just Discovered One of the Largest Dinosaur Footprints Ever Found

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smithsonian.com Millions of years ago, one of the largest animals to ever exist strutted around what is now the Gobi desert. And it left behind some massive footprints. The Gobi desert has long been a popular place for paleontologists to search for dinosaur bones.

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The baggy-skinned frogs absorb oxygen, and environmental contaminants through their skin.

Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Zoo

More than 10,000 endangered frogs and other water-dwelling animals living near a lake in South America were found mysteriously dead this month, according to reports from Peru's wildlife and forestry service Serfor, leaving many people to wonder what could have caused this bizarre die-off.

The Titicaca water frog ( Telmatobius culeus), also known as the "scrotum frog" for its loose skin, is one of the most critically endangered frogs in the world. The large, entirely aquatic frog adapted to the high altitudes of Lake Titicaca, which flows along the border between Bolivia and Peru, by taking in oxygen through its skin folds. This evolutionary adaptation also makes the frog highly sensitive to changes in its habitat, such as environmental contamination, according to Tom Weaver, curator of reptiles and fish at the Denver Zoo.

Researchers are currently investigating the latest massive die-off, which they think may have been caused by some sort of contamination. In 2014, an algae bloom that removed oxygen from the water, killed a number of frogs and fish, Weaver said. [ 5 Mysterious Animal Die-Offs]

"We're collecting more samples to find out what's causing this, because it could potentially be a disease outbreak or a contamination outbreak," Weaver told Live Science. "When you have an estimated 10,000 frogs die off, then it's usually a contamination of some sort."

The Denver Zoo has been involved in an effort to save the Titicaca water frog for nearly a decade. Researchers at the zoo have previously worked with authorities in South America when such large die-offs occur, and are again collaborating in research on the current die-off.

Weaver said the Denver Zoo team doesn't hear about every incident but that these die-offs are occurring more often, which suggests that the lake and surrounding rivers are perhaps being impacted by infrastructure development and contamination in the area.

"This is not something that happened just yesterday," Weaver said of the die-off at Lake Titicaca. "It's been going on for a while and is probably still going on right now. Everything else is dying in the lake - the fish - and it's affecting the whole chain - the whole ecosystem." [ Photos: America's Only Lake Titicaca Frogs]

The rainy season has begun in the area, and Weaver said this may have triggered the movement of contaminants, such as human sewage and heavy metal pollution, toward the lake. He noted that locals say more amphibian and fish deaths occur during the rainy season.

In a blog post, Roberto Elias, Peru field program manager for the Denver Zoo, wrote about the infrastructure and waste that has contaminated the water and may have led to the frogs' deaths. Many of the deaths were noted along the Coata River, a tributary of Lake Titicaca. This river serves as a water source for several villages in the region, but it is also used as "landfill" by local people, according to Elias.

"In the past, there have been complaints due to high pollution" including solid waste seen along the river, Elias wrote in the post. "This can be harmful to human and animal health, and is seen to a greater degree in species more susceptible such as fish and amphibians."

For the Titicaca water frog, these incidents are incredibly harmful because the amphibian is considered "critically endangered" according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, which assesses species' conservation status. Over 15 years, more than 80 percent of the Titicaca water frog population has disappeared due to overexploitation, habitat degradation and invasive species, the IUCN said.

"It's devastating; the species is already struggling to begin with, and this is a bigger hit to it," Weaver said. "Whether or not the populations come back in these areas is yet to be seen."

Original article on Live Science.

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Why Are Thousands of 'Scrotum Frogs' Dying Off in South America?

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More than 10,000 endangered frogs and other water-dwelling animals living near a lake in South America were found mysteriously dead this month, according to reports from Peru's wildlife and forestry service Serfor, leaving many people to wonder what could have caused this bizarre die-off.

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Hundreds of snow leopards are being killed every year across the mountains of central Asia, threatening the already endangered big cat, according to a new report.

There are as few as 4,000 of the solitary and elusive cat remaining and numbers have fallen by a fifth in the last 16 years.

But between 220 and 450 are killed each year, found the report from Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network, published on Friday ahead of a meeting on the crisis at the UN in New York. The number could be much higher, the NGO warned, as killings in remote mountain areas often go undetected.

Over half the so-called "ghosts of the mountains" are killed by farmers in retaliation for attacks on livestock and 20% are trapped by snares set for other creatures. Another 20% are killed for the illegal fur trade, though pelts from snow leopards killed for other reasons are often sold on.

To reduce the killings, the report's authors recommend the roll-out of leopard-proof corrals for yaks and horses and insurance schemes for farmers. Such schemes are already being tested, for example in a village in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. The natural prey of snow leopards are Himalayan blue sheep and ibex, but their numbers have fallen as their habitat is converted to farmland.

Stronger law enforcement is also needed, said Traffic, with less than a quarter of known cases of snow leopard poaching investigated and just one in seven prosecuted.

Snow leopards live in 12 nations but more than 90% of the reported snow leopard poaching takes place in five countries: China and Mongolia, which host most snow leopards, as well as Pakistan, India and Tajikistan, which each have just a few hundred of the animals.

The report found up to 200 snow leopards are being illegally traded each year, with China and Russia the most frequent destinations for animals poached in other countries and Afghanistan also a major illegal market. But the number of pelts seized has fallen sharply in recent years, particularly in China, perhaps because of increasing enforcement.

"Even if there is reduced demand for snow leopard skins, the killing will continue unless we all work together to drastically reduce human-wildlife conflict and ensure that mountain communities can co-exist with snow leopards," said Rishi Sharma, from WWF and a co-author of the report. "Compensation schemes and innovative predator-proof corrals are making a difference but we urgently need to expand these to benefit communities - and snow leopards - across Asia's high mountains."

The leopards at also at risk from climate change, with warming temperatures threatening to leave a third of their habitat uninhabitable as the tree line shifts up the mountains and causes farmers to plant crops and graze livestock at higher altitudes.
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Hundreds of snow leopards being killed every year, report warns

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Hundreds of snow leopards are being killed every year across the mountains of central Asia, threatening the already endangered big cat, according to a new report. There are as few as 4,000 of the solitary and elusive cat remaining and numbers have fallen by a fifth in the last 16 years.

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Are two heads always better than one?

Scientists from Spain are asking that question after they published findings this month documenting the first ever case of a two-headed shark among egg-laying shark species. The research, published in the Journal of Fish Biology, describes an Atlantic sawtail catshark embryo.

This catshark ( Galeus atlanticus) lives only in the western Mediterranean, at depths of 330 to 710 meters (1,082 to 2,329 feet), and is considered near threatened. While studying the fish's cardiovascular system, the scientists found an embryo with two heads, each with its own mouth, set of eyes, brain, and gill openings. The embryo had a single intestine but two sets of stomachs and livers.

When an animal has two heads it is said to exhibit dicephaly. The condition is relatively rare in the animal kingdom but has been seen in many different groups, from snakes to dolphins to people. (See the two-headed bull shark found by fishermen off the Florida Keys.)

Dicephaly has been recorded in other sharks that either bear live young (viviparous) or lay eggs that develop, and then hatch, inside the mother (ovoviviparous)-but never in true egg-laying sharks (oviparous).

Seven other two-headed sharks of various species had been found with two complete heads. Another shark had been found with a duplicated face. ( See photos of a rare cyclops shark.)

The Spanish team had collected 797 embryos for study of their cardiovascular systems, and only one displayed the abnormal feature, leading them to conclude that the incidence of dicephaly in egg-laying sharks is likely quite low.

The causes of dicephaly aren't known, but the researchers-led by Valentín Sans-Coma of the University of Malaga-suspect that genetics are the most likely culprit (rather than some environmental factor, à la Blinky, the three-eyed fish, from The Simpsons).

"We see two-headed sharks occasionally," says George Burgess, director of the Florida program for shark research at the Florida Museum of Natural History. "It's an anomaly, caused by a genetic misfire. There are lots of different kinds of genetic misfires, and most don't make it out of the womb."

When discussing another find of a two-headed shark, biologist C. Michael Wagner of Michigan State University previously told National Geographic that it is important not to jump to conclusions about such rare finds.

"In and of itself, this single natural history observation does not tell us anything earth-shattering about the health of the world's oceans," he said.

If they make it to birth, two-headed sharks probably don't survive long in the wild, Wagner added, since they likely have a hard time swimming and finding food.

"There's a reason you don't see a lot of sharks with two heads swimming around: they stand out like a sore thumb, so they get eaten," adds Burgess. "They would have trouble swimming and probably digesting food."

This story was updated at 2:45 pm ET with comments from George Burgess.

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Are two heads always better than one? Scientists from Spain are asking that question after they published findings this month documenting the first ever case of a two-headed shark among egg-laying shark species. The research, published in the Journal of Fish Biology , describes an Atlantic sawtail catshark embryo.

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Research by scientists at the University of Bristol has, for the first time, found that human-made noise can have a detrimental impact on an animal's use of scent -- putting them at greater risk of being attacked by predators.

Using field-based experimental trials on dwarf mongooses in South Africa, the researchers combined sound recordings and fecal samples to demonstrate that road-noise playback negatively affected the mongooses' ability to detect predator feces. Even after detection, the additional noise led to less information gathering and less vigilance, making the mongooses more vulnerable to danger.

Professor Andy Radford from the School of Biological Sciences said: "We've known for a long time that noise from urbanisation, traffic and airports can detrimentally affect humans by causing stress, sleep deprivation, cardiac problems and slower learning. What's becoming increasingly clear is that a lot of other species -- mammals, birds, fish, insects and amphibians -- are also impacted in all sorts of ways by anthropogenic, or human-made, noise."

One obvious way in which human-made noise can cause animals problems is through the masking of valuable acoustic information. Lead author Amy Morris-Drake says: "What our study shows for the first time is that there could also be disruption to the use of olfactory information; human-made noise could affect decision-making based on information gathered using a different sense."

The Bristol team's experiment used groups of wild dwarf mongooses that were so familiar with the researchers' close presence that they could walk within a few feet of them. Co-author Dr Julie Kern adds: "This habituation allows us to conduct ecologically relevant experiments in the mongooses' natural habitat while collecting incredibly detailed and accurate information."

Closely monitoring the mongooses, the team found that their adaptive responses to predatory cues, such as increased inspection of the cue, vigilance scanning for danger and more time spent near the safety of the burrow, were all disrupted by road-traffic noise.

Morris-Drake said: "While lots of work on the impacts of human-made noise has shown effects on animal vocalisations, movement patterns and foraging, it is often difficult to determine what that might mean for survival or reproductive success. By looking at responses to cues about a predator's presence, there is a direct link to survival; making the wrong decision can result in death."

Professor Radford concluded: "Our study suggests that noise pollution can have a negative effect in terms of information use -- in this case the impact on responses to smell, a very common information source in mammals. Given the demonstrated effects, considering the interactions among multiple sensory channels is critically important if we are to understand fully the consequences of human-induced environmental change."

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behavioral science; nature; wild animals; dolphins and whales; endangered animals; cats; animals; zoology

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Human-made noise can affect how animals use information from scents

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Research by scientists at the University of Bristol has, for the first time, found that human-made noise can have a detrimental impact on an animal's use of scent -- putting them at greater risk of being attacked by predators.

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A common orb-weaving spider may grow larger and have an increased ability to reproduce when living in urban areas, according to a study published August 20, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Elizabeth Lowe from the University of Sydney, Australia and colleagues.

Urbanization may drastically alter the landscape, local climate, and consequently the organisms that inhabit it. Some will no longer have the resources they need to survive in the urban environment, while others may thrive, possibly more so than in their native habitat; one way in which this may be evident is in marked changes in the organism's size. The authors of this study investigated changes in the physical attributes of the orb-weaving spider, commonly found in both urban and natural landscapes, using multiple environmental variables. The researchers quantified the degree of urbanization at multiple sites in Sydney, Australia, and investigated changes in the orb-weaving spider's body size, fat reserves, and ovary weight.

Results show that the spiders had smaller bodies in areas with more vegetation cover and larger bodies in areas associated with urban development, indicated by the presence of hard surfaces. Additionally, the authors found that the spiders' reproductive ability, measured by increased ovary weight, may have increased in higher socioeconomic areas, such as in areas with hard surfaces or leaf litter. According to the authors, the larger size and increased reproductive capacity of orb-weaving spiders in urban areas further support the idea that some species may benefit from habitat changes associated with urbanization.
Story Source:
Materials provided by PLOS. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Elizabeth C. Lowe, Shawn M. Wilder, Dieter F. Hochuli. Urbanisation at Multiple Scales Is Associated with Larger Size and Higher Fecundity of an Orb-Weaving Spider. PLoS ONE, 2014; 9 (8): e105480 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0105480

Cite This Page:

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spiders and  ticks; animals; extreme survival; wild animals; sustainability; environmental science; environmental policy; geography

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Orb-weaving spiders living in urban areas may be larger

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A common orb-weaving spider may grow larger and have an increased ability to reproduce when living in urban areas, according to a study published August 20, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Elizabeth Lowe from the University of Sydney, Australia and colleagues.

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The "Greatest Show on Earth" may soon be forced to fold its tent in New York City.

The City Council is considering a bill to ban wild and exotic animals from appearing in "entertainment" events, a move that a circus spokesman warned might spell the end of a 100-year tradition in the Big Apple.

"There are only two circuses that regularly perform in New York City, Ringling Brothers and UniverSoul," said spokesman Ken Frydman. "If the bill passes, neither circus could return in their current form."

Radio City's annual Christmas show, which features camels, could also be affected.

Barbara Austin, a founder of the Dawn Animal Agency, which has provided the animals to Radio City for 30 years, said no one from the City Council has reached out to her about the bill.

"I was kind of shocked that they didn't ask any input from anyone in the city, any of the trainers," she said.

The bill, which is scheduled for a public hearing next week, would prohibit "wild or exotic" animals at circuses when they're housed in "mobile" facilities for more than 12 hours at a time.

Zoos and religious institutions would be exempt. So would farm animals, such as horses.

Frydman said Ringling has an 80-city circuit and it would be impossible to replace its animals just for New York.

Stephen Payne, a VP at Feld Entertainment, Ringling's parent company, said, "This bill is unnecessary, does nothing to advance animal welfare, and would deny circus fans the opportunity to see the amazing bond that exists between our human and animal performers."

He noted that the circus is already subject to local, state and federal animal-welfare inspections.

"We are very proud of the high level of care we provide for all our animals," he said.

But animal-rights advocates disagreed.

"These are wild animals and they need to be treated in a humane way," Councilman Corey Johnson (D-Manhattan) said. "I don't think trucking animals into the city is a humane way to be treating them."

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This exotic animal ban could kick Ringling Bros. out of NYC

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The "Greatest Show on Earth" may soon be forced to fold its tent in New York City. The City Council is considering a bill to ban wild and exotic animals from appearing in "entertainment" events, a move that a circus spokesman warned might spell the end of a 100-year tradition in the Big Apple.

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Manduca sexta caterpillar, also known as a "goliath worm", found in Urbana, Illinois, U.S.

Credit: Daniel Schwen/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Hefty, bright-green caterpillars sometimes called goliath worms are living up to their moniker: They are so tough, they can survive underwater for hours, scientists have found.

And during their pupa stage - encased in a chrysalis before transforming into adult moths - they can survive for days at a time without surfacing.

Researchers discovered that the hardy caterpillars of Manduca sexta moths could recover after spending as much as 4 hours immersed in water. The pupae were even more resilient, emerging after a five-day soak and showing no long-term ill effects. [ Gallery: Out-of-This-World Images of Insects]

Caterpillars are the larvae of moths and butterflies, and many species are known to have extraordinary adaptations during this life stage that help them weather tough conditions or escape threats. Some click, squeak or whistle to scare off attackers, while others rely on defensive barfing. Some use their poop to send chemical signals that trick plants into lowering their defenses, while others pretend , to fool predators.

M. sexta larvae, which pupate (grow into an adult) in the ground, face a particularly tough challenge due to seasonal flooding in their desert habitat; how they might overcome that challenge was a question that intrigued study co-author H. Arthur Woods, an entomologist at the University of Montana.

"I've always been really impressed with the torrential rains and flooding that can occur during the summer monsoon rains," Woods told Live Science. "We often saw Manduca habitat that got flooded out for days at a time, and we started to wonder whether and how pupae could survive that water."

Insects experiencing long dunks underwater use one of two mechanisms to survive and recover, Woods said.

One technique involves the insect extracting oxygen from the surrounding water; that requires specialized body parts. Mayflies and damselflies, for example, have a type of gill that connects to the trachea and conveys dissolved oxygen in water into the insect's body, allowing them to breathe even when fully immersed.

The other method involves sealing up the body and getting by without oxygen, a process known as anaerobic metabolism. But this can be risky, Woods said. This type of metabolism produces toxic byproducts, which, at high levels, can poison the insect.

"So usually insects can use anaerobic metabolism for finite periods of time," he said.

To find out M. sexta's strategy for surviving underwater, the researchers immersed caterpillars and the more developed pupae. The caterpillars were able to recover after 4 hours underwater - not too shabby. But pupae were "the champs" at recovery, according to Woods. He and his colleagues found that the submerged pupae didn't draw upon dissolved oxygen, and relied on anaerobic metabolism to keep going when they were underwater, for as long as five days.

What surprised Woods was how long they could do it, and still recover.

In the absence of oxygen, a compound called lactate built up in the M. sexta pupae's cells. This could have had fatal consequences, but the scientists found that M. sexta was capable of quickly metabolizing, or breaking down, the lactate once they were removed from the water.

But after spending a long time in water, a sudden reinfusion of life-giving oxygen doesn't necessarily mean that M. sexta's troubles are over.

"That big pulse of oxygen can generate what are called 'oxygen radicals' - basically toxic oxygen-based molecules that zip around and damage other molecules in cells," he told Live Science. "We found that Manduca had elevated metabolic rates well beyond the point when they had rid themselves of all the lactate - which we think means that they were still repairing other tissues," Woods said.

The findings were published online Oct. 5 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

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Back from the Dead? Goliath Worms 'Drown' and Recover

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Hefty, bright-green caterpillars sometimes called goliath worms are living up to their moniker: They are so tough, they can survive underwater for hours, scientists have found. And during their pupa stage - encased in a chrysalis before transforming into adult moths - they can survive for days at a time without surfacing.

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This lion king (pictured above) is a queen. And she's not the only one.

Five lionesses in Botswana have grown a mane and are showing male-like behaviours. One is even roaring and mounting other females.

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Male lions are distinguished by their mane, which they use to attract females, and they roar to protect their territory or call upon members of their pride. Females lack a mane and are not as vocal.

But sometimes lionesses grow a mane and even behave a bit like males. However, until now, reports of such maned lionesses have been extremely rare and largely anecdotal. We knew they existed, but little about how they behave.

Now, Geoffrey D. Gilfillan at the University of Sussex in Falmer, UK, and colleagues have reported five lionesses sporting a mane at the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana's Okavango delta.

Gilfillan started studying these lionesses back in March 2014, and for the next two years he focused on recording the behaviour of one of them, called SaF05. She had an underdeveloped mane and was larger than most females.

"While SaF05 is mostly female in her behaviour - staying with the pride, mating males - she also has some male behaviours, such as increased scent-marking and roaring, as well as mounting other females," says Gilfillan.

"Although females do roar and scent-mark like males, they usually do so less frequently," he says. "SaF05, however, was much more male-like in her behaviour, regularly scent-marking and roaring."

A likely explanation is an increased level of testosterone as these lionesses mature, says Luke Hunter, president and chief conservation officer at the global wild cat conservation organisation Panthera.

