Smithsonian.com

Think about how you might try to catch King Kong: large numbers of people might help, but it takes coordination and a technological advantage—guns on planes—to bring the big guy down. Ants don’t have guns or planes (not yet, anyway), so how can they capture something thousands of times bigger than themselves? Coordination and a technical advantage of a different sort.

Arboreal ants of the species Azteca andreae live on trumpet trees (Cecropia obtusa) in French Guiana. Thousands of ants line up on the undersides of the leaves of the tree, waiting with mandibles open. When a wasp or moth lands nearby, the ants seize it by its limbs and spread-eagle the struggling victim. More ants then gather to carve up their meal and cart the carcass to the nest.

Numbers alone couldn’t make this possible. If everyone clambered onto King Kong, he would have just dragged them away, right? The Aztec ants work together to take advantage of their own technological advantage, one that comes in the form of Velcro-like stickiness, say biologists in a new study in PLoS ONE. The underside of C. obtusa leaves is downy, like the soft, looped side of Velcro, and the ants have claws shaped like hooks that attach to the leaves. When their prey lands, the ants coordinate their action to grab onto the insect and keep it pinned until they can kill or stun their meal. This strategy lets the ants catch prey up to 13,350 times the average ant’s weight, without being dragged to death.

Dejean A, Leroy C, Corbara B, Roux O, Céréghino R, et al. (2010) Arboreal Ants Use the “Velcro® Principle” to Capture Very Large Prey. PLoS ONE 5(6): e11331. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011331

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In 2009, nearly 6,700 volunteers labored for well over half a million hours for the Smithsonian Institution. “I feel pretty confident in saying the Smithsonian has one of the largest (if not THE largest) volunteer base of any cultural organization in the world,” Amy Lemon, coordinator of Smithsonian’s Behind-the-Scenes Volunteer Program (BVP) told me. “Anything a paid staff person would do at Smithsonian, a volunteer could be found doing the same thing.”

Including oodles of science.

It would be impossible to do justice to every volunteer’s work—each volunteer at Smithsonian does something especially fascinating—but here is a list of 10 of the top science-based volunteer gigs around the Mall and beyond:

Volunteer Forensic Anthropologist

After working in the department of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History under forensic anthropologist and division head Doug Owsley, Sarah Spatz Schlachtmeyer wrote a book about her activities. A Death Decoded: Robert Kennicott and the Alaska Telegraph untangles the mystery of young scientist Robert Kennicott’s death as he was exploring the Yukon River more than 150 years ago. No bones about it, volunteering time to fiddle around with human skeletal remains is definitely one of the more fascinating opportunities at the Smithsonian.

Volunteer Amphibian Research Biologist

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama offers opportunities for aspiring (and veteran) biologists. For example, Roberto Ibanez, STRI’s leading amphibian research biologist, runs the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation project, which rescues and establishes captive colonies of threatened and endangered amphibian species. Volunteers help to feed and house the amphibians. The project is just one of many programs at STRI actively seeking a large volunteer base. The 40 permanent scientists at STRI host nearly 1,000 visiting scientists every year and have projects in more than 40 tropical countries, with massive potential for anyone interested in volunteering.

Volunteer Entomologist and Tarantula Handler (Arachnologist)

Volunteers with the National Museum of Natural History’s O. Orkin Insect Zoo (no it’s not an attempt at irony, the extermination company contributed funds to the bug menagerie) regale visitors with insect factoids and, yes, put on live shows with the zoo’s many tarantula residents. These volunteers attempt to “make connections between visitors and these seemingly alien creatures,” says Bridget McGee-Sullivan NMNH volunteer manager. It’s certainly not the volunteer position for me, though (I kept my distance from the eight-legged monsters, even with a quarter-inch pane of glass in between us); I would much prefer the Butterfly Pavilion.

Volunteer Primatologist

One of the many behind-the-scenes volunteer positions at the National Zoological Park—jobs that include collecting panda dung for study and keeping tabs on the intricacies of flamingo behavior—is golden lion tamarin monitor. Though the tamarins have not been ranging free this summer across the grounds of the zoo, usually they are tracked by a dedicated corps of volunteers who take notes on the Brazilian primates and explain to visitors their endangered status, part of the zoo’s nearly 40-year project of golden lion tamarin conservation.

