Smithsonian.com

(Source: PNAS)

No, this isn’t a piece of lettuce (but that was a nice guess from our food blogger, Amanda). This is a sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, and it looks like a leaf because it has acquired chloroplasts from its algal prey and stored them in its gut lining. If you or I ate those algae, the chloroplasts wouldn’t do us any good because we don’t have the necessary genes to keep the chloroplasts going (the DNA in these organelles encodes for only about 10% of the proteins the chloroplasts need). But this sea slug has acquired those genes through some sort of transfer from the algae, letting the sea slug rely on solar power for weeks at a time.

Combine aluminum powder and a metal oxide (such as iron oxide) and you get what is known as a thermite reaction, which is very hot and very fast. Thermite’s main use is to bind train tracks. I suppose you could try cooking with it, but despite the video evidence above that it has been done, I wouldn’t recommend it. This may be faster than even the deep-fried bird, but doesn’t that meat look raw in the middle?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Turkey farm (Source: USDA-ARS)

In preparation for tomorrow’s big day, I offer you a selection of articles on the theme of turkey science:

How did the turkey in my oven get so big?

Should I have bought a Heritage bird (and what is a Heritage bird anyway)?

How do white meat and dark meat differ?

Should I worry that turkeys are given antibiotics?

Should I worry about hormones and steroids in my turkey?

Will the turkey make me sleepy?

And from my neighbor over at Food and Think, Smithsonian’s new food blog: Do we need to be concerned about how turkeys are treated at the farm?

At FaT you’ll also find an entire history (or eat-ymology) of the turkey. Already read up on your turkey facts? Try the turkey quiz.

One of the first Smithsonian articles I worked on was last year’s Guerrillas in Their Midst, about the endangered mountain gorillas of Rwanda and Congo. Though the animals in Rwanda appeared to be doing well and supporting a thriving tourism business, the story in Virunga National Park in Congo was not so pleasant.

A silverback mountain gorilla (via Wikimedia Commons)

In July 2007, four members of the Rugendo gorilla family, which had been visited by our reporter, were killed. A total of ten gorillas were killed that year in the park. Then in January, we reported that the rangers who protected the park had been barred from accessing the gorillas because of the conflict between the Congolese army and rebel forces led by ex-general Laurent Nkunda. Of course, the rangers weren’t the only ones affected by the fighting; 800,000 people were forced from their homes, according to the United Nations.

Fighting flared again in Congo in recent weeks, displacing another 200,000 people. Virunga’s park rangers, who had been able to return to some of the park in recent months, were forced to flee into the forests when their headquarters were overtaken by rebel troops.

But now some promising news: 120 rangers returned to the park on Friday after the chief warden, Emmanuel de Merode, negotiated their safe return. As he told the Environmental News Service, “Rangers are neutral in this conflict, and it is right that they should be allowed to do their job.”

Though the rangers now plan to start a long-neglected survey of the park’s gorilla population, cleaning up will have to be a priority. Their facilities have been abandoned for the last 14 months and much of their supplies and equipment were stolen in the conflict. It may be a long while until we know how many of the gorillas survived.

You remember Nicolaus Copernicus, right? He’s the 16th-century Polish astronomer who was the first to figure out that earth was not the center of the universe, that the earth and all the other planets orbited the sun. But he wasn’t always so well known. Copernicus worked as a church administrator since astronomy wasn’t a profitable career choice (thus relegated to hobby status). And when he died, he was buried in an unmarked grave in Frombork Cathedral, the church where he worked. A few years ago, though, archaeologists found what they thought were his remains.

When we last left this story, in 2006—in Copernicus Unearthed—a skull, missing the lower jaw, had been found buried near an altar where the astronomer had been known to pray daily. The archaeologists thought this might be our guy. The skull was from a 70-year-old male (which matched the approximate age for Copernicus when he died in 1543) and a forensic reconstruction looked like an older version of the astronomer’s portraits (such as the one on the left). But to confirm that they had indeed found their man, the archaeologists needed to perform a DNA test. The problem? Copernicus had no children and though his uncle was known to be buried in the same cathedral, no one knew where.

Now comes news that the archaeologists found a few hairs in a book Copernicus owned. The archaeologists brought in a geneticist who compared the DNA from the hairs to that found in some bones that accompanied the skull–a vertebra, a tooth and a femur bone. The DNA in two out of four hairs matched the bones. Those archaeologists really did find their guy. Congrats!

The Moon (Credit: NASA)

In honor of our newly launched sister blog, The Once and Future Moon, from Air & Space, this week’s Picture of the Week is the Earth as seen from the Moon, circa 1966.

Thinking ahead, NASA sent five missions up to photograph the moon in the 1960s, before sending the first people. The data have been stored since then in analog form, and now the Lunar Orbiter Recovery Project is converting the data to digital form and reconstructing the images. This one, released last week by NASA, if the first of many more sure to come.

In a repeat of the 1960s, NASA will send up the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter next year to map the moon in preparation, in part, for the next human mission.

While reading the Guardian (the UK newspaper) over the weekend, I came across a little article in which a British scientist was complaining about the absurdity of featuring a drawing of a hummingbird (below) on the 10-pound note that honors Charles Darwin (it’s the 200th anniversary of his birth next February). The scientist points out, correctly, that there are no hummingbirds on the Galapagos Islands and they didn’t appear in On the Origin of Species. What I am wondering, though, is why he chose to make this an issue eight years after the design of the note was released and, presumably, after several of them had passed through this guy’s wallet?

(Image Source: Bank of England)

(Credit: Image courtesy of Penn State and Dover Books)

With the announcement that the woolly mammoth genome has been sequenced, it seems natural to ask when we will finally see live mammoths. Since Jurassic Park, we’ve been tantalized by “promising” research that could some day soon lead to resurrecting long-extinct creatures. We even featured one of these researchers, Beth Shapiro, in last year’s young innovators issue (or, as it is know around the magazine office, the “I feel inadequate now” issue).

Well, I am here to throw some cold water on your plans for a mammoth-viewing safari vacation. We’re still a long way away.

There are a couple of ways you can start off when trying to recreate an extinct species. See, you need a copy of the creature’s DNA arranged in chromosomes and packaged in a nucleus. You can attempt to pull out an intact nucleus from some bone or hair or other remains that you find. This might seem like a good idea, especially since there was a study published a couple of weeks ago that did just this, pulling the nuclei out of mouse brain cells that had been frozen for 16 years. But 16 years in a freezer is far different from thousands of years in permafrost, freezing and occasionally thawing and refreezing. Finding mammoth nuclei with DNA that wasn’t damaged and contaminated would be difficult.

The other option is to work with a genome sequence and create chromosomes from that. The wooly mammoth genome, though, is only mostly sequenced (about 70%), and you need many copies of a complete sequence to make sure that there aren’t many mistakes left (sequencing isn’t foolproof). Then you have to organize the DNA into chromosomes, which hasn’t been done before, and create a nucleus out of them, which also hasn’t been done before. Oh, and you really need to do this multiple times.

But let’s say that you manage to find or create an intact nucleus with complete chromosomes and accurate DNA. Then you have to essentially clone the animal, transferring that nucleus to an egg—probably of an elephant—getting the injected egg to divide like a normally fertilized egg, and putting the egg into an elephant to carry it to term. This would be akin to cloning an elephant—but as you can probably guess by now, this also hasn’t been done before. (If you want a more detailed explanation of all the pitfalls on the path to creating a mammoth, Nature has a great article about this–and the whole mammoth study–though they are behind the pay wall.)

The bottom line is that if I’m lucky, I might see a mammoth before I die. But I probably won’t see a herd of them.