In lions, testosterone directly affects the development of manes. Castrated males, for example, lose their ability to produce testosterone and promptly lose their mane, too.

In 2011, a captive lioness called Emma at the National Zoological Gardens of South Africa developed a mane. Tests revealed high levels of testosterone due to a problem in her ovaries, and once they were removed she reverted to a typical lioness.

The idea that testosterone is implicated in the Botswana lionesses is also backed by observations of their reproductive success, says Kathleen Alexander at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

"While some of the maned lionesses were observed mating, none of them became pregnant, suggesting they are infertile, a known consequence of high levels of androgens such as testosterone in females," she says. "The behavioural changes suggest this is likely the case."

Hunter suspects this explanation applies to the animals studied by Gilfillan and his colleagues. "Given all five known maned females come from the Okavango region, there must be a genetic component in this population underlying the phenomenon," he says.

"I don't think this is anything to be concerned about," says Hunter. "Although the females are apparently infertile, they otherwise appear to live long, healthy lives. And from a conservation perspective, there is nothing to suggest the pattern is increasing or will ever be anything more than a rare, local phenomenon."

No one seems to be studying the exact genetic and hormonal causes of this phenomenon at the moment. "I guess there are just one or a few genes altered," says Vincent Savolainen at Imperial College London, who had a student briefly work on the possible causes. "I believe some masculinised genes have been documented in domesticated cats - it would be good to look into this, especially given that the cat genome is available as reference."

Could the masculinised females in fact be a boon to the pride when it comes to competing with other prides? It's possible, it seems.

Gilfillan says he once saw SaF05 bring down a zebra. "A neighbouring pride stole the zebra from SaF05, but in return SaF05 killed two of their cubs."

Cub-killing behaviour is rare in females but common in males.

Journal reference: African Journal of Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/aje.12360

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Five wild lionesses grow a mane and start acting like males

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This lion king (pictured above) is a queen. And she's not the only one. Five lionesses in Botswana have grown a mane and are showing male-like behaviours. One is even roaring and mounting other females. Advertisement Male lions are distinguished by their mane, which they use to attract females, and they roar to protect their territory or call upon members of their pride.

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Based on its nearly 2-inch-long teeth, Megalolamna paradoxodon likely measured about 12 feet long.

Credit: Kenshu Shimada

About 20 million years ago, a car-size shark swam along the ancient coastlines of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, hunting for medium-size fish with its pointy teeth, a new study finds.

However, there are few fossil remains of the now-extinct shark. Researchers have found merely five of its nearly 2-inch-long (4.5 centimeters) teeth, in different parts of the world: Japan, California, Peru and North Carolina, the researchers said.

"The fact that such a large ...shark with such a wide geographic distribution had evaded recognition until now indicates just how little we still know about the Earth's ancient marine ecosystem," said Kenshu Shimada, the lead author of the study and a paleobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago. [ Image Gallery: Ancient Monsters of the Sea]

Researchers named the shark, which lived in the early Miocene epoch, Megalolamna paradoxodon. The genus name is a nod to the shark's mega-size teeth that superficially resemble those of sharks in the genus Lamna. The species name notes the shark's strange teeth, with the Latin word "paradoxum," and the Greek "odon," meaning paradox and teeth, respectively.

Researchers found Megalolamna paradoxodon fossil teeth in California, North Carolina, Peru and Japan.

Credit: Kenshu Shimada

"At first glance, teeth of Megalolamna paradoxodon look like gigantic teeth of the genus Lamna, that includes the modern porbeagle and salmon sharks," Shimada told Live Science in an email. "However, the fossil teeth are too robust for Lamna - it shows a mosaic of dental features reminiscent of the genus Otodus. So, we determined it to be a species new to science that belongs to the family Otodontidae with no direct relationship with Lamna."

M. paradoxodon's front teeth were fit for grasping, and its back teeth were adept at cutting; these two types of teeth probably helped the giant predator seize and slice prey, Shimada added.

The shark likely lived in shallow, coastal waters in the mid-latitudes, which is where researchers unearthed its fossilized teeth. But even though the researchers have only its teeth, they were able to estimate the length of the shark by comparing the specimens to modern shark teeth.

By analyzing the tooth-to-body ratio of the shark's modern relatives in the lamniform family - including the sand tiger shark, mako shark and great white shark - the researchers estimated that M. paradoxodon could grow to be up to 12 feet (3.7 meters) long. That makes it smaller than the great white shark, which can reach lengths of between 15 and 20 feet (4.6 to 6.1 m).

However, it's hard to say exactly how large M. paradoxodon grew, said John-Paul Hodnett, a shark specialist and graduate student of biology at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia who was not involved in the study.

"For teeth, you should always be cautious of the fact that it is possible to have very large or small teeth in a shark's jaw, which do not represent the true aspect of the shark's body size," Hodnett told Live Science. For instance, some of the modern whale shark's teeth are tiny, but the beast can grow to be more than 40 feet (12 m) long, he said.

The prehistoric teeth helped the researchers make another "mega" discovery. They compared them with the teeth of Carcharocles megalodon, an extinct species that is the most massive shark ever known to have lived. Megalodon could grow to be up to 60 feet (18 m) long, and its bite was more powerful than Tyrannosaurus rex's.

Both M. paradoxodon and C. megalodon belong to the extinct family of sharks known as Otodontidae, but scientists previously placed C. megalodon in a distinct lineage, Shimada said.

But Shimada and his colleagues now suggest that M. paradoxodon and C. megalodon are actually close cousins, and that C. megalodon should be should be placed in another genus called Otodus. [ 7 Shark Mysteries]

" Carcharocles megalodon has been the typical expression for the fossil shark," Shimada said. "However, our new study clearly supports the idea suggested by a few previous workers that ' megalodon' should be placed within the genus Otodus, and thus it should be referred to as Otodus megalodon from now on."

The study was published online Oct. 3 in the journal Historical Biology.

Original article on Live Science.

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Extinct 12-Foot-Long Shark Is Related to Ginormous Megalodon

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About 20 million years ago, a car-size shark swam along the ancient coastlines of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, hunting for medium-size fish with its pointy teeth, a new study finds. However, there are few fossil remains of the now-extinct shark.

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Sharks and rays win new protections at global wildlife summit

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Cites votes for new measures to control the trade in silky and thresher sharks, hunted for their fins, and devil rays, whose gills are prized as a medicinal 'cure'

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As the legend goes, when star-crossed lovers Naupaka and Kaui knew they'd be forever separated, Naupaka took the flower from behind her ear and tore it in two pieces, keeping one and giving Kaui the other.

As she went to the mountains, and he to the sea, the plants around them felt their sorrow, and from then on bloomed only in half-flowers.

Such is the Hawaiian myth behind the naupaka, a beach shrub native to the islands whose flowers look like they're missing half of their petals.

Now the plants are linked to another sad event: Their primary pollinators, a group of more than 60 yellow-faced bee species in the genus Hylaeus, are disappearing fast. So fast that on September 30, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deemed seven Hylaeus species as endangered-the first bees ever on the list. ( See seven intimate pictures that reveal the beauty of bees.)

In the early 1900s, yellow-faced bees were the most abundant Hawaiian insects, ranging from the coastlines to the mountains and even the subalpine slopes of Mauna Kea.

Yet habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change have hit Hawaii's only native bees so hard that they're now one of the state's least observed pollinators. Only two known populations of H. anthracinus, one of the most studied species, remain on the island of Oahu, and a few small populations are scattered across several other islands, according to recent surveys.

"What we saw was really alarming-the bees were doing a lot worse than we thought," says Cynthia King, an entomologist with Hawaii's Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

In 2010, the state government stepped up efforts to learn more about the bees. Around the same time, the invertebrate nonprofit Xerces Society submitted a petition to federally protect seven yellow-faced bees. Saving these species is a "necessary part" of the White House's strategy to protect pollinators, says Xerces executive director Scott Black.

"We should protect the rarest of the rare."

Ignored Insects

The six-millimeter-long, solitary bees-so named for the golden mark between the males' eyes-are the only bees from Hawaii.

Even so, they flew largely under the radar until around 1995, when Karl Magnacca, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawai'i, noticed bees buzzing in his house on the Big Island. When he looked up the insects up in recent scientific literature, he came up virtually empty.

"That was surprising, since bees in general are an important group. [Yellow-faced bees] have been ignored since the 1920s."

Magnacca decided to do his Ph.D. on the bees, and in the process discovered ten new species, as well as mapped out where the various species live in Hawaii-"sparking a renaissance of interest in them," he says. ( Read "Quest for a Superbee" in National Geographic magazine.)

The bees have possibly gone overlooked in part because they look like wasps.

For one, they're fast-if a bee passes you, all you'll likely see is a little black squiggle, Pigpen-style, according to King, the state entomologist. The insects also have black, shiny bodies, without that classic bee fuzz.

Deadly Invaders

To figure out the life cycle of this little-seen insect, University of Hawai'i entomologist Jason Graham has studied-for the first time-where H. anthracinus lives and nests on Honolulu's Ka Iwi coast and in the James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge on the North Shore.

He found that the bees like to nest in holes in coral rocks that have washed ashore or in the hollow stems of a few coastal plants. After laying eggs, females seal the holes with a type of waterproof cellophane.

Graham has also observed an invasive bee from India-ironically from the same genus-competing with the native bees, nesting in the same plant cavities and foraging on the same flowers.

Invasive species in general are devastating-in addition to these rival Hylaeus bees, yellow-faced bees must contend with alien ants. (Hawaii has no native ant species.)

Highly efficient foragers and predators, ants see a yellow-faced bee nest, with its beefy larvae, "as an amazing little buffet," says King.

Giving Bees a Boost

By dissecting nests and measuring their sizes, as well as raising bees in the lab, Graham has developed an artificial nest box that allows bees in and keeps ants out.

"The artificial nests are wooden blocks with pre-drilled holes that match the hole size female bees look for when home-shopping for a nest spot," he says. The cord that attaches the nest blocks to a branch is then covered with a sticky substance that prevents crawling predators, like ants, from getting inside.

Eventually, Graham envisions placing such boxes in areas where yellow-faced bees no longer live, so that when adults emerge for the first time they'll return to the same spot to reproduce-and therefore reestablish populations.

The boxes "may bring these bees back from the verge of extinction," he says.

More difficult to combat are rising seas and more intense storm surges. In 2015, 40-foot waves wiped out an entire population of bees living on a rock jetty, Graham adds.

"We Can Do More"

Black acknowledges that "Hawaii is one of the toughest places to do conservation. That said, we can do more."

For instance, the state could focus on setting aside the bees' remaining strongholds as conservation areas, ensuring they're free of development and agriculture and trying as much as possible to keep invasive species at bay. ( See more gorgeous photos of bees.)

King is optimistic that the bees' new endangered status will strengthen plans to help the insects.

"A lot of people think of Hawaii as a lost cause because we have so many invasive species," she says, but "we're really well positioned right now to make headway for the bee."

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For the First Time, Bees Declared Endangered in the U.S.

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As the legend goes, when star-crossed lovers Naupaka and Kaui knew they'd be forever separated, Naupaka took the flower from behind her ear and tore it in two pieces, keeping one and giving Kaui the other. As she went to the mountains, and he to the sea, the plants around them felt their sorrow, and from then on bloomed only in half-flowers.

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The ancestors of rattlesnakes were equipped with venom that could target muscles, blood and the nerves.

Credit: Tom Reichner / Shutterstock.com

The ancestor of today's rattlesnakes was a serpent to be feared: It had genes to make venoms that would target the blood, the muscle and the nervous system.

Today's rattlers, on the other hand, are specialists. The eastern diamondback and the western diamondback both have venom that damages muscles, while the Mojave rattlesnake's toxins target the nerves. Now, researchers have learned that rattlesnake ancestors rapidly deleted genes that made diverse toxins, which resulted in faster-than-usual evolution.

"This wholesale loss is unusual," study researcher Sean Carroll, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said in a statement. "It's not just run-of-the-mill, ordinary variation."

The researchers conducted a genetic analysis to track the loss of various venom genes. Most of the time, evolution works slowly - genes that are no longer used continue to clutter up the genome for ages. But that wasn't the case for the venom genes, the researchers found.

Neurotoxin genes evolved 22 million years ago, predating the evolution of rattlesnakes themselves, the researchers found. Rattlesnakes evolved 12 million to 14 million years ago. Over time, the rattlers lost between two to four venom genes each, compared to their last common ancestor, and all three rattlesnake species currently share two of an original suite of seven genes. [ Image Gallery: The Social Life of Rattlesnakes]

The western diamondback and the eastern diamondback each deleted their neurotoxin genes 6 million years ago, the researchers reported Sept. 15 in the journal Current Biology. The Mojave rattlesnake deleted its muscle toxin gene 4 million years ago.

The reason for this erasure has to do with how the toxin genes were arranged. The genes were part of a sequence that also contained what's called a "transposable element," Carroll and his colleagues found. Transposable elements are sometimes called "jumping genes" because they can easily move around within the genome. Their ease of movement makes for easy mutations and deletions of protein-coding genes nearby.

"You can envision a really quick and dynamic process in rattlesnakes, where this whole locus (stretch of DNA) is sort of breathing - expanding and contracting," postdoctoral researcher Matt Giorgianni of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said in the statement. "It really highlights how dynamic this genomic region is and helps put into perspective how quickly these things could happen."

Even individual species of snakes can show variation in venom, study researcher Noah Dowell, also a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said in the statement. When the team studied the genomes of four western diamondbacks, they found that one had two extra venom genes.

It's not clear why rattlers decided to ditch their wide variety of chemical weaponry in favor of specialized toxins. They may have been evolving in response to the susceptibility of their prey to various venoms, Carroll said.

"There's good evidence in nature that there is an arms race going on that generally exists between predators and prey," said Carroll. "Those arms races can be pretty intense and not dissimilar to things like antibiotics and bacteria, where you have a really strong, kind of do-or-die selective pressure that can accelerate the pace of evolution and intensify the changes that take place over time."

Original article on Live Science.

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Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor

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The ancestor of today's rattlesnakes was a serpent to be feared: It had genes to make venoms that would target the blood, the muscle and the nervous system. Today's rattlers, on the other hand, are specialists. The eastern diamondback and the western diamondback both have venom that damages muscles, while the Mojave rattlesnake's toxins target the nerves.

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The Bobbit worm hunts at night by extending its antennae above its burrow, hoping to snatch passing prey. The worms are often up to 10 feet (3 meters) in length.

Credit: copyright Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel

Indo-Pacific fish have a cooperative defense against a real-life sarlacc: spit.

For the first time, researchers have observed small fish mobbing up against a worm that hunts like the Star Wars predator made famous in "Return of the Jedi." The giant Bobbit worm ( Eunice aphroditois) buries its 10-foot-long (3 meters) bulk in the sandy seafloor, waving wormy antennae in the water and dragging passing fish into its den.

A single small fish is no match for this predatory monster, but a white-and-yellow species called Peters' monocle bream ( Scolopsis affinis) gangs up to defend itself against the Bobbit worm, researchers reported Sept. 12 in the journal Scientific Reports. In doing so, it also alerts other fish to the worm's location, ruining the predator's chances for a meal.

"Concerning their mental capacity, fish are for the most part greatly underestimated," study researcher Daniel Haag-Wackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel, said in a statement. Research into their behavior in their natural habitats continues to reveal big surprises." [ See Photos of a Worm with 5 Shape-Shifting Mouths]

This illustration shows an unfortunate fish being dragged into the Bobbit worm's burrow. In some cases, predation triggers survivors to shoot water jets at the worm.

Credit: copyright Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel

The Bobbit worm is an annelid, or segmented worm. It attacks its prey with sharp teeth and a toxin that can stun. As fearsome as they are, these worms don't move around much. They rely on the element of surprise to catch prey (and are much more subtle than the Star Wars sarlacc, which relied on the enemies of Jabba the Hutt to stay well-fed).

When Peters' monocle bream detect a Bobbit worm, they respond by hovering right over the entrance to the worm's burrow and spitting jets of water at the worm. When one bream starts this behavior, other breams join in, a phenomenon called "mobbing." Mobbing occurs when prey animals team up to drive off a predator. Birds do it frequently. Starlings, for example, will team up to dive-bomb hawks or owls to keep from being picked off, according to the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife.

The Bobbit worm lays in wait for prey to wander too close to its spring-loaded jaw. The worms have sharp teeth and can inject a toxin to stun their prey.

Credit: copyright Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel

The spitting fish drive the Bobbit worm back into its burrow, and might also mark the spot as dangerous so that the school can avoid it in the future, the researchers wrote. Though the fish sometimes mobbed a worm after the worm snatched one of their shoalmates, the researchers didn't see any fish get attacked during mobbing. Because Bobbit worms prefer to surprise their prey, it's probably not too dangerous for the fish to participate in the mob, the researchers wrote.

The study took place in the Lembeh Strait near Indonesia. The researchers dove to the black-sand bottom 90 times to observe four different Bobbit worms and the fish that inhabited the territory. In one case, a second species of bream, the monogrammed monocle bream ( Scolopsis monogramma), joined the Peters' monocle breams in shooting water at the worm.

"This astonishing observation may indicate that mobbing by directing water jets to an ambushing enemy is more widespread," the researchers wrote.

Original article on Live Science.

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Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor

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Fish Spit to Keep Monstrous 'Sarlacc' Worms Away

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Indo-Pacific fish have a cooperative defense against a real-life sarlacc: spit. For the first time, researchers have observed small fish mobbing up against a worm that hunts like the Star Wars predator made famous in "Return of the Jedi."

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Trevor Young

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Chemical composition of hitchhikers' shells might reveal ancient baleen travel routes

DENVER - Barnacles can tell a whale of a tale. Chemical clues inside barnacles that hitched rides on baleen whales millions of years ago could divulge ancient whale migration routes, new research suggests.

Modern baleen whales migrate thousands of kilometers annually between breeding and feeding grounds, but almost nothing is known about how these epic journeys have changed over time. Scientists can glean where an aquatic animal has lived based on its teeth. The mix of oxygen isotopes embedded inside newly formed tooth material depends on the region and local temperature, with more oxygen-18 used near the poles than near the equator. That oxygen provides a timeline of the animal's travels. Baleen whales don't have teeth, though. So paleobiologists Larry Taylor and Seth Finnegan, both of the University of California, Berkeley, looked at something else growing on whales: barnacles. Like

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Chemical composition of hitchhikers' shells might reveal ancient baleen travel routes DENVER - Barnacles can tell a whale of a tale. Chemical clues inside barnacles that hitched rides on baleen whales millions of years ago could divulge ancient whale migration routes, new research suggests.

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Wild deer in the city of Nara have long been loved by tourists and locals alike, and have been protected and cared for under law. Some 1,200 deer inhabit Nara Park, pleasing visitors with their mostly harmless, tame nature.

Some of the wandering herd, however, have plagued local farmers by inflicting severe crop damage. But any talk of limiting their numbers has been taboo, because deer across the city are designated as a natural treasure under the Cultural Properties Protection Law, and also because they are considered to be "the holy messenger of god" - due to their habitat's proximity to the 1,200-year-old Kasuga Grand Shrine.

On Tuesday, the Nara Prefectural Government put an end to years of controversy over the issue, with a panel of experts concluding that it will redefine areas where deer must be protected. Capturing and culling of deer in other areas of the city will be permitted for the first time, though the prefectural government must submit a detailed plan in advance to the Cultural Affairs Agency, according to a Nara government official.

Under the new zoning policy, which will come into effect later this year, the city will be divided into four areas: "the priority protection zone," covering all of Nara Park, where officials will make daily patrols to monitor and treat injured deer; "the semipriority protection zone" surrounding the park, where patrols will be less frequent but deer will still be protected; "the borderline zone" where some deer will be protected but others found damaging farmers' crops will be captured; and "the management zone" where deer can be captured and killed.