Each month more than 450 people volunteer through Friends of the National Zoo, says Mike Frick, who manages FONZ’s Behavior Watch program. They donate their time and energy to help zoo staff care for and collect scientific data on the animals exhibited at the zoo and those located at the zoo’s Front Royal, Virginia campus, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.

Data collected by volunteers is used for national conservation efforts, monitoring breeding behavior of the zoo’s animals, helping zoo keepers prepare diets for the animals and “research into the life history of animals that are either so rare or elusive in the wild that studies on captive individuals are the only means by which scientists have to understand them,” Frick says.

Volunteer Horticulturalist

Amateur gardeners, retired botanists and other interested individuals can find a place to call home among the fecund gardens of the National Zoo. The Pollinarium, Heritage Gardens and Butterfly Garden are home to a vast array of wild and rare plants and flowers that all need gardening and care. Volunteer horticulturalists can also be found beyond the zoo’s grounds; eight Smithsonian gardens are located around the National Mall, all requiring dedicated volunteers to tend.

Volunteer Forest Ecology Researcher

At the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on the Chesapeake Bay, bank executives and other volunteers gather data from Maryland’s forests on how it is being affected by logging and climate change. There are 18 research laboratories at SERC studying topics that range from earthworms to native orchids to forest ecosystems, says SERC outreach coordinator Karen McDonald. SERC usually hosts 60 to 90 volunteers, depending on the season, who take part in tasks that include tagging blue crabs and building fences to limit deer movement  for studying the effects they have on their ecosystem.

Volunteer Planetary Geologist

Throughout the National Air and Space Museum, volunteers are strategically placed with 12 “Discovery Carts” giving demonstrations on all manner of topics, such as aviation and astrophysics, allowing visitors to interact with items that relate to the collection. One standout is the falling-stars cart, which lets visitors touch pieces of meteorite that have made their way to Earth from around the solar system. Visitors learn from the cart’s volunteer planetary geologists about these meteorites and what their different properties and chemical make-ups can tell us about our solar system. “There’s something magical about handing someone a rock that looks like a piece of coal then seeing their face when you tell them that it’s as old as the solar system,” Tom Hill, an NASM volunteer, told discovery station program coordinator Beth Wilson.

Volunteer Chemist and Innovation Facilitator

At the National Museum of American History’s Spark!Lab, volunteers encourage the young and young-at-heart to express their own inventiveness. Volunteers and staff facilitate interactive experiments in chemistry, physics and genetics. It’s just the place for a volunteer mad scientist.

Around the Mall talked to Spark!Lab’s “Resident Eccentric,” Steven Madwell, a couple of years ago.

Volunteer Naturalist

Volunteers at the Smithsonian’s Naturalist Center in Leesburg, Virginia, spend their days answering questions of inquisitive minds, from kindergartners to high school seniors. “Every day is an adventure for Naturalist Center volunteers,” NMNH’s McGee-Sullivan says. “You never know who will walk in the door and what type of question will be asked of a volunteer.” One five-year-old girl brought in a partial skull from the playground, McGee-Sullivan says. The volunteers at the Naturalist Center helped her discover that it was the skull of a cottontail rabbit.

Volunteer Zoologist

Within the walls of the National Museum of Natural History’s Discovery Room, volunteers interact with visitors as they examine fossils, skulls, shells and other objects from the museum’s collection. These volunteers have one of the most important jobs of all: inspiring scientific curiosity in Smithsonian visitors and honing the visitors’skills in observation and inquiry, giving them the tools they need to answer all their questions about the natural world.

Outside of Smithsonian Institution and Washington, D.C. there are an abundance of opportunities for citizen scientists to get their volunteer on. Behind-the-Scenes Volunteer Program’s Lemon says rough estimates indicate there are more than a million volunteers at America’s 17,000-plus museums.

Michael Gold and the rest of the staff at ScienceForCitizens.net have developed an entire online community for citizen scientists. The Web site allows those wishing to volunteer for science to connect with real volunteer projects and research opportunities in their area to match their interests.

If I told you that “ants don’t sleep,” would you believe me? What if I were speaking with a foreign accent?

Researchers at the University of Chicago have found that we judge non-native speakers to be less believable, though not because of any bias against foreigners. Instead, they say, it’s simply because we find these speakers harder to understand. (The study will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.)

Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar recorded three native English speakers, three speakers with mild accents (Polish, Turkish and Austrian-German) and three with heavy accents (Korean, Turkish and Italian) repeating statements like “a giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.” Speakers of American English then listened to 45 of these statements, 15 by each type of speaker. The listeners were told that the speakers were saying things that an experimenter had written, not expressing their own knowledge (in an attempt to rule out bias against the individual speaker), and asked whether each statement was true or false.