Prefectural government official Kazutomi Mukai told The Japan Times on Thursday that the new rules will not affect the 1,200 deer that live in Nara Park, stressing that it will only target animals that wander into mountainous areas and eat vegetables and rice.

Mukai added that the prefecture's previous attempts to control the deer population ended in failure due to fierce public opposition.

"Last time we tried to take action, which was a few years ago, our office was flooded with phone calls from people protesting it," Mukai said. "Many of them were those from outside the prefecture," who voiced surprise that Nara officials would even think about killing any of its deer.

Crop damage inflicted by deer has been a problem nationwide, forcing many rural municipalities to take measures to control local populations in recent years. The agriculture ministry estimates a third of the ¥20 billion agricultural damage caused by wild animals in fiscal 2014 was due to deer.

"It has sort of been a taboo for a long time," Mukai said. "But we want to underscore the fact the measure is also intended to protect the existing deer in Nara Park, and the number to be captured will be very small."

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Nara to allow some deer to be culled under new management policy | The Japan Times

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Wild deer in the city of Nara have long been loved by tourists and locals alike, and have been protected and cared for under law. Some 1,200 deer inhabit Nara Park, pleasing visitors with their mostly harmless, tame nature. Some of the wandering herd, however, have plagued local farmers by inflicting severe crop damage.

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florida tackling python problem with hunting contest - cnn

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Florida tackling python problem with hunting contest - CNN

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The state of Florida is launching a hunting contest in an effort to fight the out-of-control Burmese python population.

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From climate to the peninsula's very shape, not much in Florida has stayed the same over the last 8 million years.

Except, it turns out, alligators.

While many of today's top predators are more recent products of evolution, the modern American alligator is a reptile quite literally from another time. New University of Florida research shows these prehistoric-looking creatures have remained virtually untouched by major evolutionary change for at least 8 million years, and may be up to 6 million years older than previously thought. Besides some sharks and a handful of others, very few living vertebrate species have such a long duration in the fossil record with so little change.

"If we could step back in time 8 million years, you'd basically see the same animal crawling around then as you would see today in the Southeast. Even 30 million years ago, they didn't look much different," said Evan Whiting, a former UF undergraduate and the lead author of two studies published during summer 2016 in the Journal of Herpetology and Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology that document the alligator's evolution -- or lack thereof. "We were surprised to find fossil alligators from this deep in time that actually belong to the living species, rather than an extinct one."

Whiting, now a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, describes the alligator as a survivor, withstanding sea-level fluctuations and extreme changes in climate that would have caused some less-adaptive animals to rapidly change or go extinct. Whiting also discovered that early American alligators likely shared the Florida coastline with a 25-foot now-extinct giant crocodile.

In modern times, however, he said alligators face a threat that could hinder the scaly reptiles' ability to thrive like nothing in their past -- humans.

Despite their resilience and adaptability, alligators were nearly hunted to extinction in the early 20th century. The Endangered Species Act has significantly improved the number of alligators in the wild, but there are still ongoing encounters between humans and alligators that are not desirable for either species and, in many places, alligator habitats are being destroyed or humans are moving into them, Whiting said.

"The same traits that allowed alligators to remain virtually the same through numerous environmental changes over millions of years can become a bit of a problem when they try to adapt to humans," Whiting said. "Their adaptive nature is why we have alligators in swimming pools or crawling around golf courses."

Whiting hopes his research findings serve to inform the public that the alligator was here first, and we should act accordingly by preserving the animal's wild populations and its environment. By providing a more complete evolutionary history of the alligator, his research provides the groundwork for conserving habitats where alligators have dominated for millions of years.

"If we know from the fossil record that alligators have thrived in certain types of habitats since deep in time, we know which habitats to focus conservation and management efforts on today," Whiting said.

Study authors began re-thinking the alligator's evolutionary history after Whiting examined an ancient alligator skull, originally thought to be an extinct species, unearthed in Marion County, Florida, and found it to be virtually identical to the iconic modern species. He compared the ancient skull with dozens of other fossils and modern skeletons to look at the whole genus and trace major changes, or the lack thereof, in alligator morphology.

Whiting also studied the carbon and oxygen compositions of the teeth of both ancient alligators and the 20- to 25-foot extinct crocodile Gavialosuchus americanus that once dominated the Florida coastline and died out about 5 million years ago for unknown reasons. The presence of alligator and Gavialosuchus fossils at several localities in north Florida suggest the two species may have coexisted in places near the coast, he said.

Analysis of the teeth suggests, however, that the giant croc was a marine reptile, which sought its prey in ocean waters, while alligators tended to hunt in freshwater and on land. That doesn't mean alligators weren't occasionally eaten by the monster crocs, though.

"Evan's research shows alligators didn't evolve in a vacuum with no other crocodilians around," said co-author David Steadman, ornithology curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. "The gators we see today do not really compete with anything, but millions of years ago it was not only competing with another type of crocodilian, it was competing with a much larger one."

Steadman said the presence of the ancient crocodile in Florida may have helped keep the alligators in freshwater habitats, though it appears alligators have always been most comfortable in freshwater.

While modern alligators do look prehistoric as they bake on sandbars along the Suwannee River or stroll down sidewalks on the UF campus, study authors said they are not somehow immune to evolution. On the contrary, they are the result of an incredibly ancient evolutionary line. The group they belong to, Crocodylia, has been around for at least 84 million years and has diverse ancestors dating as far back as the Triassic, more than 200 million years ago.

Other study co-authors were John Krigbaum with UF's anthropology department and Kent Vliet with UF's biology department.

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nature; new species; evolutionary biology; extinction; frogs and reptiles; endangered animals; animals; fish

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Reptilian anachronism: American alligator older than we thought

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From climate to the peninsula's very shape, not much in Florida has stayed the same over the last 8 million years. Except, it turns out, alligators. While many of today's top predators are more recent products of evolution, the modern American alligator is a reptile quite literally from another time.

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London Zoo: Animals can show emotions similar to humans

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It is common to the point of cliché for stories about research on animal emotions to start by saying that until recently, scientists objected to ascribing emotions to animals, but a surprising new study reveals that animals actually do experience them. This angle is antiquated to the point of absurdity.

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What do Odysseus and TV wildlife expert Steve Irwin have in common? (Stingray barbs killed them both.) What is the most venomous creature in the world? (The Australian box jellyfish.) What does it feel like to get high on cobra venom? (Weird.) Could bee venom cure Lyme disease? (Possibly.)

These are some of the fascinating stories Christie Wilcox tells in Venomous: How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry. When National Geographic caught up with her by phone in Hawaii, she explained why the king cobra packs such a punch; how snakes may have helped our ancestors evolve bigger brains; and why the Gila monster's venom may hold the key to the treatment of diabetes and even Alzheimer's. [Find out about the medical potential of venom.]
Let's cut to the chase: What are the five most dangerous venomous creatures in the world?
Oh, I love that question! [Laughs uproariously] You have to give snakes their due because overall snakes kill 90,000-plus people a year and disable countless more -though the sad fact is we don't exactly know [how many] because a lot of these places are poor and don't have medical systems that allow good reporting.

The main places people are dying are Africa, Sri Lanka, India, and South America. In Africa there is a snake bite crisis because not only do they have deadly snakes that cause significant morbidity and mortality, but the only good antivenom we used to have is not being made anymore.

At the top of the snake list is the king cobra. Compared to other snakes, their venom isn't particularly potent, but they can inject massive volumes and they're huge, seven-to-eight-foot-long snakes.

Next, I would put the Australian box jellyfish because they can kill in less than five minutes. The Conus geographus, or geographic cone snail, has a 70 to 80 percent fatality rate when it stings but, luckily for us, it's very rare.

I would also include the Lonomia caterpillar because I like the way it kills. [Laughs] It's this tiny, furry caterpillar, but it can cause massive internal hemorrhaging. That's just so badass. [Laughs]

Number one is the mosquito, though. And I have a specific reason for saying that. When people talk about venomous, they talk about venomous to humans. And by far and away the most dangerous creatures to humans on this planet, other than ourselves, are mosquitoes.
The bothrops, or viper, family kills in a particularly gruesome way, don't they? Tell us about necrosis.
Necrosis means the death of tissues. But the word does not begin to capture how absolutely disgusting and horrible tissue death really is. [Laughs] We're talking about flesh that liquefies and melts with big, weeping lesions. People refer to "black stick," which is what happens to your limbs if you don't treat a bite well.

Necrosis is a twofold process. The first is the toxins themselves attacking the tissues with enzymes whose job is to chop up tissue parts. It also has the effect of turning on our immune system which, in a failed attempt to kill the toxins, also goes on the attack. It's like friendly fire in your tissues. [Laughs]
On the positive side, you suggest, "Snakes may be the driving force behind our big brains." Unpack that idea for us.
Way back, when we were still merged with other primates in terms of our evolutionary lineage, these ancestral primates coexisted with snakes. Lynne Isbell has put forward a hypothesis that snakes were one of the predominant predators from an evolutionary standpoint of these early primates. So, as all species do, these early primates co-evolved with their predators. Snakes wanted to kill them-and they wanted to survive. Those that had an adaptation to detect snakes faster survived and reproduced.

What the snake-detection hypothesis puts forward is that what made them successful was eyesight: the ability to see in color, in three-dimensions, and therefore detect snakes very quickly. We can still see that in both us and other primates. When shown images of snakes for just microseconds, we react viscerally and instinctually, even before we realize that there's a snake in that image. This quick detection requires good visual systems, and good visual systems require big brains.
Today, science is revealing exciting new applications for venom. Talk about apitherapy and its possible use in treating Lyme disease.
There's an incredible woman, Ellie Lobell, who has pioneered research into the use of bee venoms for Lyme disease because bee venoms contain potent antimicrobials. Lyme disease is caused by spiral-shaped bacteria that are notoriously difficult to kill, even in petri dishes. But bee venom contains compounds that are capable of doing it.

What happened to Ellie is a remarkable story. She had Lyme disease, which wasn't knocked out by an initial round of antibiotics. She slowly deteriorated to the point where her mind and body were, basically, dying. Eventually she gave up and moved to California where she planned to die. But by chance she went for a walk and was attacked by a swarm of what people call killer (Africanized) bees. She went back to her room and laid down expecting to die. But after a week of the worst pain imaginable, she emerged better! She believes the overload of toxins in the bees' venom killed the Lyme bacteria. She thinks it's a miracle and now she is working with Dr. Eva Sapi, who soon hopes to publish a paper examining which components in bee venom might be used to tackle Lyme disease.
Injecting yourself with snake venom seems a pretty kinky thing to do. Tell us about the weird culture of "SI-ers" (self-immunizers).
The overall goal of most self-immunizers is to protect themselves against venomous animals that they want to keep in their homes. These people want cobras or vipers as pets. Antivenom is expensive and you can't really administer it [to] yourself very well. So they inject themselves with snake venom in small doses at first, building up to larger doses, in an attempt to build an immune response to venom that will save their life in the case of a bite.

It's a fascinating idea. Whether or not it's enough to save your life, or how to do it safely and effectively, are questions that still need to be answered. But scientists are now looking at these SI-ers and the antibodies in their blood to potentially solve some of the issues we currently have with anti-venoms.
Some creatures have developed so-called venom immunity. Tell us about the honey badger featured in National Geographic footage that went viral (with non-Nat Geo narration dubbed in).
The honey badger that don't care! [Laughs] Venom immunity is one of those things you think would be more common than it is. But venom immunity is difficult in an evolutionary sense.

There are certain groups of animals that have become immune, however, like honey badgers, mongooses, and opossums. Not 100 percent, but they can take doses higher than we can even imagine surviving ourselves. There's two ways they do this. Mongooses have actually changed their physiology so the venoms don't work. The ion channels in their neurons, which these venom toxins target, have mutated so the toxin is ineffective. The other way, exemplified by the opossum, is to create blood proteins that bind venom. It's possible we could use similar proteins as an antivenom, something scientists are currently investigating in order to make them injectable for humans.
The Gila monster is an almost mythical creature. Tell us about the new discoveries that are revealing amazing medical properties of its venom-and why we need to conserve these creatures.
In the southwestern U.S., we have these legends about a Gila monster's bite: how they'll never let go, or can kill a man. There's never actually been a recorded death from a Gila monster, but their venoms do have potent effects. They hurt a lot! These properties are actually potentially useful, though.

The unifying factor that makes animals venomous is that they have toxins that act in very specific ways in the bodies of their prey and other animals. That is exactly what we need when we look for a pharmaceutical. We want something that does something to our bodies in a very specific manner. If we are looking to lower blood pressure, we need a compound that will work, without doing anything else. If you want to turn off chronic pain, you want to shut down only those neurons.

The Gila monster has provided some very interesting molecules, particularly an insulin-type molecule, which is referred to as exendin-4. What this does is help regulate insulin in the body. These molecules are game changers, which have revolutionized the treatment for Type 2 diabetes.

Scientists are now realizing these molecules may do even more. [Exendin-4] is being investigated as a weight-loss drug, for instance, because controlling diabetes and controlling weight are related to the same insulin pathway. It is also being investigated as preventive treatment for Alzheimer's and other degenerative disorders.

This is just one of many venom compounds undergoing clinical trials for revolutionary treatments of diseases that have completely stumped us, from heart disease to Alzheimer's and even HIV. Other studies are showing that compounds from tarantula venom work better than morphine but don't cause respiratory depression. It's really incredible!

So even if you don't buy into ecological and conservation messages, which I personally do, the reason we need to keep these creatures is that we don't yet know what's in their venom. We haven't taken all these different venomous species and run the genomics and proteomics to understand what's actually there. If we lose these animals we will lose all this information-and these potential drugs-before we have even had the chance to discover them.
This interview was edited for length and clarity. Simon Worrall curates Book Talk. Follow him on Twitte r or at simonworrallauthor.com.

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Venomous Animals Kill in Horrible Ways-And Also Cure

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What do Odysseus and TV wildlife expert Steve Irwin have in common? (Stingray barbs killed them both.) What is the most venomous creature in the world? (The Australian box jellyfish.) What does it feel like to get high on cobra venom? (Weird.) Could bee venom cure Lyme disease? (Possibly.)

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Great White Shark Nursery

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An ocean research organization has discovered a nursery and probably even the birthing site of great white sharks in the North Atlantic- and it's near Montauk, Long Island.

Chris Fischer, the founding chairman of Ocearch, the organization behind the development, told CBS News that they had "definitely [found] the nursery, likely the birthing site."

The find is "probably the most significant discovery we've ever made on the ocean," Fischer added.

Knowing where the great white sharks give birth and raise their young in the North Atlantic can lead to better efforts to protect the iconic animals, which the International Union for the Conservation of Nature describes as "vulnerable."

The birthing site is "the holy grail of the research," Fischer told CBS, which reported the discovery.

Ocearch tracks great white sharks by putting tags on their dorsal fins, and when they surface, they ping a satellite. This summer, the organization tagged several sharks, among them a 42-pound male named Hampton and a 50-pound female named Montauk. Both were tagged in August, and both are immature. They also collect blood and tissue samples from the sharks, measure them, and determine their sex.

The Ocearch website allows the public to follow the location of the sharks, and recently, both Hampton and Montauk were swimming near Long Island. The organization also recently tagged sharks they dubbed Gotham, Gratitude, and Hudson.

Mary Lee is another well-known shark the organization tracks, and she's very big. First tagged in 2012, she weighs 3,456 pounds and is 16 feet long. She's traveled over 34,000 miles since she was tagged, and bears the namesake of Fischer's mother, according to her profile on Ocearch. Recently, she pinged in off the coast of the Carolinas.
Follow Rob Verger on Twitter: @robverger

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Great white shark nursery, possible birthing site, discovered off Long Island

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An ocean research organization has discovered a nursery and probably even the birthing site of great white sharks in the North Atlantic- and it's near Montauk, Long Island. Chris Fischer, the founding chairman of Ocearch, the organization behind the development, told CBS News that they had "definitely [found] the nursery, likely the birthing site."

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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/wildlife-giraffes-africa-new-species-conservation/

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Comeback of humpbacks

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Celebrate the Comeback of Humpbacks With These Fabulous Photos

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Forty years after they were near the brink of extinction, most populations of humpback whales have been removed from the endangered species list.

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Three nations create giant reserves for ocean life

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Concern over a worldwide decline in marine life prompted the presidents of Ecuador, Colombia, and Costa Rica to announce agreements Friday to increase protection of some of the most biodiverse ocean waters.

The agreements bring the marine reserves off the three nations to 83,600 square miles. Ecuador and Costa Rica also agreed to delineate the boundaries of their national waters, exchanging nautical charts in a step toward protecting the underwater "highways" used by sharks, sea turtles, and other migrating marine life.

"These three countries share marine resources and thus have responsibility for managing them sustainably...We have the unique and urgent opportunity to allow future generations to enjoy an ocean as rich as the Pacific," said Ecuador President Rafael Correa as he and the two other presidents gathered in the Galápagos, which inspired Charles Darwin's revolutionary ideas about biology and evolution.

The actions expand protections in three UNESCO World Heritage Sites: Cocos, Malpelo, and Galápagos.

Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos pledged to more than double the size of the Malpelo Flora and Fauna Sanctuary 300 miles from the mainland's coast. Already one of the largest no-fishing zones in the region, the sanctuary, now more than 10,000 square miles, hosts one of the world's largest aggregations of sharks.

"This is important to protect our jewels. If there is something that Colombia has, it's a richness in flora, fauna, and biodiversity. An important part of that richness is in Malpelo," Santos said.

Costa Rica President Luis Guillermo Solís committed to expanding Cocos Island National Park by nearly 4,000 square miles. That will nearly quadruple the area where fishing is restricted in an effort to safeguard white-tip sharks, whale sharks, and hammerhead sharks.

"This is an historic moment - the first time that three presidents got together to expand protections in their neighboring waters," said Enric Sala, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence who has led scientists and filmmakers investigating the waters around the Galápagos.

Currently around three percent of ocean waters worldwide are protected in marine reserves; fishing is banned in about half of these waters. Ecuador, Colombia, and Costa Rica have pledged to meet a United Nations target of protecting 10 percent of the world's oceans by 2020.

Today's announcements add to a series of recent actions designed to safeguard whales, sharks, sea turtles, tuna, and other creatures off the coasts of Central and South America. A new marine sanctuary created in March around Wolf and Darwin islands protects roughly one-third of the waters of the Galápagos from fishing and other extractive industries. Scientific studies conducted last year found that these waters host the world's highest known abundance of sharks, from migratory hammerheads to reef sharks.

While technology today should allow monitoring by remote surveillance, the key to success of the reserves is the political will to arrest and prosecute poachers. Sala says he was encouraged by the three heads of state's "concrete actions," which demonstrate "a real commitment to work together to protect their biological corridors."

Fish biomass around Wolf and Darwin averages 17.5 tons per hectare - twice as high as the second highest known area worldwide, Costa Rica's Cocos Island National Park, says Sala, who conducted the Pristine Seas expedition with Pelayo Salinas of the Charles Darwin Research Station. ( Read more about Pristine Seas.)

Protections already are in place at the Galápagos Marine Reserve, 51,000 square miles of water surrounding the archipelago, which was listed in 1998 as a World Heritage Site.

Under the new boundary maps, Ecuador's marine territory now is more than five times larger than its continental territory, Correa says.

In 2003 the three nations and Panama joined with the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and other international organizations to form the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape, covering 750,000 square miles of ocean.The Seascape, which helps link marine protected areas in Panama and Colombia, safeguards an important migratory route for the endangered blue whale and protects one of the last remaining nesting grounds in the Eastern Pacific of the critically endangered leatherback turtle. Scientists have found that sharks navigate along a ridge from Cocos in the north to Galápagos in the south. Once they leave the protected areas, they are vulnerable to intense fishing along this ridge.

The announcements followed Thursday night's premier of Wild Galápagos: Pristine Seas, a National Geographic documentary, which was shown at an event attended by the three presidents that included time aboard the ship National Geographic Endeavour.

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Three Nations Create Giant Reserves for Ocean Life

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Concern over a worldwide decline in marine life prompted the presidents of Ecuador, Colombia, and Costa Rica to announce agreements Friday to increase protection of some of the most biodiverse ocean waters. The agreements bring the marine reserves off the three nations to 83,600 square miles.

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New species of snake confirmed

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A new species of snake - pale gray, with white and black spots - was discovered on a rocky plateau in northern Madagascar. Researchers are calling it Madagoscarophis lolo, after the Malagasy word for "ghost."

The snakes of the Madagoscarophis genus, generally active at twilight and at night, are called "cat-eyed snakes" for their vertical pupils. The new 20-inch specimen was found during an expedition in 2014, and a DNA analysis confirms that it is a new species.

Although the scientists do not yet know its population size, the ghost snake was found in a protected national park and they do not believe it is endangered.

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A new species of snake - pale gray, with white and black spots - was discovered on a rocky plateau in northern Madagascar. Researchers are calling it Madagoscarophis lolo, after the Malagasy word for "ghost." The snakes of the Madagoscarophis genus, generally active at twilight and at night, are called "cat-eyed snakes" for their vertical pupils.

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New species of snake confirmed

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A new species of snake - pale gray, with white and black spots - was discovered on a rocky plateau in northern Madagascar. Researchers are calling it Madagoscarophis lolo, after the Malagasy word for "ghost."

The snakes of the Madagoscarophis genus, generally active at twilight and at night, are called "cat-eyed snakes" for their vertical pupils. The new 20-inch specimen was found during an expedition in 2014, and a DNA analysis confirms that it is a new species.

Although the scientists do not yet know its population size, the ghost snake was found in a protected national park and they do not believe it is endangered.

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A new species of snake - pale gray, with white and black spots - was discovered on a rocky plateau in northern Madagascar. Researchers are calling it Madagoscarophis lolo, after the Malagasy word for "ghost." The snakes of the Madagoscarophis genus, generally active at twilight and at night, are called "cat-eyed snakes" for their vertical pupils.

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There are dog people. There are cat people. And then there are guinea pig people ... or parrot people ... or red-eyed tree frog people.

Private ownership of exotic pets is allowed in many states throughout the United States, and thanks to the Internet, it's easier than ever for people to purchase whatever feathered, furred or finned pet they desire. But just because you can own an exotic pet, doesn't mean you should.

Purchasing or adopting any type of pet requires careful thought and consideration - and exponentially so for exotic animals. Here are five things you should carefully consider before you bring an exotic pet into your home.

The rules: Did you know that it's illegal to possess a chimpanzee in the state of California? In Illinois, it's against the law to own or care for any animal that might be considered "dangerous," and that includes any kind of venomous reptile. The same goes for Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York and several other states. Many states have strict laws regulating the type of pets you are allowed to own and the type of permits you're required to have if you wish to own them. Start here for information about your state's requirements for exotic pets.

The costs: This is a big one. When you adopt a dog or cat, you can assume that you'll be able to pick up all of the food and supplies you need to care for that animal at your local big box store. But that's not necessarily the case for exotic animals. And though the frog or parrot or snake itself may not cost that much, the cost of caring for it might be, and these are costs that you need to know ahead of time.

"Exotic pets typically need special caging, specialized diets and forms of enrichment that can all become quite expensive especially in larger exotics pets," said Sharman Hoppes, associate clinical professor at Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences.

A guinea pig munches on some basil leaves - but do you know what kind of food he should be eating? (Photo: TJ Images/Shutterstock)

The research: Before you bring home an exotic animal, you need to know everything there is to know about what it takes to properly care for this animal. "Before buying an exotic pet, research everything about them," Hoppes said. "Questions such as where they come from, their diet, if they climb, their social ability, how big will they get as adults, diseases they are susceptible to, and how long they live are essential before purchasing an exotic pet," Hoppes added.

Other questions to ask include what size cage or enclosure will it need? What does it need to eat? What is its temperament? And how much interaction will it want or need? Many small animals require stimulation outside of the cage - from floor time to cuddle sessions.

The care: Check to find out if there is a veterinarian in your area who will care for your pet in case of an emergency. If not, you many find yourself driving for hours every time your pet needs a vaccination. And you may want to find out how much those annual visits are going to cost. While a regular checkup for a dog or cat may cost around $100, an examination for an exotic animal can cost anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending upon whether or not anesthesia is necessary for the doctor to complete the checkup.

You also need to find out what your pet can and cannot eat and where you can find it. What are your pet's daily requirements in terms of vitamins, minerals, calories, protein, and what foods or supplements will they need to consume to meet those needs?

The fit: Another major consideration about adopting any pet - but especially an exotic pet - is how well this animal will fit into your life. "Many exotic pets are not good with children, and your new girlfriend or boyfriend may not like your large macaw who wants to bite them or may be afraid of your pet kangaroo that can kick and box with the power of Muhammad Ali," noted Hoppes.

If you already have other pets, it's important to consider how these animals will interact with your new pet. In some instances, you may be able to bring your pets to the exotic animal shelter to see how they will all get along.

Ready to adopt? Once you've done all of your homework, it's time to start looking for your new pet. Be sure to check your local rescue centers first. Of course, this is something that you would want to do for any pet, but the stakes are even higher for exotic animals that are purchased or adopted on a whim and then abandoned at the first complication.

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5 things to ask before you adopt an exotic pet

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There are dog people. There are cat people. And then there are guinea pig people ... or parrot people ... or red-eyed tree frog people. Private ownership of exotic pets is allowed in many states throughout the United States, and thanks to the Internet, it's easier than ever for people to purchase whatever feathered, furred or finned pet they desire.

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Credit: vvvita/Shutterstock.com

Dog owners who like to talk to their beloved Fido can rest assured that their pooch may actually understand what they are trying to say, according to a new study.

Moreover, when dogs listen to someone talking, they may use brain regions that are equivalent to those that humans use to understand what others say, the researchers found.

In other words, the new study shows that the brain mechanisms involved in the process of understanding human speech are similar in dogs and humans, said study co-author Attila Andics, a neuroscientist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. This means that the brain mechanisms involved in understanding human speech are not unique to humans, he told Live Science.

To convey information through speech, people use both words and intonation, which is the way a person's voice rises and falls to express an emotion or meaning, such as praise or disapproval. Similarly, to understand what someone is trying to say, people have to pay attention to both their words and their intonation. [ 10 Things You Didn't Know About Dogs]

In the study, the researchers wanted to see whether dogs also pay attention to both words and intonation when trying to understand what a human is trying to say to them.

To conduct the study, the researchers looked at 13 dogs. The researchers measured the dogs' brain activity with a brain scanner while the dogs listened to recordings of their trainers speaking different combinations of words and intonations.

The researchers found that the dogs paid attention to both the words and intonation when trying to understand human speech, just as humans do when they try to understand human speech. This finding means that dogs may understand both the words and the intonation that humans use when they talk to dogs, the researchers said.

The brain scans also suggested that the dogs used the left parts of their brains while trying to understand words but used the right parts of their brains while trying to understand intonation, the researchers said. Similarly, humans use the left parts of their brains while trying to understand the meanings of words and the right parts of their brains while trying to understand intonation.

The new findings were published today (Aug. 30) in the journal Science.

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Confirmed: Your Dog Understands What You're Saying

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Dog owners who like to talk to their beloved Fido can rest assured that their pooch may actually understand what they are trying to say, according to a new study. Moreover, when dogs listen to someone talking, they may use brain regions that are equivalent to those that humans use to understand what others say, the researchers found.

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An infant Grauer's gorilla rides on an adult gorilla's back.

Credit: A.J.Plumptre/WCS

The population of the world's largest ape has collapsed over the last two decades. Fewer than 4,000 Grauer's gorillas remain in the wild, and now conservationists warn that the animals are at risk of extinction.

Officials from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced Sunday (Sept. 4) that they're raising the threatened status of the Grauer's gorilla from " endangered" to "critically endangered," the highest category before extinction.

"Critical endangered status will raise the profile of this gorilla subspecies and bring attention to its plight," Andrew Plumptre, the lead author of the new listing, said in a statement. "It has tended to be the neglected ape in Africa, despite being the largest ape in the world." [ Image Gallery: 25 Primates in Peril]

Grauer's gorillas ( Gorilla beringei graueri) are a subspecies of the eastern gorilla. They are found in fragmented forest habitats in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they mainly subsist on fruit and other plants and can grow up to 5.5 feet (168 cm) tall and weigh up to 440 lbs. (200 kg).

Earlier this year, the Wildlife Conservation Society and Fauna and Flora International released a report documenting a77-percent drop in the number of Grauer's gorillas over the span of a single generation, from an estimated 17,000 individuals in 1995 to 3,800 today.

The authors of the report pointed to bushmeat hunting and civil war in the DRC as major drivers of the population collapse and recommended that the species be listed as critically endangered.

Bushmeat hunting and civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are major drivers of the collapse of the population of Grauer's gorillas, researchers say. Here, the skulls of poached Grauer's gorillas.

Credit: A.J.Plumptre/WCS

The new listing means that all gorillas -including eastern and western gorillas -are now considered critically endangered.

The other subspecies of the eastern gorilla is the mountain gorilla ( Gorilla beringei beringei), which is already listed as critically endangered. The population of mountain gorillas has, however, been increasing. There are now an estimated 880 individuals, up from about 300 in 2008, according to the IUCN's latest data.

The changes to the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species were announced at the organization's World Conservation Congress in Hawaii.

Among the other species whose threatened status was raised was the plains zebra ( Equus quagga), which was once considered a species of "least concern" but is now "near threatened." The animal's population in Africa dropped by 24 percent over the past 14 years, from around 660,000 individuals to just over 500,000 animals, mostly due to hunting, according to the IUCN.

In a bit of good news, the giant panda ( Ailuropoda melanoleuca), which had been listed as endangered since 1990, had its status downgraded to "vulnerable." The IUCN lauded conservation efforts that have helped boost the panda population in China, but warned that climate change could wipe out a large chunk of the bears' bamboo habitat during the next century.

Original article on Live Science.

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World's Largest Gorilla Species at Risk of Extinction

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The population of the world's largest ape has collapsed over the last two decades. Fewer than 4,000 Grauer's gorillas remain in the wild, and now conservationists warn that the animals are at risk of extinction. Officials from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced Sunday (Sept.

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Fisherman hands in giant pearl he kept under the bed for 10 years

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Enormous pearl thought to have come from a giant clam could be the biggest in the world and, if authenticated, is estimated to be worth more than $100m

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A couple of years ago, biologists from Washington State University found that killing a wolf to rid a threat to livestock actually increased the chances that cattle or sheep would be killed in the following year. Only eliminating a quarter or more of the wolves in a state resulted in declines in wolves killing livestock.

Ranchers have long killed wolves to protect their animals, but the study's results seemed to show that the practice might not be as productive as they'd like. Now a new study of wolves in the Italian Alps shows why keeping packs together could be a good move for ranchers.

Camille Imbert of the University of Pavia in Italy and colleagues wanted to know why wolves kill livestock instead of wild prey. Sheep or cattle might look like an easy meal to us, but that may not be true for wolves. And even if a goat was easy to catch, that might not be a wolf's sole consideration when looking for something to eat.

The researchers studied a population of wolves in Liguria, in northwest Italy, one of the few European wolf populations that has managed to survive into the 21st century and is now starting to expand its range due to new laws and efforts to restore its habitat. From 2008 to 2013, the team collected 1,457 samples of wolf scat and determined which wolf had left the poop behind and what it had eaten. The scientists also figured out whether or not the wolf had belonged to a pack, which consist of a pair of adults and their offspring.

Wolves that belonged to packs tended to eat more wild boar and roe deer and less goat and other livestock than did single wolves, the researchers report in the March Biological Conservation. Lone wolves - either young wolves that are moving to new territory or the former members of a pack that has been broken up (say, when the leaders were killed) - may not know as well what prey is available in an area as the resident pack and may therefore hunt whatever is available, Imbert and her colleagues write. Packs, it seems, can be pickier and go for wild prey when it's available.

Not that a pack of wolves won't hunt livestock. Pack wolves did eat goats and other domestic animals. But it seems at least a little blame can be put on Italian herders, who let goats roam unguarded and free in the mountains. And wolves will readily eat young calves born in open pastures; when birthing is done closer to home, cows tend to be safe from wolves.

To keep livestock from being eaten by wolves, the researchers make a few recommendations: Institute a few more protections for domestic animals. Promote a rich community of wild animals that the wolves can eat. And don't kill wolves and break up packs. "Removal measures do not solve the problem in the long run," they write.

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How killing wolves to protect livestock may backfire

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A couple of years ago, biologists from Washington State University found that killing a wolf to rid a threat to livestock actually increased the chances that cattle or sheep would be killed in the following year. Only eliminating a quarter or more of the wolves in a state resulted in declines in wolves killing livestock.

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Most households in the UK will have a broadband connection and a lot of those houses will also have experienced connection or speed issues.

But what if there was a way to connect to the internet and benefit from a direct connection with much faster speeds? Enter Li-Fi.

Li-Fi stands for Light Fidelity and is a Visible Light Communications (VLC) system which runs wireless communications that travel at very high speeds.

With Li-Fi, your light blub is essentially your router. It uses common household LED light bulbs to enable data transfer, boasting speeds of up to 224 gigabits per second.

The term Li-Fi was coined by University of Edinburgh Professor Harald Haas during a TED Talk in 2011. Haas envisioned light bulbs that could act as wireless routers.

Subsequently, in 2012 after four years of research, Haas set up company pureLiFi with the aim 'to be the world leader in Visible Light Communications technology'.
Read next: Eight brilliant uses of Li-Fi
How does Li-Fi work?

Li-Fi and Wi-Fi are quite similar as both transmit data electromagnetically. However, Wi-Fi uses radio waves, while Li-Fi runs on visible light waves.

As we now know, Li-Fi is a Visible Light Communications (VLC) system. This means that it accommodates a photo-detector to receive light signals and a signal processing element to convert the data into 'streamable' content.

An LED light bulb is a semiconductor light source meaning that the constant current of electricity supplied to an LED light bulb can be dipped and dimmed, up and down at extremely high speeds, without being visible to the human eye.

For example, data is fed into an LED light bulb (with signal processing technology), it then sends data (embedded in its beam) at rapid speeds to the photo-detector (photodiode).

The tiny changes in the rapid dimming of LED bulbs is then converted by the 'receiver' into electrical signal.

The signal is then converted back into a binary data stream that we would recognise as web, video and audio applications that run on internet-enabled devices.
You might also like: What is microservices?
Podcast discussion: Li-Fi vs Wi-Fi

Li-Fi vs Wi-Fi

While some may think that Li-Fi with its 224 gigabits per second leaves Wi-Fi in the dust, Li-Fi's exclusive use of visible light could halt a mass uptake.

Li-Fi signals cannot pass through walls, so in order to enjoy full connectivity, capable LED bulbs will need to be placed throughout the home. Not to mention, Li-Fi requires the light bulb is on at all times to provide connectivity, meaning that the lights will need to be on during the day.

Additionally, where there is a lack of light bulbs, there is a lack of Li-Fi internet so Li-Fi does take a hit when it comes to public Wi-Fi networks.

However, using Li-Fi instead of Wi-Fi, you'll negate lots of security problems associated with shared and often overloaded broadband networks.

It will also be advantageous in areas where radio frequency waves do not reach.

It was announced in 2016 that an extension of standard Wi-Fi was to be launched called Wi-Fi HaLow.

This new project claims to double the range of connectivity while using less power. Due to this, Wi-Fi HaLow is reportedly perfect for battery-powered devices such as smartwatches and smartphones, and also lends itself to internet of things devices such as sensors and smart applications.

Due to its impressive speeds, Li-Fi could make a huge impact on the internet of things too, with data transferred at much higher levels with even more devices able to connect to one another.
Read next: What is the internet of things?
What's more, due to its shorter range, Li-Fi is more secure than Wi-Fi and it's reported that embedded light beams reflected off a surface could still achieve 70 megabits per second.

Who is investing in Li-Fi?

In November 2014, Li-Fi pioneers pureLiFi joined forces with French lighting company Lucibel to launch Li-Fi-enabled products.

PureLiFi has a few products on the market: a Li-Fi ceiling unit to connect to an LED light fixture and Li-Fi-XC which is for connecting to a device via USB or as part of the hardware, providing about 43Mbps from each LiFi-enabled LED light.

Plus, with faster connectivity and data transmission it's an interesting space for businesses. The integration of internet of things devices and Li-Fi will provide a wealth of opportunities for retailers and other businesses alike. For example, shop owners could transmit data to multiple customers' phones quickly, securely and remotely.

Well-known lighting brand Philips has also jumped to invest in Li-Fi, now offering full and integrated Li-Fi services including LED products and Li-Fi.

In 2016, it was reported that Li-Fi was being tested in Dubai, by UAE-based telecommunications provider Du and Zero1. Du claimed to have successfully provided internet, audio and video streaming over a Li-Fi connection.

In addition, reports suggested that Apple may build future iPhones with Li-Fi capabilities. A Twitter user found that within its iOS 9.1 code there were references to Li-Fi written as 'LiFiCapability' hinting that Apple may integrate Li-Fi with iPhones in the future.

Founded by Maite Brandt-Pearce and Mohammad Noshad in 2013, Charlottesville-based Li-Fi firm VLNComm has received backing from the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. It has also released three Li-Fi products: a desk light, USB stick and LED panel.

More recently, Icade, a French real estate investment firm has opted to use Li-Fi to connect its employees to the internet.

So, whether or not Li-Fi will live up to its hype is yet to be decided. Watch this space...

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Li-Fi explained | What is it, how it works & why Wi-Fi might be a thing of the past

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Most households in the UK will have a broadband connection and a lot of those houses will also have experienced connection or speed issues. But what if there was a way to connect to the internet and benefit from a direct connection with much faster speeds? Enter Li-Fi.

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The Great Barrier Reef is in worse shape than suspected thanks to ocean acidification, Mathieu Mongin of Australia's CSIRO and colleagues estimate February 23 in Nature Communications.

Driven by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, acidification lowers seawater levels of the mineral aragonite, which corals use to build their exoskeletons. The Great Barrier Reef actually contains 3,581 individual reefs, and a clear picture of aragonite levels across the reefs doesn't exist. Mongin's team used a combination of carbon, salinity and temperature data at 22 coastal sites from 2010 to 2012 and models of ocean circulation and chemistryfrom 2010 to 2014 to determine the current state of aragonite levels across the reefs and to predict which reefs might be most at risk.

By their analysis, aragonite levels dropby an estimated 50 percent around individual reefs compared with the open ocean. Those saturation levels are also much more variable across the Great Barrier Reef than previous estimates projected. Northern reef corals probably drive this variability by using up all carbon resources, leaving reefs to the south at greater risk.

More variability doesn't bode well when they factored in models of climate change over the next century. Even the best possible future carbon emissions scenario may produce significant losses on the Great Barrier Reef, the researchers write.

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Great Barrier Reef acidification predictions get worse

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The Great Barrier Reef is in worse shape than suspected thanks to ocean acidification, Mathieu Mongin of Australia's CSIRO and colleagues estimate February 23 in Nature Communications. Driven by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, acidification lowers seawater levels of the mineral aragonite, which corals use to build their exoskeletons.