Statements read by people with accents—either mild or heavy—were less likely to be rated as true than those repeated by a native English speaker. When the exercise was repeated with the American English speakers being told that “the experiment is about the effect of the difficulty of understanding speakers’ speech on the likelihood that their statements would be believed,” thus warning them that an accent could affect credibility, the mildly accented speakers were rated just as truthful as the native speakers. Statements from individuals with heavy accents, though, were still more likely to be perceived as false.

The difference in credibility, Lev-Ari and Keysar say, occurs because an accent reduces something called “processing fluency.” Instead of simply recognizing that we’re having problems understanding the words, we interpret those words as being less believable. The researchers note:

These results have important implications for how people perceive non-native speakers of a language … Accent might reduce the credibility of non-native job seekers, eyewitnesses, reporters or news anchors. … Most likely, neither the native nor the non-native speakers are aware of this, making the difficulty of understanding accented speech an ever present reason for perceiving non-native speakers as less credible.

Perhaps this explains why I never believe the call center people from foreign lands when they tell me the cable guy is right around the corner and will be only a few minutes late.

Most of the time we don’t think about the periodic table. Individual elements are always important—gold, oxygen, aluminum—but we rarely consider the table as a whole. It just hangs on the wall where it will be consulted from time to time (or perhaps admired for its aesthetics, like the one that hangs by my desk). But there’s more to the table than just a clever arrangement of letters and number, and in his book, The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, Sam Kean delves into the fascinating stories behind that ubiquitous poster.

Each chapter of the book covers a group of elements and a specific part of science history. Readers learn about how the periodic table got its shape, the development of chemical weapons, how various elements have been used in money and why the Swedish town of Ytterby has seven elements named for it. But it’s the littler stories that I enjoyed, those bits of random history and facts too obscure even for quiz shows. My favorites:

* Thallium is considered the deadliest element, pretending to be potassium to gain entry into our cells where it then breaks amino acid bonds within proteins. The CIA once developed a plan to poison Fidel Castro by dosing his socks with thallium-tainted talcum powder.

* Beryllium tastes like sugar but you wouldn’t want to use it as a substitute. Up to a tenth of the human population is susceptible to acute beryllium disease and the rest can develop chemical pneumonitis from exposure to beryllium powder.

* An Eagle Scout in the mid-1990s tried to make a nuclear reactor in his backyard (but was caught before he could manage to find any uranium-235).

* Several scientists “discovered” element 43—naming it things like “davyium” and “nipponium”—only to have their discoveries debunked. Element 43 wasn’t truly discovered until the 1930s; technetium, as it was eventually named, was the first element to be made artificially (in a cyclotron).

* The disappearing spoon of the title is made of gallium, which looks like aluminum but melts at 84 degrees. Place a spoon made of gallium in a cup of hot tea and it will vanish.

The book is written in such a way that readers won’t need to bone up on their chemistry to understand the science. And those who do remember their chem class days won’t be bored since the book is filled with so many stories from such a range of areas of history, from war to biology to literature.

Kean is currently blogging about the elements over at Slate. And if you’re looking for more element info, there’s always the Periodic Table of Videos.

In the magazine’s 40th anniversary issue, one of the 40 things you need to know about the future is both revolutionary and unreal: “A medical laboratory will fit on a postage stamp.”

The idea behind Google—boiling down vast stores of knowledge into an elegant little package—is also the idea behind the thing [George] Whitesides is now holding in his hand, a so-called lab on a chip no bigger than a postage stamp, which is designed to diagnose a variety of ailments with nearly the precision of a modern clinical laboratory.

It’s intended for health workers in remote parts of developing nations. They will place a drop of a patient’s blood or urine on the stamp; if the ailment is one of the 16 or so that the stamp can recognize, it will change color according to the affliction. Then the health worker, or even the patient, can take a picture of the stamp with a cellphone. The picture can be sent to a doctor or a lab; someday a computer program might allow the cellphone itself to make a tentative diagnosis.

Our profile of nanotechnology pioneer George Whitesides just hints at some of the possibilities for the future in this area of research. For more, watch Whitesides’ lecture below, filmed at TEDxBoston last year. (As a bonus, I’ve also included his TEDTalk about simplicity. It’s fascinating. Enjoy!)