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Two years ago, scientists warned of a new threat to Madagascar's unique biodiversity: invasive Asian toads that had probably arrived via container ship sometime in the 2000s and started spreading in the wild. Similar to the cane toads that have become a menace in Australia, the Asian toads ( Duttaphrynus melanostictus) are toxic, and predators that eat them usually end up dead. In Australia, that toxic nature has wreaked havoc on the native wildlife, but the toads have spread too fast and too far to eliminate entirely. Efforts now focus on limiting the toads' impacts on native wildlife and ecosystems as much as possible.

In Madagascar, where the invasion is much more recent, there may be time to do something more drastic. The bad news, though, is that a new report from an international group of scientists evaluating options for dealing with the invasion finds that eliminating the toads is " not currently feasible."

The problem facing Madagascar is potentially huge, the report's authors note. Predators, ranging from mammals - like the fossa and mouse lemur - to birds, such as hawks, to large snakes, may all die if they are unlucky enough to eat the toads. Populations of smaller amphibians - frogs, chameleons and skinks - could shrink from toads hunting them. There are also worries that Asian toads could spread amphibian diseases such as Ranavirus. The effects of such losses could run rampant through the food web and ecosystem.

The toads are dangerous to humans, too. Unlike in Australia, where people have dealt with the toads for a long time and are unlikely to eat them, rural Madagascans may see the toads as an easy meal. Many of these people depend on hunting and gathering for at least part of their diet and may not know that Asian toads aren't safe. Plus, declines in large snakes could let the rat population thrive. Too many rats is never a good thing, and the rodents could devastate stores of crops and commercial items.

The report outlines four options for dealing with the toads: Do nothing, protect priority sites only, contain the spread within the 100 square kilometers or so where the toads are currently found, or eradicate them entirely. The last option would be best, the scientists say, as it would get rid of the problem entirely and protect both wildlife and people. But then they list a host of reasons why this wouldn't work.

There are already about 4 million Asian toads in Madagascar, scientists estimate, and they are really good at making more toads. Females lay an average of 20,000 eggs - and up to 40,000 eggs - each year. Only 1 percent of those eggs survive, but that's still a lot of toads. To keep the toad population at 4 million, wildlife managers would have to kill 1.5 million toads every year. To get rid of them, they'd have to kill 2.5 million toads every year until they were gone.

Such measures wouldn't be horribly expensive - the report estimates it would cost about $2 million to $10 million (the effort would need only a wealthy backer from the West) - but that's really just a guess. No one knows exactly where the toads are or precisely how many are in Madagascar. There's no easy way to find them, and there's no quick method of dispatching them, at least not in the numbers necessary for eradication. And then the country would need to set up good biosecurity measures to prevent another invasion (though that would have the added benefit of preventing other potentially harmful species from entering the country).

And then there's the fact that no one has tried to remove invasive toads on such a scale before. There have been three successful removal projects, but they were all in much smaller areas.

So it looks like eradication won't be possible, the scientists conclude, at least without a lot more research that would let managers and the government overcome many hurdles. And by that time, the toads will probably have become so numerous that, like in Australia, any such efforts would be impossible.

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Invasive toads will probably overrun Madagascar

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Two years ago, scientists warned of a new threat to Madagascar's unique biodiversity: invasive Asian toads that had probably arrived via container ship sometime in the 2000s and started spreading in the wild. Similar to the cane toads that have become a menace in Australia, the Asian toads ( Duttaphrynus melanostictus) are toxic, and predators that eat them usually end up dead.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Two years ago, scientists warned of a new threat to Madagascar's unique biodiversity: invasive Asian toads that had probably arrived via container ship sometime in the 2000s and started spreading in the wild. Similar to the cane toads that have become a menace in Australia, the Asian toads ( Duttaphrynus melanostictus) are toxic, and predators that eat them usually end up dead. In Australia, that toxic nature has wreaked havoc on the native wildlife, but the toads have spread too fast and too far to eliminate entirely. Efforts now focus on limiting the toads' impacts on native wildlife and ecosystems as much as possible.

In Madagascar, where the invasion is much more recent, there may be time to do something more drastic. The bad news, though, is that a new report from an international group of scientists evaluating options for dealing with the invasion finds that eliminating the toads is " not currently feasible."

The problem facing Madagascar is potentially huge, the report's authors note. Predators, ranging from mammals - like the fossa and mouse lemur - to birds, such as hawks, to large snakes, may all die if they are unlucky enough to eat the toads. Populations of smaller amphibians - frogs, chameleons and skinks - could shrink from toads hunting them. There are also worries that Asian toads could spread amphibian diseases such as Ranavirus. The effects of such losses could run rampant through the food web and ecosystem.

The toads are dangerous to humans, too. Unlike in Australia, where people have dealt with the toads for a long time and are unlikely to eat them, rural Madagascans may see the toads as an easy meal. Many of these people depend on hunting and gathering for at least part of their diet and may not know that Asian toads aren't safe. Plus, declines in large snakes could let the rat population thrive. Too many rats is never a good thing, and the rodents could devastate stores of crops and commercial items.

The report outlines four options for dealing with the toads: Do nothing, protect priority sites only, contain the spread within the 100 square kilometers or so where the toads are currently found, or eradicate them entirely. The last option would be best, the scientists say, as it would get rid of the problem entirely and protect both wildlife and people. But then they list a host of reasons why this wouldn't work.

There are already about 4 million Asian toads in Madagascar, scientists estimate, and they are really good at making more toads. Females lay an average of 20,000 eggs - and up to 40,000 eggs - each year. Only 1 percent of those eggs survive, but that's still a lot of toads. To keep the toad population at 4 million, wildlife managers would have to kill 1.5 million toads every year. To get rid of them, they'd have to kill 2.5 million toads every year until they were gone.

Such measures wouldn't be horribly expensive - the report estimates it would cost about $2 million to $10 million (the effort would need only a wealthy backer from the West) - but that's really just a guess. No one knows exactly where the toads are or precisely how many are in Madagascar. There's no easy way to find them, and there's no quick method of dispatching them, at least not in the numbers necessary for eradication. And then the country would need to set up good biosecurity measures to prevent another invasion (though that would have the added benefit of preventing other potentially harmful species from entering the country).

And then there's the fact that no one has tried to remove invasive toads on such a scale before. There have been three successful removal projects, but they were all in much smaller areas.

So it looks like eradication won't be possible, the scientists conclude, at least without a lot more research that would let managers and the government overcome many hurdles. And by that time, the toads will probably have become so numerous that, like in Australia, any such efforts would be impossible.

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Invasive toads will probably overrun Madagascar

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Two years ago, scientists warned of a new threat to Madagascar's unique biodiversity: invasive Asian toads that had probably arrived via container ship sometime in the 2000s and started spreading in the wild. Similar to the cane toads that have become a menace in Australia, the Asian toads ( Duttaphrynus melanostictus) are toxic, and predators that eat them usually end up dead.

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Update June 21, 2018: A federal lab report determined that the eagles died after ingesting carbofuran, a chemical that has been banned in the U.S. since the mid-1990s. It's unclear who poisoned the eagles and why.

Update March 10, 2016: Investigators say the 13 eagles did not die of disease or other natural causes. Officials are treating the case as a possible criminal act.

It's a whodunit for the animal kingdom: State and federal wildlife officials are trying to find out what happened to 13 bald eagles that were discovered dead on Maryland's Eastern Shore on Saturday.

The birds of prey were found on a farm in rural Caroline County, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) east of Washington, D.C. and just west of the 3,800-acre Idylwild Natural Area. A man looking for shed deer antlers found some of the birds and phoned state officials, who then found several more.

"We don't know the cause of death yet and are asking the public for help with information," says Catherine Hibbard, a spokesperson for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is investigating the case along with the Maryland Natural Resources Police.

Investigators are working the scene and are sending the bird carcasses to the federal forensic ornithology lab in Ashland, Oregon, to determine cause of death. Hibbard says it's too early to speculate on how the birds died but says its highly unusual for that many eagles to be found dead in such a small area.

"Our special agent has never seen this many dead eagles in eight years on the job," says Hibbard.

In recent years, officials have found a few eagles killed on the Eastern Shore from poisons that were put out by landowners to kill foxes or other animals, she adds. Eagles that scavenge on the poisoned carcasses can take up the poisons themselves, sometimes to lethal effect.

"Never have we seen this many eagles involved," Hibbard says, stressing that the investigation is ongoing.

The national symbol of the U.S., bald eagles were nearly wiped out by hunting, pesticides, and habitat loss in the 20th century. However, they have rebounded in recent decades thanks to strict protections and banning of DDT, which caused their eggshells to be too thin. Bald eagles were officially removed from endangered and threatened status in the U.S. in 2007, although they are still protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

If people are ultimately convicted of causing the death of the eagles, they could face a fine as high as $100,000 and prison time up to one year as a result of those acts.

Anyone with information about the eagles is being asked to call the USFWS at 410-228-2476 or Maryland's investigators at 800-628-9944. A reward (raised to $25,000 as of March 10) is being offered for information that leads to a conviction.

This story was produced by National Geographic's Special Investigations Unit, which focuses on wildlife crime and is made possible by grants from the BAND Foundation and the Woodtiger Fund. Read more stories from the SIU on Wildlife Watch. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to ngwildlife@natgeo.com.

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The Deaths of 13 Bald Eagles May Have Been a Criminal Act

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Update June 21, 2018: A federal lab report determined that the eagles died after ingesting carbofuran, a chemical that has been banned in the U.S. since the mid-1990s. It's unclear who poisoned the eagles and why. Update March 10, 2016: Investigators say the 13 eagles did not die of disease or other natural causes.

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A new 3D printer can print living tissue structures that could one day be used to replace injured or diseased tissue in patients.

"With further development, this technology could potentially be used to print living tissue and organ structures for surgical implantation," Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who co-authored a study describing the new printer, said in a statement. [Read full story: 3D 'Bioprinter' Makes Replacement Bones, Ears]

3D-printed ear structure

This photo shows an ear structure printed with the new bioprinter. In experiments, the researchers implanted such ear structures under the skin of mice to see if the structure tissue would survive. They found that the structures did survive, and had even developed blood vessels by two months after implantation, thanks to special microchannels printed throughout the structures. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

3D-printed jaw bone structure

This image shows a jaw bone fragment printed with the new bioprinter. The size and shape of the fragment corresponds to the size and shape of fragments that could be used for jaw reconstruction in human patients. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

Tailor-made tissue

This photo shows 3D-printed ear and jaw bone structures. The new printing system can use data from CT and MRI scans to tailor-make tissue for patients. For instance, if a patient is missing an ear, the printer could print a new matching ear structure based on a scan of their intact ear. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

Printer at work

This photo shows the printing system at work printing a jaw bone structure. The new printer deposits plastic-like materials to form the shape of the tissue and water-based gels that contain cells. This process allows the printed tissue to retain its shape and ensures the printing process does not damage the cells.

Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

This photo shows the printing system at work, printing a jaw bone structure. The new printer deposits plastic-like materials to form the shape of the tissue and water-based gels that contain cells. This process allows the printed tissue to retain its shape and ensures the printing process does not damage the cells. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

Larger, stronger tissues

This image shows a close-up view of the jaw bone structure during the printing process. The new printer allows researchers to print tissue and organ structures that are larger and stronger than the relatively simple and fragile tissues that researchers have engineered before. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

More research needed

This photo shows another bioprinted jaw bone structure. So far, the researchers have been able to implant only some of the tissue and bone structures they have made into rodents. Much more research is needed before these structures can be implanted in human patients, the researchers said. (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)

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Photos: Muscles and Bones Made with New 'Bioprinter'

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A new 3D printer can print living tissue structures that could one day be used to replace injured or diseased tissue in patients. "With further development, this technology could potentially be used to print living tissue and organ structures for surgical implantation," Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who co-authored a study describing the new printer, said in a statement.

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Shark attacks hit record high in 2015, group says - CNN

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There were more shark attacks worldwide, 98, than any other documented year, though an expert says that's mostly because more humans are swimming near them.

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An Aedes aegypti female mosquito on water inside a tire at a used tire store in Villavicencio, Colombia. The mosquito carries the Zika virus, and females leave their eggs on damp surfaces. Credit Credit Fernando Vergara/Associated Press

A sudden, sharp increase in babies with "no foreheads and very strange heads" was baffling doctors in Brazil. That set off a search for answers that led to a little-known pathogen, the Zika virus.

An Aedes aegypti female mosquito on water inside a tire at a used tire store in Villavicencio, Colombia. The mosquito carries the Zika virus, and females leave their eggs on damp surfaces. Credit Credit Fernando Vergara/Associated Press

Something strange was happening last August in the maternity wards of Recife, a seaside city perched on Brazil's easternmost tip, where the country juts into the Atlantic.

"Doctors, pediatricians, neurologists, they started finding this thing we never had seen," said Dr. Celina M. Turchi, an infectious diseases researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a prominent scientific institute in Brazil.

"Children with normal faces up to the eyebrows, and then you have no foreheads and very strange heads," she recalled, referring to the condition known as microcephaly. "The doctors were saying, 'Well, I saw four today,' and, 'Oh that's strange, because I saw two.'"

Aside from their alarming appearance, many of the babies seemed healthy.

"They cried," Dr. Turchi said. "They breast-fed well. They just didn't seem to be ill."

Doctors were stumped.

They did not know it then, but they were seeing the first swell of a horrifying wave. A little-known pathogen - the Zika virus, carried by mosquitoes - had been circulating in Brazil for at least a year. It would later become the chief suspect in the hunt to work out what had happened to those newborns.

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A Brazilian soldier inspected a water cask in Recife, looking for the larvae of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which transmit the Zika virus. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

Since then, those tiny babies have led the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency. They have prompted warnings to pregnant women to avoid countries where the virus is circulating, even to refrain from unprotected sex with men who have visited those countries, following a report of sexual transmission of the virus in Dallas last week.

They have led health ministers of five countries to say something so unthinkable that none had ever uttered it before: Women, please delay having children.

The virus now threatens the economies of fragile nations and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. It has opened a new front in the debate in heavily Roman Catholic countries about a woman's right to birth control and abortion.

And the children stricken with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads, have doctors everywhere asking: What is this virus? How could it have been around for almost 70 years without us realizing its power? What do we tell our patients about a bug that can hide in a mosquito's proboscis and a man's semen, even in human saliva or urine? What do we tell young women who ask if their unborn babies are safe?

"This epidemic is an unfolding story," said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "As with Ebola, this virus is something that could exist for years under the radar, and we don't know until we get thousands of cases what it really does."

"With Zika, we're seeing new twists and turns every week."

To doctors in Recife, whatever was striking the babies seemed to have fallen like a bolt from the blue.

In reality, it had been building for months. It had even been frequently discussed among clinicians - but no one had realized what was on the horizon.

A year earlier, doctors say, the first patients had started trickling into public hospitals in Natal, capital of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, about 200 miles up the coast from Recife.

It was a few weeks after the 2014 World Cup, and Natal had been one of the host cities of the soccer championship, which draws fans from all over the world.

Many patients lived on the city's margins, others in settlements dotted across the sertão, northeast Brazil's arid hinterland.

Almost all had the same symptoms: a flat pinkish rash, bloodshot eyes, fever, joint pain and headaches. None were desperately ill, but the similarities were striking.

"That scared some patients and doctors, and my team," said Aline Bezerra, a nurse and the municipal epidemiologist. "We knew nothing other than that it might be some kind of light dengue."

Tests ruled that out, along with other common viruses, but the patients kept coming. One day in January 2015, 100 showed up at the state's hospitals.

"We alerted the federal authorities that we were dealing with something urgent and new," said Dr. Kleber Luz, an infectious diseases specialist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. "But their reaction was sluggish."

By last March, the spread of a " doença misteriosa " - the mystery disease - had become impossible to ignore. It appeared in two more states nearby. Then it reached Salvador, a city of 2.5 million.

Doctors speculated that it was an allergy; that it was roseola, a childhood illness; that it was a new variant of Fifth Disease, a facial rash that gives children a " slapped-cheek " look.

"People were claiming it was polluted water," said Dr. Gúbio Soares, a virologist at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador. "I began thinking it was something transmitted by mosquitoes."

Working in his modest lab with a colleague, Dr. Silvia Sardi, Dr. Soares kept testing blood samples.

Other doctors were doing the same. Over 6,800 samples were tested, according to news reports, from victims ranging from 4 months to 98 years old. Parvovirus, dengue, chikungunya and other suspects were all ruled out.

Finally, in April, Dr. Soares and Dr. Sardi were sure: It was Zika.

"I actually felt a sense of relief," Dr. Soares said. "The literature said it was much less aggressive than viruses we already deal with in Brazil."

In the capital, Brasília, the health minister at the time, Dr. Arthur Chioro, felt the same way.

"Zika virus doesn't worry us," he told reporters in May, after the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation had confirmed Dr. Soares's findings. "It's a benign disease." Dengue hemorrhagic fever, on the other hand, killed hundreds of Brazilians each year.

But on ProMED Mail, an online service run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases, the reaction was not so sanguine.

"The arrival of Zika virus in Brazil is not good news," wrote Thomas M. Yuill, an emeritus professor of veterinary science and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Not only did Brazil have "abundant mosquitoes and a large population of susceptible people," he wrote, but so did much of the Americas.

Two weeks earlier, an American mosquito disease expert working in Rio de Janeiro had scoffed on ProMED about an unconfirmed report that it was Zika. The virus fit the symptoms, he wrote, but it was circulating only in Africa and Asia, and in the South Pacific, half a world away, in a different ocean.

He was right about where the virus had been, but not about where it was now.

For years, virus hunters on ProMED and other outbreak alert networks had been watching, fascinated, as Zika made long, slow and erratic progress eastward across the Pacific, island-hopping as American forces had done during World War II, albeit in reverse.

In 2007, it hit Yap Island, in Micronesia, east of the Philippines and north of Australia. It could have come to Yap from anywhere in Asia.

In October 2013, the Zika virus raced through the many islands of French Polynesia, including Tahiti and Bora Bora. In early 2014, it bounced to the Cook Islands, just to the west, and New Caledonia, close to Australia.

It also leapt to Easter Island, home of the giant stone heads, its official arrival in the Western Hemisphere.

It is still island-hopping. American Samoa and Tonga are having outbreaks now.

Scott C. Weaver, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, wrote an article in 2009 warning that Zika was approaching the Americas. The virus was so obscure that, trying to be helpful in an interview, he explained: "Its closest relative is Spondweni" - a virus named for a place in South Africa that is no longer even on maps.

The Zika Forest in Uganda still is; the virus was discovered there in a monkey in 1947. Since then, the Zika virus had been considered mild compared to its killer cousins: yellow fever, dengue, West Nile and Japanese encephalitis. Until 2013, there was no evidence Zika had ever hospitalized anyone.

Back in Brazil, on May 14, it was definite. The mysterious outbreaks - by then in cities all over Brazil, including Rio de Janeiro - had all been caused by Zika.

Who had brought the virus to Brazil? There are two theories.

The first, offered by Brazilian scientists who analyzed airline flight patterns, was that it arrived in the crowds of soccer fans who had flocked to the 12 host cities in the 2014 World Cup. If the Natal outbreak was truly the first, that theory has credence.

A second, proposed by French scientists connected to the Pasteur Institute in Paris who had investigated the outbreak in Polynesia, was that it arrived a few weeks later, during the Va'a World Sprint, a canoe race in Rio that attracted teams from several Polynesian islands.

Since the virus is believed to persist in the blood for up to 10 days, it presumably came from an island then having an outbreak. But in a world as interconnected as ours has become, it may be spread not by a foreigner from faraway lands, but by any international traveler.

The first case of Zika infection detected in New York City was found in December 2013 - six months before the virus is thought to have reached Brazil - in a 48-year-old traveler who lives near Central Park but has asked to remain unidentified.

When he walked into Traveler's Medical Service on Madison Avenue, he had just returned from a long trek through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Easter Island and Hawaii, with a stopover in French Polynesia.

Dyan J. Summers, the nurse practitioner who first saw him, said he pulled his shirt out of his bluejeans and peeled it off, exposing a pinkish rash he said he had had for 11 days.

"I took one look and said, ' Dengue fever,'" she recalled in an interview last week. "He said, 'I'm not so sure. I think it's Zika.'"

Ms. Summers was startled: "I'd heard of Zika, but nobody was thinking about Zika."

"But this is a very, very bright guy," she continued. "He travels a lot, he knows about safe water and safe altitudes for malaria. He was right on the money, that guy. In Polynesia, he had read articles in the local paper about Zika."

She took blood immediately and again 20 days later, and sent both samples to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Their tests showed that he had antibodies to dengue, West Nile and Zika, but the count of Zika antibodies had shot up.

In researching Zika, Ms. Summers said, her very bright patient had found an article about a scientist in Colorado who had infected his wife with the virus after returning from Africa.

"Because of that paper, I advised him not to have unprotected sex with his common-law wife," she said.

"What's weirder," she added. "He knew there were cases of Guillain-Barré connected to it."

Their exchange was strangely prescient.

At the time, Polynesian and French doctors were just beginning to diagnose Guillain-Barré syndrome, a form of temporary paralysis that starts in the hands and feet. Along with infant microcephaly, the syndrome has turned out to be one of the Zika epidemic's chief fears.

It is an autoimmune attack on nerve cells that can be triggered by several viruses or bacteria. It is usually temporary, though it can last for weeks; but if the paralysis reaches the muscles powering the lungs, and the patient is not quickly put on a respirator, it can kill.

Ms. Summers's caution was right: Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave similar advice about unprotected sex to all Americans.

In May, after it was confirmed that Zika was circulating in Brazil, it took only a few weeks for doctors to suspect that Dr. Chioro, the health minister, had been mistaken. There were hints that the virus was anything but benign.

In Maceió, Recife and other cities, cases of Guillain-Barré began to spike. Dr. María Lúcia Brito, a neurologist in Recife, saw 50 patients with it in 2015, up from 14 the year before.

"It was obvious - a shift occurred when Zika cases started to rise," she said.

Then, in July, a pair of twins were born in Recife. One was healthy; the other was microcephalic. Their parents took them in early August to be examined by Dr. Vanessa van der Linden, a prominent neurologist.

She diagnosed the cause as an infection that had reached one baby in the womb, and tested mother and baby for rubella, syphilis and toxoplasmosis, three known causes of microcephaly.

The results were negative, so she started testing for genetic mutations like Down syndrome.

In September, the Hospital Barão de Lucena, the public hospital in Recife where she works, saw a surge in cases: five microcephalic babies were suddenly in her care.

The same thing was happening elsewhere. The hospital where her mother was a pediatric neurologist suddenly had seven cases.

"That's when I thought, 'Something is terribly wrong,' " Dr. van der Linden said.

She soon learned that several of the mothers remembered having the "mystery disease" - the Zika rash - early in their pregnancies.

But tests of the infants for the Zika infection were all negative. Their mothers had been ill months earlier, and in adults the virus usually disappears in 10 days or less. It is still unclear how long it persists in a fetus.

In early October, the national health ministry asked Dr. Turchi, the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation epidemiologist, to investigate. She went to hospitals, including those in Recife. Doctors were running tests for various viruses, but they were all coming up blank.

"The pediatricians were saying, 'We've never seen anything like this,' " she said. "These kids are different. This is something new."

Dr. Kátia Petribu, a hospital psychiatrist in Recife, remembers the mothers. They were ghosts - mute, expressionless figures in corridors holding babies whose foreheads seemed to have vanished.

Many of the mothers were young, one just 14. "They were in a state of shock," she said. "They were unable to talk."

Dr. Petribu had trouble sleeping. She could not get them out of her mind.

Normally, she worked with patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. But she decided to refocus on these women, who so clearly needed help.

"They come with nothing," she said. "No food. They travel by bus for hours, arrive at 7 a.m., and wait for hours to be seen."

Many were young rural women with no understanding of why their children looked so different. A 16-year-old showed up with her own mother, who was worried about missing a perfect day to sell cold drinks on the beach.

Dr. Mauricio L. Nogueira, a doctor from southern Brazil who had seen no cases in his region, which is as far from the tropical north as Quebec is from Miami, remembers visiting a hospital in the northern city of Salvador. He is still haunted by what he saw: 25 microcephalic children, all born in the previous 10 days.

That was "really shocking for me," he said. "Until then, I was just reading reports."

One mother, he said, looked up at him and asked, "Hey, doctor, his head is going to grow, right?"

"It was really painful," he said.

Frustration was growing, too, for Dr. Turchi, the epidemiologist. "If we had known what was going on, that would have been one thing," she said. "But there was no book to follow. We had no map."

She shelved her work on the dengue virus and skipped Christmas with her mother.

"I couldn't sleep for several weeks," she said. "It was the most important thing I have seen in my entire career. It was a tragedy, but it was like we were seeing history in front of us, day by day. It was a living history, and we were part of it."

Zika's connection to microcephaly was suspected but very difficult to confirm. Dr. Turchi set up a quick "case control" study, the epidemiologist's classic tool, comparing babies born with the condition and those without it.

Dr. David L. Heymann, chairman of the World Health Organization committee that recommended the declaration of the public health emergency, said in an interview last week that very tool - a case control study following two sets of pregnant women, some who had Zika and some who did not - was what his committee needed to prove whether Zika causes microcephaly, and whether it does so alone or requires a cofactor like a prior infection with dengue.

"Sorting out a rare event will take a lot of women," he said, and they must be followed for months.

But Dr. Turchi did not have months.

She called every scientist she knew, and they came from all over Brazil. One flew in from London. Dr. Turchi gave the group a name: MERG, the Microcephaly Epidemic Research Group.

"It was like a house on fire - everyone grabs a bucket and does what they can," she said. Some scientists stayed in her apartment, talking late into the night. "It's like when you like something and you have people who like the same thing, you can talk for hours without feeling tired," she said. "It's like discussing football. You never stop talking. It's an obsession."

A turning point came in early November: Dr. Adriana Melo in Paraíba State, just north of Recife, had drawn amniotic fluid from a pregnant woman and found Zika virus in it. Then brain tissue from two stillbirths was tested. Again, Zika.

"At last we had a road to follow," Dr. Turchi said. "A map."

One of those who flew in to help in the detective work was Dr. Laura C. Rodrigues, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on contract to the Pan American Health Organization.

"It was the kind of call where you dropped everything," she said. "There had never been a congenital malformation by mosquito before, not ever. It was totally outside our experience."

With the discovery of Zika in malformed fetuses, Dr. Turchi's team has been able to turn to the kind of task Dr. Heymann described. They have recruited about 1,000 pregnant women with Zika symptoms, and are following healthy and microcephalic newborns in the same areas. They work nights and weekends, eating sandwiches from the institute's shop or meals of rice, beans and chicken provided by a research assistant's mother.

There are now so many reported cases of microcephaly that a new problem has arisen: too many false alarms.

Anxious obstetricians across Brazil have reported babies who merely have small heads, or babies whose mothers had other problems, like severe alcoholism or family histories of malformations, conditions that should have excluded them from the research.

Brazil has already changed its definition of a small head, to 32 centimeters around from 33 centimeters, and may revise it again soon.

Dr. Turchi defends those decisions, saying a broad net had to be cast at first because so little was known.

"We didn't want to get just the severe cases; we wanted to look at the broadest possible spectrum of the disease," she said. "Then we can narrow it later."

Loosed on a continent where no one is immune, Zika has the potential to infect tens of millions of people. It is now being transmitted in 33 countries with about 600 million inhabitants, the W.H.O. says. Health officials in Brazil are investigating thousands of reported cases of microcephaly that may be linked to the virus.

Now a bright spot has appeared.

In Recife, and Pernambuco State around it, microcephaly cases have been declining for about three weeks. It is unclear exactly why, but researchers are starting to wonder if the epidemic has peaked.

"It looks like a perfect epidemic curve," Dr. Turchi said. "You see where it started, then went up, and now it's going down."

How dangerous is the virus and who is most at risk? Credit Credit Luis Robayo/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

But that decline, and the general sigh of relief it portends, is occurring only in the one spot in the hemisphere where transmission of the virus hit earliest and was most intense.

Zika was just getting started there a year before the microcephaly cases began. And now the virus is virtually everywhere south of Florida and Texas.

And Guillain-Barré, the harbinger of microcephaly, is being spotted farther from the epidemic's epicenter in Brazil.

Colombia, Venezuela, Suriname and El Salvador, where mosquitoes thrive year-round, all have reported Guillain-Barré cases. Colombia has "an explosion" of them, its health minister said, with three deaths.

There have also been dozens of confirmed Zika rashes and fevers in the United States, all so far in returning travelers, except for the person infected through sex in Texas by a traveler returning from Venezuela.

Air travel maps show the United States' potential to be a kind of viral pincushion; Zika may arrive from anywhere. Since four out of five victims never have any symptoms, there is no way to spot it at the border.

The C.D.C. thinks it is all but inevitable that there will be at least small outbreaks here. But how far they spread will depend on how aggressively mosquitoes are killed.

Now that the world is alert to the danger and is fighting back, and women are even contemplating delaying pregnancies, scientists say it is unlikely that Brazil's national nightmare will be repeated elsewhere on such a scale.

In Recife, Dr. Turchi was hopeful.

"I'm more comfortable now," she said. "I see so many people working as a team and so much international concern. Now it has become clear to the whole world."

Correction:

An article on Sunday about the Zika virus misstated the location of Yap Island, in Micronesia, which suffered an outbreak of the virus in 2007. It is east of the Philippines, not west.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. reported from New York; Simon Romero from Recife, Brazil; and Sabrina Tavernise from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Medical Mystery With a Global Reach. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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How a Medical Mystery in Brazil Led Doctors to Zika

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A sudden, sharp increase in babies with "no foreheads and very strange heads" was baffling doctors in Brazil. That set off a search for answers that led to a little-known pathogen, the Zika virus. An Aedes aegypti female mosquito on water inside a tire at a used tire store in Villavicencio, Colombia.

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Antarctica is gaining ice, NASA study says - CNN

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Antarctica is gaining more ice than it has lost, according to a new study by NASA.

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http://news.discovery.com/human/life/doomsday-clock-set-at-3-minutes-to-midnight-160126.htm

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A newly discovered species of spider, Jotus remus, is so named because it sports an enormous paddelike appendage on its third pair of legs. (In Latin, remus means oar or paddle.) The spider likely flashes his paddle in order to woo mates.

Credit: Jurgen Otto

Males of the human variety may spend hours at the gym bulking up to attract the ladies, but that's nothing compared to the efforts of a new spider species from Australia.

This little brown spider sports a massive, paddlelike appendage on its legs that it flashes at females to woo mates, new research has revealed.

The new spider species, Jotus remus, can do this paddle "peekaboo" routine for hours, all to get female spiders to accept its advances. The paddle seems to be a way of separating the fertile females from those that have no interest in mating, said Jürgen Otto, the biologist who discovered the oddball spider. [ Incredible Photos of Peacock Spiders]

Camping stowaway

Otto has a day job researching mites at the Australian Department of Agriculture and Water Resources in Sydney, but spends his free time hunting down gorgeous and unusual peacock spiders. (Otto maintains a YouTube channel filled with videos of the bizarre mating dances of peacock spiders.) He first discovered J. remus, while on a camping trip with his family during Christmas break in 2014. While unpacking the car after the trip, he spied an ordinary-looking brown spider sitting on his tent bag.

"At first it didn't seem really unusual. It had color, patterns and shapes I've seen before," Otto told Live Science. "But I looked closer and noticed it had these funny extensions on their third pair of legs, it seemed like a paddle."

Otto suspected the creepy crawly was a new spider species, but had no idea what the paddle was for. And finding out posed a bigger problem: He wasn't sure whether the spider lurked in the wilderness around his home or was a stowaway from his campsite at Barrington Tops National Park, about 125 miles (200 kilometers) north of Sydney.

Eventually, Otto returned to his camping location and noticed several of the spiders on a walking trail he'd visited during the trip. He suspected the darker brown arachnids were the females, so he scooped some of those up, as well as additional males and put individual males and females together with some twigs and leaves to see what they did.

Hide-and-seek

The male spider quickly hid behind a leaf as the female spider watched.

"From under the leaf he stretched out one of his legs, of the third pair," Otto told Live Science. "He exposed that paddlelike extension to her and waved it at her." The female occasionally lunged toward the male spider. The male handily evaded her.

"He seemed to have no difficulty at all escaping from these attacks; he seemed to be playing a game," Otto said.

This seemingly pointless game of hide-and-seek went on for many minutes until the male gave up. Otto tried the same thing with multiple females and male piders. Perhaps the male was trying to exhaust the females, to make them more receptive to his mating advances, Otto said he thought. But the females didn't seem to get tired, no matter how long the male persisted. Like the male spider, Otto eventually set aside the peekaboo game and pursued other spider questions.

Like a virgin

But a few months ago, some of the immature females of J. remus grew up. These spider females were "virgins" who had had no opportunity to mate with males. In these types of spiders, females can probably only mate once, so non-virgin females are of no use for males looking to pass on their genes, Otto said.

When Otto put the male spider together with the virgin female spider, the male went ahead with his paddle routine. But the female, rather than lunging at him, watched curiously. Within a few minutes, the female became very calm and still. At that point, the male spider made his move, emphatically thrusting his paddle twice.

"After those two vigorous paddle strokes, he just jumped up very quickly to the other side of the leaf and went on mating with that female," Otto said.

So the paddle dance seemed to be an elaborate way for male spiders to figure out if a prospective female is "the one," Otto said.

"The one that keeps attacking him is not the right one," Otto said. (Probably good advice for males of any species.)

Questionable behavior

While Otto has never seen a female spider eat a male, the females are superb hunters and the males of the species are significantly smaller than the females, "just the right size for him to be food," Otto said. As such, the elaborate paddle game may partly be a protective mechanism, a way for males to avoid risking danger with a female who has no interest. Still, the males are swift and never seemed to be truly threatened by the females, and the whole encounter seems almost playful, so there could be another explanation for the male spiders' sneaky moves, he added.

One question still puzzles Otto: Why do the males play so long with partners who clearly have no interest?

"If the male gets a reaction from the female telling him she is not really happy to mate with him, why does he keep on trying?" Otto said. "There's a lot of play going on that seems to be wasted energy."

Otto and his colleague David Hill, a zoologist in Greenville, South Carolina, described J. remus in a paper that was published online Jan. 7 in the journal Peckhamia.

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Spider Shows Off His Big Paddle to Woo Mates

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Males of the human variety may spend hours at the gym bulking up to attract the ladies, but that's nothing compared to the efforts of a new spider species from Australia. This little brown spider sports a massive, paddlelike appendage on its legs that it flashes at females to woo mates, new research has revealed.

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First Posted: Jan 26, 2016 08:09 AM EST

Oil in the ocean doesn't sound like a good thing-especially after something like the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, though, researchers have found that life thrives above natural oil seeps in the form of phytoplankton.

The oil itself doesn't seem to be helping the plankton. However, the low concentration of oil found above natural seeps isn't kill them, either. In addition, it seems as if the turbulence from the rising oil and gas bubbles from below brings deep-water nutrients that the phytoplankton need to grow.

"This is the beginning of evidence that some microbes in the Gulf may be preconditioned to survive with oil, at least at lower concentrations," said Ajit Subramaniam, one of the researchers, in a news release. "In this case, we clearly see these phytoplankton are not negatively affected at low concentrations of oil, and there is an accompanying process that helps them thrive. This does not mean that exposure to oil at all concentrations for prolonged lengths of time is good for phytoplankton."

The researchers didn't just find phytoplankton in the area where oil was, though. They found that due to the increased nutrients, the patch of phytoplankton was about twice the size as populations that lived only a few kilometers away.

There are still many questions to be answered about this phenomenon, though. For example, scientists don't yet know which types of phytoplankton are thriving over seeps, or if some types of phytoplankton in the community are negatively affected. With that said, this study does highlight that at least some populations of phytoplankton benefit from the nutrients brought by rising oil.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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Oil Leaking into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deep Ocean is Helping Marine Life Thrive

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Oil in the ocean doesn't sound like a good thing-especially after something like the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, though, researchers have found that life thrives above natural oil seeps in the form of phytoplankton.

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A caloric increase is helping the oldest known living terrestrial animal in the world -- a giant tortoise -- reclaim his health and vigor, a veterinarian reports.

At 183 years old, Jonathan, who resides on the tiny Atlantic island of St. Helena, is now eating like a king. Until recently, the giant tortoise munched on twigs, leaves and grass, an unhealthy diet for such a large and aging tortoise. But now, he's being served a more nutritious menu, including apples, carrots, cucumbers, bananas and guava, according to National Geographic.

Before the diet change, Jonathan's keratin beak was blunt and soft, making him an inefficient grazer, Dr. Joe Hollins, the veterinarian who cares for Jonathan, said in a 2012 report in the journal Veterinary Record. But a better diet helped the tortoise develop a sharper bite.

"His once blunt and crumbly beak has become sharp and lethal, so he was probably suffering from microdeficiencies of vitamins, minerals and trace elements," until the diet upgrade, Hollins said in a statement.

Jonathan's life may be long, but it hasn't been easy. He was born in the Seychelles archipelago in the Indian Ocean. In 1882, the tortoise was given as a gift to the governor of St. Helena, an island slightly larger than Manhattan that was once inhabited by an exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, as well as more than 5,000 Boer War prisoners, according to the Seychelles News Agency.

Jonathan was about 50 years old when he arrived on St. Helena. Since then, other tortoises, including David, Emma, Frederika and Myrtle, have joined him. But as Aldabra giant tortoises, they're unable to mate with Jonathan, the agency reported.

Nowadays, the "brittle old gentleman" is blind from cataracts and has lost his sense of smell. But the tortoise still has excellent hearing, Hollins said.

Farewell to Speed, San Diego Zoo's ancient tortoise

"Once weekly I hand-feed him to boost his calorie intake," Hollins wrote in the report. "After his meal, I wipe his chin, scratch his throat and wish him well."

Seychelles giant tortoises have a life expectancy of 150 years, but Jonathan appears to be going strong. Other long-lived animals include the hydra (a marine animal that may be immortal) and an approximately 4,200-year-old deep-sea coral living off the Hawaiian coast.

The world's oldest living human -- the 116-year-old Susannah Mushatt Jones of Brooklyn, New York -- doesn't even come close. But she still beats the world's oldest living cat (age 26) and the oldest captive panda (age 37) on record.

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At age 183, world's oldest animal is still going strong

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A caloric increase is helping the oldest known living terrestrial animal in the world -- a giant tortoise -- reclaim his health and vigor, a veterinarian reports. At 183 years old, Jonathan, who resides on the tiny Atlantic island of St. Helena, is now eating like a king.

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A computer simulation shows how the first stars may have exploded, spreading the first traces of heavy elements through the universe.

Credit: Britton Smith, John Wise, Brian O'Shea, Michael Norman and Sadegh Khochfar

An enormous cloud of dust and gas may bear the fingerprints of the first stars in the universe.

The distant cloud contains only a tiny amount of relatively heavy elements, which are manufactured in the hearts of stars, suggesting that these traces may have come from some of the first stars that ever existed.

"The reason why we care [about the first stars] is intricately related with the air we're breathing right now," study co-author John O'Meara, of Saint Michael's College in Vermont, said last week at a press conference at the 227th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Kissimmee, Florida. "Early on in the universe, we didn't have those heavy elements [such as oxygen] at all." [ From the Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps]

The universe's first stars were built primarily out of hydrogen and helium, the dominant elements that existed shortly after the Big Bang.

Fusion transformed the material at these stars' hearts into heavier elements, which were then blasted into space when the stars died in violent supernova explosions. Subsequent generations of stars incorporated this material into their bodies, building even heavier elements in their cores.

"It's clear the history of the universe is very much the history of the increase in the relative amounts of heavy elements over time," said O'Meara, who worked with study lead author Neil Crighton, as well as Michael Murphy, both of whom are based at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.

The study team used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to study an ancient gas cloud as it appeared only 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang, which created the universe about 13.8 billion years ago.

As light from an extremely bright background object known as a quasar streamed through the cloud, the astronomers were able to determine the composition of its constituent gas. They found that the ancient cloud contained an extremely small percentage of heavy elements - traces that may have been scattered by the first generation of stars.

Previous surveys have revealed clouds of hydrogen and helium gas, but they were pristine, untouched by the heavy elements built within stars. This ancient gas cloud contains the smallest measurable traces of heavy elements ever found, the researchers said.

"It is the lowest amount of heavy elements ever determined in a gas cloud like this," O'Meara said.

The problem with studying massive clouds of gas in the early universe isn't that they are rare; it's that they are extremely common. The light from a single quasar can pierce through multiple clouds as it streams toward Earth. According to O'Meara, this can "muddle" the process of distinguishing heavy elements, because the signals are overlapping.

"It was our willingness to go down in the weeds, to try to find those very rare systems where you could make that measurement" that made the observations possible, he said.

Other such heavy-element-tinged clouds may exist as well, but scientists need to pore over a number of observations to find alignments where the signals can be precisely measured.

"It's not to say they're not out there in abundance," O'Meara said. "The problem is just getting lucky."

As instruments like NASA's $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) come online in the near future, the hunt for such gas clouds might become easier. Rather than being limited to quasars, which are relatively few in number, scientists should be able to use galaxies as their background light source.

"Once you can start using galaxies as a background source, you go from hundreds of thousands of objects on the sky to tens of millions," O'Meara said.

Searching the universe for signs of these clouds today will help narrow down the list of potential targets for JWST in the future, he added.

"We're building James Webb in part to find these things," O'Meara said. "It would be nice to get at least a teaser trailer of what we might find with Webb."

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd or Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Nola Taylor Redd, Live Science Contributor

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Traces of the First Stars in the Universe Possibly Found

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An enormous cloud of dust and gas may bear the fingerprints of the first stars in the universe. The distant cloud contains only a tiny amount of relatively heavy elements, which are manufactured in the hearts of stars, suggesting that these traces may have come from some of the first stars that ever existed.

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.rdmag.com/news/2016/01/brain-monitoring-takes-leap-out-lab

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The huge gap between current CMS offerings and what the world needed occurred to me during my time as CTO of The Huffington Post. When we were acquired by AOL in 2011, I inherited 53 properties built on dozens of different content management systems. It wasn't long after that I soon realized they were all built by IT people who didn't fully grasp the concepts of traffic and distribution. That's why in 2012 I launched RebelMouse as the first platform to create the "social front page" - a hub where users could aggregate social feeds all in one place. It went viral with eight million users worldwide. The viral success made me realize that there wasn't a CMS to bring it all together, yet.

One of the main reasons I launched RebelMouse was because I recognized that a huge shift in advertising would happen, and that content would become marketing very quickly. And it did.

Today, I am extremely proud of the powerful product we've created. RebelMouse was built to solve the complex intersection of product, engineering, editorial, and revenue. It's allowed us to create a next-generation CMS unlike any other - backed by some of the best venture capitalists in the world - and is responsible for launching some of the biggest media sites such as Axios and The Dodo, both of which saw massive success upon launch.

But our team still sees plenty of sites - including brands, publishers, and personal influencers - not reaching their full potential. A lot of the time it's because they're bogged down with a clunky CMS like WordPress. We're all trying to publish and make money in a competitive industry that's always changing. But to be frank, WordPress isn't keeping up with the industry fast enough. There's a lot you need in and out of a CMS to survive and succeed in this digital climate, and we've created a solution that quickly responds to every industry shift and algorithm curveball.

Here are six reasons why RebelMouse is different from WordPress and worthy of a replatforming process that's simple and can be completed in a matter of days.

1. RebelMouse Is a Centralized CMS

RebelMouse is a centralized CMS, unlike other common web solutions like WordPress and Drupal. WordPress is a decentralized model that requires every platform update to be completed independently. This means that - of the 87 million plus versions of WordPress that are currently live on the internet - each update has to be implemented one by one.

Operating your business on a decentralized model is a big security risk. Every time there's a security threat, the core developers at WordPress must deploy patches in the form of product updates. From there, it's up to the managing developers of each individual site to deploy and configure around these updates to avoid breaking custom code and plugins. And this happens a lot. Since its launch in 2003, WordPress has released 238 product updates, many of them to address gaps in security.

Since we operate on a centralized model, every update on our platform is updated at one time, and sometimes multiple times a day. Usually our clients never notice the difference. We protect the data of our clients and make sure their sites are not only risk-free, but also operating at continuous peak performance.

But this doesn't mean our platform is closed off by any means. We use the languages of the open web, and any developer can easily learn our platform to create high-quality work without the burden of relying on unstable and fragmented WordPress plugins and updates.

2. More Than Just Tech

We've never been one to stick to boxes at RebelMouse. We started out on the cutting edge of social in 2012, and stayed close to the heart of digital publishing ever since. That's why our clients don't get a stagnant software platform like WordPress. Instead, they get a full-service creative agency full of content optimization specialists, social media gurus, and monetization experts. We blur the line between product and strategy to drive success.

Our content migration process from WordPress to RebelMouse is simple. And once it's completed, we don't waste any time optimizing your site for page speed. From there, we restructure your content strategy so you can see results at scale. Here are some of the strategy services we offer:

Monetization: We believe saving costs is the new revenue stream. Our lean tech model creates new opportunities for monetization, and our strategy team uses data-driven methods to make sure your site is getting maximum return.

Social: In 2018, engagement is the key metric to watch to drive sustainable growth. Using our social tools, we can help you create deep connections that spark conversation in the social ecosystem.

Audience Loyalty: It's easy to have viral moments both on site and via social, but those instances can be fleeting. Organic loyalty is what's required to ensure steady growth. We help you take advantage of the social ecosystem's universe of creators and influencers to help you grow a loyal community.

Search: The RebelMouse CMS has the tools to help you optimize each post for SEO. LIke everything else in the current digital climate, the strategy around search is always changing. We'll make sure your current efforts are up to snuff.

3. User-Focused Site Experience

Media sites have become really complicated over time. The industry let intrusive ads take over the internet, and now we're all left cleaning up the mess and re-prioritizing user experiences to get users back and make them stick. When we launched Axios on our new Social UX for Media layout in 2017, it mimicked the social feeds to drive more pageviews, engagement, and user satisfaction. It's a design structure that sees success on our other properties, too, including Dance Magazine and EcoWatch.

Our platform also has a powerful layout tool called Particle Assembler which creates beautiful designs. Instead of leaning heavily on an expensive developer team, Particle Assembler lets content creators design gorgeous layouts within a few clicks. Whatever works best for your brand, we'll guide you through the right design and site navigation that will bring next-level growth to your business.

4. Better Social Distribution Tools

A lot of publishers were slower to understand the importance of distributed publishing when digital started to gain steam. Luckily, it's something we've been working to perfect since we launched our CMS in 2012. Producing quality content is only half the battle - after all, there's no point in publishing engaging content if nobody is around to read it. This is why dynamic distribution is so important in order to succeed in today's digital world. And the good news is that tackling this doesn't have to be a solo effort.

At RebelMouse, we believe we live in a universe of creators. Not only will your fellow creators take interest in the topics you publish about, but they'll also share your content and validate your message.

That's why we created Discovery, an important part of our enterprise-level toolset that's available from right within our Entry Editor where you create articles. Using proprietary technology, Discovery enables you to identify key pages and profiles that could be interested in sharing your content. And through varying levels of social outreach, you can repurpose and share content from your Discovery findings in a way that validates the original message of those influencers. From there, you amplify the content through your own social channels.

This sharing cycle has led to the success of some of our biggest clients. The Dodo - one of the most successful new media companies to date - used Discovery to become the center of all things animals on the internet. It can do this for you, too.

5. Modern Authoring Tools

Chances are the CMS platform you're using was created before social. If that's true, you may still view content on your website and in social feeds as two different entities you have to control and manage. We're here to blur those lines for you and take publishing where it needs to be in 2018.

Our Entry Editor isn't simply a way to publish articles. It's a full-blown toolset for content creators. Before each piece of content is pushed live, it can be optimized for design, social, and SEO. We've also created a new content workflow that ensures every content team is on the most efficient path to publish.

Your writers, editors, creators, and community deserve tools that make them fast and efficient. It's also important that they follow a process that enforces best practices, so that the CMS itself is training your team with every post as they onboard.

6. Easy-to-Understand Analytics

It's important for you to manage your writers, see their performance, enable them to learn from each other, and help them become data driven. RebelMouse analytics provide you with a clear view of who is performing, what posts are working, and where that content is gaining traction.

Our CMS operates on a data-driven product cycle. Everything we release at RebelMouse is subjected to a small percentage of traffic and A/B tested for performance impact. Our testing includes how each version affects pagespeed and user experience. We then take these results and check to see how they correlate with bounce rate, time on site, pages per session, and conversion to goals - such as shares, subscriptions, and purchases. We also take big data and distill it into easy-to-consume insights that you can quickly act upon. You can view how each post is performing on search and social, right from within the Entry Editor.

In addition, we have a deep Google Analytics integration, so you can easily add in components, promos, third-party units, and ad units. But most importantly, as these pieces are being added, they're set up in staged environments automatically, and the traffic performance from these tests can be traced back to impact on bounce rate, pages per session, session duration, number of shares, percent of shares per visit, and unique custom goals for your business.

Let's Start Working Together

We migrate sites from WordPress all the time, and it's a fast process. Even if replatforming isn't an option for you at the moment, we can still offer you our creative agency services to make sure you're reaching your biggest audience possible. Let's create something together. Request a proposal to get in contact with a Rebel.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
6 Reasons to Upgrade to RebelMouse from WordPress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The huge gap between current CMS offerings and what the world needed occurred to me during my time as CTO of The Huffington Post. When we were acquired by AOL in 2011, I inherited 53 properties built on dozens of different content management systems. It wasn't long after that I soon realized they we...

# data[].attributes.body
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160111-insects-animals-science-praying-mantises-3d-vision/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The JAQ fuel cell charger would allow you to charge your smartphone without an electrical outlet, say at the beach.

Credit: myFC

LAS VEGAS - A sleek new device could help you charge your phone without an electric outlet.

Swedish startup MyFC unveiled its cool technology, dubbed JAQ, here at CES on Jan. 6. The device, which is small enough to slip into your back pocket, is a fuel cell charger. It uses saltwater and oxygen to convert chemical energy into electricity. Then it uses that electricity to charge your phone's battery.

The charger consists of a credit card-shaped "power card" and a hollowed out port that's roughly the size of a smartphone. The card contains saltwater, which fuels electricity-producing chemical reactions when you slip the card into the port. To get that electricity to your phone's battery, you simply plug your phone into the port with a standard cable. [ Smartphones With the Longest Battery Life]

One JAQ power card produces about 1,800 milliampere-hours' (mAH) worth of electricity - that's nearly enough energy to fully charge an iPhone 6S. Larger devices, like tablets, can also be charged with the fuel cell, but it'll take more than one power card to get them fully juiced. The saltwater-containing power cards are good for just one use. After that, they stop producing the chemical reactions necessary to generate electricity.

The device works by combining two reactants, in this case hydrogen and oxygen, inside an enclosed space. Hydrogen atoms from the saltwater in the power card enter the fuel cell (there are 10 fuel cells in the card) at the anode, where a "chemical reaction strips them of their electrons," MyFC explains on its website. These electrons then provide the current that powers the phone or tablet that's connected to JAQ.

This smartphone charger uses salt and water to juice up your device.

Credit: myFC

Once the hydrogen atoms are stripped of their electrons, they become positively charged hydrogen ions and are able to move through the fuel cell's electrolyte - a membranelike substance that limits the movement of ions in the cell. At the cathode end of the cell, oxygen from the air enters and combines with the hydrogen ions that made it through the electrolyte and electrons returning from the electrical circuit. This reaction results in a totally harmless byproduct: water (H2O).

JAQ isn't available for purchase just yet, but the company anticipates that the product will be ready to ship later this year. When it does go up for sale, MyFC hopes to implement a subscription service. Customers would sign up to receive a certain number of power cards every month. Individual cards would also be available for purchase and will likely cost about $1.50 each, a company spokesperson told Live Science.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pocket-Sized Device Charges Your Phone with Water

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LAS VEGAS ­- A sleek new device could help you charge your phone without an electric outlet. Swedish startup MyFC unveiled its cool technology, dubbed JAQ, here at CES on Jan. 6. The device, which is small enough to slip into your back pocket, is a fuel cell charger.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Astronomers have spotted two huge waves of gas being "burped" by the black hole at the heart of a nearby galaxy.

The swathes of hot gas, detected in X-ray images from Nasa's Chandra space telescope, appear to be sweeping cooler hydrogen gas ahead of them.

This vast, rippling belch is taking place in NGC 5195 - a small, neglected sibling of the "Whirlpool Galaxy", 26 million light years away.

That makes it one of the closest black holes blasting gas in this way.

The findings, presented at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Florida, are a dramatic example of "feedback" between a supermassive black hole and its host galaxy.

"We think that feedback keeps galaxies from becoming too large," said Marie Machacek, a co-author of the study from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CFA).

"But at the same time, it can be responsible for how some stars form. This shows that black holes can create, not just destroy."

Ancient emissions

Black holes are well known for consuming gas and stars, but the two arcs of material glimpsed here are the equivalent of a burp after a big meal, the team said.

The black hole at the centre of NGC 5195 probably gorged on gas that was delivered by the small galaxy's interaction with its much bigger, spiralling neighbour. As that matter fell into the black hole, huge amounts of energy would have been released - causing the outbursts.

Eric Schlegel from the University of Texas at San Antonio, who led the study, explained that the crucial observation was the cooler hydrogen gas being propelled ahead of the hot, X-ray emitting waves.

"This is the best example of snowplough material I've ever seen," he said.

Deep red light, indicating the presence of hydrogen, was seen in a thin strip just in front of the outermost wave, in optical images from a telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

"If it had not been for the hydrogen-alpha image, I would have been somewhat sceptical," Prof Schlegel told BBC News.

"I would have said, maybe this is mass going in, maybe it's mass coming out."

But the patch of hydrogen, spread out in a thin shape closely matching the arc of hot gas seen in Chandra X-ray images, clinched this as a belch rather than a gulp.

In fact, it is the cosmic shockwave from a rather ancient burp; the team has calculated that the inner wave of hot gas probably took three million years to reach its current position - and the outer wave up to six million years.

"We think these arcs represent fossils from two enormous blasts when the black hole expelled material outward into the galaxy," said co-author Christine Jones, also from the CFA.

"This activity is likely to have had a big effect on the galactic landscape."

If their central, supermassive black holes often blast gas outward like this, it might help explain why elliptical galaxies like NGC 5194 tend not to have much active star formation, Prof Schlegel said.

And in the meantime, the outburst is likely to give NGC 5195 (also known as Messier 51b) some of the spotlight that it normally loses to the huge, whirlpool-shaped Messier 51a, with which it is gradually colliding.

"[The Whirlpool Galaxy] gets all the attention," Prof Schlegel said. "The poor companion gets very little - but I think that's about to change."

More black hole news

Other researchers speaking at the AAS meeting on Tuesday described a different, very peculiar black hole.

It is one of a pair of supermassive black holes, circling each other within a single galaxy after a big merger event.

Remarkably, only one of the pair is surrounded by the usual bright, spherical clump of gravitationally bound stars - posing something of a mystery.

"The answer may lie in the galaxy merger itself," said Julie Comerford, an astrophysicist at University of Colorado Boulder.

"When two galaxies merge, there are very strong gravitational and tidal forces that can strip away the stars from around the black hole."

Alternatively, the star-starved black hole may simply belong to a very rare, intermediate class - much smaller than the usual supermassive monsters that sit at the centre of big galaxies.

In that case, one of the galaxies that went into the merger must have only been a dwarf galaxy.

"Maybe this small sphere of stars is actually appropriate for an intermediate-mass black hole," said Dr Comerford.

"There are very few of these known - they are very rare and hard to find - but they're interesting because we think they may be an evolutionary stopover in the process of building supermassive black holes."

Dr Comerford and her colleagues published their findings, based on images from the Chandra and Hubble space telescopes, last year in the Astrophysical Journal.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Astronomers have spotted two huge waves of gas being "burped" by the black hole at the heart of a nearby galaxy. The swathes of hot gas, detected in X-ray images from Nasa's Chandra space telescope, appear to be sweeping cooler hydrogen gas ahead of them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The huge gap between current CMS offerings and what the world needed occurred to me during my time as CTO of The Huffington Post. When we were acquired by AOL in 2011, I inherited 53 properties built on dozens of different content management systems. It wasn't long after that I soon realized they were all built by IT people who didn't fully grasp the concepts of traffic and distribution. That's why in 2012 I launched RebelMouse as the first platform to create the "social front page" - a hub where users could aggregate social feeds all in one place. It went viral with eight million users worldwide. The viral success made me realize that there wasn't a CMS to bring it all together, yet.

One of the main reasons I launched RebelMouse was because I recognized that a huge shift in advertising would happen, and that content would become marketing very quickly. And it did.

Today, I am extremely proud of the powerful product we've created. RebelMouse was built to solve the complex intersection of product, engineering, editorial, and revenue. It's allowed us to create a next-generation CMS unlike any other - backed by some of the best venture capitalists in the world - and is responsible for launching some of the biggest media sites such as Axios and The Dodo, both of which saw massive success upon launch.

But our team still sees plenty of sites - including brands, publishers, and personal influencers - not reaching their full potential. A lot of the time it's because they're bogged down with a clunky CMS like WordPress. We're all trying to publish and make money in a competitive industry that's always changing. But to be frank, WordPress isn't keeping up with the industry fast enough. There's a lot you need in and out of a CMS to survive and succeed in this digital climate, and we've created a solution that quickly responds to every industry shift and algorithm curveball.

Here are six reasons why RebelMouse is different from WordPress and worthy of a replatforming process that's simple and can be completed in a matter of days.

1. RebelMouse Is a Centralized CMS

RebelMouse is a centralized CMS, unlike other common web solutions like WordPress and Drupal. WordPress is a decentralized model that requires every platform update to be completed independently. This means that - of the 87 million plus versions of WordPress that are currently live on the internet - each update has to be implemented one by one.

Operating your business on a decentralized model is a big security risk. Every time there's a security threat, the core developers at WordPress must deploy patches in the form of product updates. From there, it's up to the managing developers of each individual site to deploy and configure around these updates to avoid breaking custom code and plugins. And this happens a lot. Since its launch in 2003, WordPress has released 238 product updates, many of them to address gaps in security.

Since we operate on a centralized model, every update on our platform is updated at one time, and sometimes multiple times a day. Usually our clients never notice the difference. We protect the data of our clients and make sure their sites are not only risk-free, but also operating at continuous peak performance.

But this doesn't mean our platform is closed off by any means. We use the languages of the open web, and any developer can easily learn our platform to create high-quality work without the burden of relying on unstable and fragmented WordPress plugins and updates.

2. More Than Just Tech

We've never been one to stick to boxes at RebelMouse. We started out on the cutting edge of social in 2012, and stayed close to the heart of digital publishing ever since. That's why our clients don't get a stagnant software platform like WordPress. Instead, they get a full-service creative agency full of content optimization specialists, social media gurus, and monetization experts. We blur the line between product and strategy to drive success.

Our content migration process from WordPress to RebelMouse is simple. And once it's completed, we don't waste any time optimizing your site for page speed. From there, we restructure your content strategy so you can see results at scale. Here are some of the strategy services we offer:

Monetization: We believe saving costs is the new revenue stream. Our lean tech model creates new opportunities for monetization, and our strategy team uses data-driven methods to make sure your site is getting maximum return.

Social: In 2018, engagement is the key metric to watch to drive sustainable growth. Using our social tools, we can help you create deep connections that spark conversation in the social ecosystem.

Audience Loyalty: It's easy to have viral moments both on site and via social, but those instances can be fleeting. Organic loyalty is what's required to ensure steady growth. We help you take advantage of the social ecosystem's universe of creators and influencers to help you grow a loyal community.

Search: The RebelMouse CMS has the tools to help you optimize each post for SEO. LIke everything else in the current digital climate, the strategy around search is always changing. We'll make sure your current efforts are up to snuff.

3. User-Focused Site Experience

Media sites have become really complicated over time. The industry let intrusive ads take over the internet, and now we're all left cleaning up the mess and re-prioritizing user experiences to get users back and make them stick. When we launched Axios on our new Social UX for Media layout in 2017, it mimicked the social feeds to drive more pageviews, engagement, and user satisfaction. It's a design structure that sees success on our other properties, too, including Dance Magazine and EcoWatch.

Our platform also has a powerful layout tool called Particle Assembler which creates beautiful designs. Instead of leaning heavily on an expensive developer team, Particle Assembler lets content creators design gorgeous layouts within a few clicks. Whatever works best for your brand, we'll guide you through the right design and site navigation that will bring next-level growth to your business.

4. Better Social Distribution Tools

A lot of publishers were slower to understand the importance of distributed publishing when digital started to gain steam. Luckily, it's something we've been working to perfect since we launched our CMS in 2012. Producing quality content is only half the battle - after all, there's no point in publishing engaging content if nobody is around to read it. This is why dynamic distribution is so important in order to succeed in today's digital world. And the good news is that tackling this doesn't have to be a solo effort.

At RebelMouse, we believe we live in a universe of creators. Not only will your fellow creators take interest in the topics you publish about, but they'll also share your content and validate your message.

That's why we created Discovery, an important part of our enterprise-level toolset that's available from right within our Entry Editor where you create articles. Using proprietary technology, Discovery enables you to identify key pages and profiles that could be interested in sharing your content. And through varying levels of social outreach, you can repurpose and share content from your Discovery findings in a way that validates the original message of those influencers. From there, you amplify the content through your own social channels.

This sharing cycle has led to the success of some of our biggest clients. The Dodo - one of the most successful new media companies to date - used Discovery to become the center of all things animals on the internet. It can do this for you, too.

5. Modern Authoring Tools

Chances are the CMS platform you're using was created before social. If that's true, you may still view content on your website and in social feeds as two different entities you have to control and manage. We're here to blur those lines for you and take publishing where it needs to be in 2018.

Our Entry Editor isn't simply a way to publish articles. It's a full-blown toolset for content creators. Before each piece of content is pushed live, it can be optimized for design, social, and SEO. We've also created a new content workflow that ensures every content team is on the most efficient path to publish.

Your writers, editors, creators, and community deserve tools that make them fast and efficient. It's also important that they follow a process that enforces best practices, so that the CMS itself is training your team with every post as they onboard.

6. Easy-to-Understand Analytics

It's important for you to manage your writers, see their performance, enable them to learn from each other, and help them become data driven. RebelMouse analytics provide you with a clear view of who is performing, what posts are working, and where that content is gaining traction.

Our CMS operates on a data-driven product cycle. Everything we release at RebelMouse is subjected to a small percentage of traffic and A/B tested for performance impact. Our testing includes how each version affects pagespeed and user experience. We then take these results and check to see how they correlate with bounce rate, time on site, pages per session, and conversion to goals - such as shares, subscriptions, and purchases. We also take big data and distill it into easy-to-consume insights that you can quickly act upon. You can view how each post is performing on search and social, right from within the Entry Editor.

In addition, we have a deep Google Analytics integration, so you can easily add in components, promos, third-party units, and ad units. But most importantly, as these pieces are being added, they're set up in staged environments automatically, and the traffic performance from these tests can be traced back to impact on bounce rate, pages per session, session duration, number of shares, percent of shares per visit, and unique custom goals for your business.

Let's Start Working Together

We migrate sites from WordPress all the time, and it's a fast process. Even if replatforming isn't an option for you at the moment, we can still offer you our creative agency services to make sure you're reaching your biggest audience possible. Let's create something together. Request a proposal to get in contact with a Rebel.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
6 Reasons to Upgrade to RebelMouse from WordPress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The huge gap between current CMS offerings and what the world needed occurred to me during my time as CTO of The Huffington Post. When we were acquired by AOL in 2011, I inherited 53 properties built on dozens of different content management systems. It wasn't long after that I soon realized they we...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An artist's impression of a ring around Mars, formed by its tiny moon Phobos.

Credit: Made using Celestia, Copyright (C) 2001-2010, Celestia Development Team

Mars may one day have rings similar to Saturn's famous halo, new research suggests.

In a few tens of millions of years, the Red Planet may completely crush its innermost moon, Phobos, and form a ring of rocky debris, according to the new work. Phobos is moving closer to Mars every year, meaning the planet's gravitational pull on the satellite is increasing. Some scientists have theorized that Phobos will eventually collide with Mars, but the new research suggests that the small moon may not last that long.

"The main factor affecting whether Phobos will crash into Mars or break apart is its strength," Tushar Mittal, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the authors of the new research paper, told Space.com by email. "If Phobos is too weak to withstand increasing tidal stresses, then we expect it to break apart." [ Photos of Mars' Moon Phobos Up Close]

The two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, are named after the children of the god Ares, the Greek counterpart to Mars, the Roman god of war.

The larger, inner moon, Phobos, is only about 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide, and orbits the Red Planet rapidly, rising and setting twice each Martian day. The tiny moon is slowly moving toward its host - drawing closer to Mars by 6.5 feet (2 meters) every century - which may result in a dramatic crash into the Martian surface within 30 million to 50 million years, previous research has shown.

But after simulating the physical stresses that Mars exerts on Phobos, Mittal and co-author Benjamin Black, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, see a different fate for Phobos. Their research suggests that instead of going out in a single, enormous impact, the moon will be pulled apart by the Martian gravity.

On Earth, the gravitational pull of the moon causes the rise and fall of ocean tides. Although the moon has no oceans, Earth's gravitational pull is still referred to as "tidal forces."

Phobos and other moons in the solar system also feel tidal stress from their hosts. Black and Mittal studied the "strength" of the Martian satellite, including characteristics like composition and density, to determine how much planetary stress the moon could withstand.

After comparing it to several meteorites on Earth, they concluded that Phobos today is made up of porous, heavily damaged rock and is likely the same throughout its interior.

"The moon is probably neither a complete rubble pile, nor completely rigid," Mittal said. "The porosity of Phobos may have helped it survive."

After simulating the stresses caused by the tidal pull of Mars, the pair found that the moon would break up over the course of 20 million to 40 million years, forming a ring of debris around the planet.

The rubble would continue to move inward, toward the planet, though at a slower pace than the larger moon is traveling, they said. Over the span of 1 million to 100 million years, the particles would rain down on the equatorial region of Mars, Mittal and Black said.

Initially, the ring could be as dense as Saturn's, but it would become thinner as the particles fell down onto the planet over time, they added. [ Latest Images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter]

Saturn isn't the only planet in the solar system to boast rings; all of the gas giant planets have some form of debris disk surrounding them. While some of the material was likely gathered from space, portions of those ring systems could be the remains of early moons that broke apart as they journeyed inward. Larger moons move inward at a faster pace than their smaller counterparts, causing a much more rapid demise.

"Phobos is unique in that it is currently one of only a couple of inwardly evolving moons in our solar system that we know about," Mittal said. "However, since inwardly evolving moons inadvertently self-destruct, it is possible that more inwardly migrating moons may have existed in the past."

Phobos is the only remaining inwardly migrating moon known to exist today. The tiny, doomed moon may help scientists to better understand the evolution of the early solar system and the fate of other moons already destroyed.

For an observer standing the surface of Mars, the ring will look different depending on her location.

"From one angle, the ring will reflect extra light towards a viewer, and it will look like a bright curve in the sky," Mittal said. "From another angle, the viewer might be in the ring's shadow, and the ring would be a dark curve in the sky."

Because Phobos is made up of dark material that doesn't reflect light well, the ring might be difficult to spot from Earth with an amateur telescope. However, Mittal suggested that the ring's shadow on Mars could be visible.

Confined to a single, stable disk, the ring - if it forms - shouldn't create too many problems for the exploration of, or travel to, the Red Planet, Mittal said. However, "Any deorbiting ring particles could be a potential hazard for a Mars base built near the equator," he added.

The research was published online today (Nov. 23) in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Nola Taylor Redd, Live Science Contributor

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Mars may one day have rings similar to Saturn's famous halo, new research suggests. In a few tens of millions of years, the Red Planet may completely crush its innermost moon, Phobos, and form a ring of rocky debris, according to the new work.

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"The idea we started with was 'wouldn't it be fantastic if we could harvest the solar energy that hits our road network, convert it to electricity and then perhaps even power the cars that drive over the roads?'," Sten de Wit, spokesman for the SolaRoad consortium, told CNBC in a phone interview.

De Wit explained that the project was possible thanks to funding of 3.5 million euros ($3.8 million), with 1.5 million euros coming from the province of Noord-Holland and the rest from the consortium's other partners.

According to SolaRoad, a translucent layer of tempered glass - roughly one centimeter thick - sits on top of the slab, with "crystalline silicon solar cells" below the glass. SolaRoad says that the top layer has also been designed to be dirt repellent, skid resistant and strong.

At the beginning of November, SolaRoad announced that a cycle path in the Dutch town of Krommenie - designed as a pilot demonstration of the concept - had generated 9,800 kilowatt hours of energy in one year, enough to supply three homes with electricity.

Commenting on the results from the pilot programme, de Wit said they slightly exceeded the team's upper expectations.

The project's plans are ambitious, and extend much further than the borders of the Netherlands.

In March of this year, the California Energy Commission announced that it had signed an agreement with the Province of Noord-Holland to swap information and "collaborate on innovative transportation energy projects."

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Solar roads: The future of clean energy?

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"The idea we started with was 'wouldn't it be fantastic if we could harvest the solar energy that hits our road network, convert it to electricity and then perhaps even power the cars that drive over the roads?'," Sten de Wit, spokesman for the SolaRoad consortium, told CNBC in a phone interview.

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Dinosaurs evolved from their closest relatives, the dinosauromorphs, in less than 5 million years, a new study finds. Researchers did radioisotopic dating on a handful of sand-grain-size zircon crystals embedded in rock near and above dinosauromorph fossils, and found that the animals lived between 234 million and 236 million years ago. These new dates are about 5 million to 10 million years earlier than previous estimates. [ Read the Full Story on the Dinosauromorphs]

Running dinosauromorphs

Ancient animals run away from an erupting volcano 235 million years ago in northwestern Argentina. These animals later ended up as fossils in the Chañares Formation. The site includes fossils of early mammal relatives Dinodontosaurus (left background) and Massetognathus (left foreground).

The early dinosauromorphs Lewisuchus (right background) and Lagerpeton (right foreground) are also pictured. (Image credit: Victor Leshyk)

Mountainous work

Study co-researcher Adriana Mancuso (right), with the Argentine Institute of Snow Research, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences, and Juan Martín Leardi (left), a paleobiologist at the University of Buenos Aires, excavate a skeleton of Massetognathus, an early mammal relative that was buried in the Chañares Formation. (Photo credit: Randall Irmis)

Surreal landscape

Study co-researcher Adriana Mancuso (far left) investigates the badlands of the Chañares Formation in northwestern Argentina. The researchers dated the layer containing dinosauromorphs to 236 million to 234 million years ago. (Photo credit: Randall Irmis)

Rocky work

Adriana Mancuso points to a volcanic ash layer in the Chañares Formation that contained crystals of the mineral zircon, which allowed them to do radioisotopic dating. (Photo credit: Randall Irmis)

Volcanic ash

Study co-researcher Farid Chemale, a faculty member in the Institute of Geosciences at the University of Brasilia, samples a volcanic ash layer in the Chañares Formation for radioisotopic dating. (Photo credit: Adriana Mancuso)

Argentinian nightfall

Dusk falls over the badlands of the Chañares Formation in Talampaya National Park in Argentina. (Photo credit: Adriana Mancuso)

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+.

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Photos: Unearthing Dinosauromorphs, the Ancestors of Dinosaurs

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Dinosaurs evolved from their closest relatives, the dinosauromorphs, in less than 5 million years, a new study finds. Researchers did radioisotopic dating on a handful of sand-grain-size zircon crystals embedded in rock near and above dinosauromorph fossils, and found that the animals lived between 234 million and 236 million years ago.

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A new electronic skin can feel the raspy texture of sandpaper, the beat of someone's pulse and even heat. But there's more. It also can detect sound.

This rubbery plastic-and-carbon film mimics the structure of human skin, reports Hyunhyub Ko and his team in the October 30 Science Advances.

It's the first time anyone has demonstrated an e-skin that can sense so many different types of stimuli, says Alex Chortos. "That's the innovative and impressive part of this work," points out this materials scientist. He works at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

Chortos is part of a team that developed another pressure-sensing e-skin. It can relay signals directly to brain cells, based on tests with cells that had been isolated from a mouse. Those cells got the skin's message, too. They became more or less active depending on how hard researchers pushed on the skin. These researchers described their advance October 16 in Science.

Such work offers a blueprint for scientists to actually "bridge electronics with biology," says Wenlong Cheng. He's a chemical engineer at Australia's Monash University in Clayton, Victoria.

Both Chortos' skin-to-cell-communications system and Ko's super-sensing e-skin bring more-lifelike artificial skins closer to practical use. "In the future, we could combine these techniques for real, operational electronic skin," says Ko. A materials scientist, he works at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea.

One day, such an e-skin might cover prosthetic limbs and plug directly into people's nerve cells, he says. This would let people know if they were touching something hot or rough or sharp - just as real skin does. The artificial skin also could form the basis for soft, wearable medical devices.

Over the last several years, scientists have invented an assortment of electronic-skin components. These range from different soft materials to new types of sensors. Some sensors can recognize more than one type of stimuli, Cheng says - but only under just the right conditions. E-skins are still "far from having the capabilities that human skin has," he admits. But the newly reported advances do bring the prospect of such a technology closer.

By mimicking the ultrasensitive skin of human fingertips, Ko and his colleagues designed their e-skin to detect many types of signals. The researchers placed a soft ridged film over thin bumpy sheets made from plastic and graphene. (Graphene is a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon with a host of unusual properties.) Those thin bumpy sheets are only about as thick of a few layers of the plastic cling-wrap used to seal up kitchen leftovers.

Touching this e-skin pressed together the electrodes on the bumpy sheets. This caused an electric current to flow through the device, which was hooked up to a machine to measure such signals. The amount of current depended on how much the bumps compressed. This provided a gauge of the pressure.

Heating the Korean team's e-skin also generated a current, showing that it could sense temperature, too. A strip of the e-skin placed on a person's wrist let the researchers simultaneously measure skin temperature and blood pressure.

And ridges on this simulated skin help it detect texture. When researchers skimmed its surface over glass or sandpaper, the ridges vibrated. The pattern of those vibrations differed depending on what had touched it. Sensors in the skin picked up on those differences.

Sound waves also made the e-skin vibrate. It could "hear" noise from a speaker playing a famous lecture by the late physicist, Richard Feynman. The e-skin converted his words into electrical signals, and then sent them to a machine. This let the researchers judge how well the e-skin sensed sounds. It worked even better than an iPhone's microphone, Ko concluded.

Cheng thinks such an e-skin might hold promise for use in soft, wearable hearing aids. Unlike conventional aids, he says, soft devices are more comfortable because they mold to human skin.

Power Words

atom The basic unit of a chemical element. Atoms are made up of a dense nucleus that contains positively charged protons and neutrally charged neutrons. The nucleus is orbited by a cloud of negatively charged electrons.

chemical engineer A researcher who uses chemistry to solve problems related to the production of food, fuel, medicines and many other products.

electric current A flow of charge, called electricity, usually from the movement of negatively charged particles, called electrons.

Electrode (in chemistry) Materials that serve as an anode or cathode, attracting negatively or positively charged particles. Or things that serve as electric conductors through which current leaves or enters something else.

electronics Devices that are powered by electricity but whose properties are controlled by the semiconductors or other circuitry that channel or gate the movement of electric charges.

graphene A super-strong sheet of carbon that's only one-atom thick. Because it also thin, transparent and can conduct electricity, the electronics industry is finding many potential uses for this material.

innovation (adj. innovative) An adaptation or improvement to an existing idea, process or product that is new, clever, more effective or more practical.

materials science The study of how the atomic and molecular structure of a material is related to its overall properties. Materials scientists can design new materials or analyze existing ones. Their analyses of a material's overall properties (such as density, strength and melting point) can help engineers and other researchers select materials that best suited to a new application.

physicist A scientist who studies the nature and properties of matter and energy.

prosthesis (adj. prosthetic) An artificial device that replaces a missing body part. Such a prosthetic limb, for example, would replace parts of an arm or leg. These replacement parts usually substitute for tissues missing due to injury, disease or birth defects.

rasp (adj. raspy) A metal carpentry and metalworking tool that works like a coarse file to grind or scrape the rough edges off of something; or something that has an abrasive surface.

sensor A device that picks up information on physical or chemical conditions - such as temperature, barometric pressure, salinity, humidity, pH, light intensity or radiation - and stores or broadcasts that information. Scientists and engineers often rely on sensors to inform them of conditions that may change over time or that exist far from where a researcher can measure them directly. (in biology) The structure that an organism uses to sense attributes of its environment, such as heat, winds, chemicals, moisture, trauma or an attack by predators.

simulate To deceive in some way by imitating the form or function of something. A simulated dietary fat, for instance, may deceive the mouth that it has tasted a real fat because it has the same feel on the tongue - without having any calories. A simulated sense of touch may fool the brain into thinking a finger has touched something even though a hand may no longer exists and has been replaced by a synthetic limb. (in computing) To try and imitate the conditions, functions or appearance of something. Computer programs that do this are referred to as simulations .

stimulus (plural: stimuli) Something that prompts a response in a living organism or in a controlled environment (including a chemical or physical test system).

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New e-skin feels heat, textures and more

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A new electronic skin can feel the raspy texture of sandpaper, the beat of someone's pulse and even heat. But there's more. It also can detect sound. This rubbery plastic-and-carbon film mimics the structure of human skin, reports Hyunhyub Ko and his team in the October 30 Science Advances.