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A European brown hare (courtesy of flickr user Keith Marshall)

The idea that you could conceive a second pregnancy while already pregnant is definitely weird (and probably creepy for any woman in her last trimester). This is all but impossible in humans, but what about other species? Aristotle suggested more than two thousand years ago that the hare—the rabbit’s relative—could do this:

Of all animals the woman and the mare are most inclined to receive the commerce of the male during pregnancy; while all other animals when they are pregnant avoid the male, save those in which the phenomenon of superfetation occurs, such as the hare. Unlike that animal, the mare after once conceiving cannot be rendered pregnant again, but brings forth one foal only, at least as a general rule; in the human species cases of superfetation are rare, but they do happen now and then.

Now scientists in Germany have confirmed that Aristotle got it right: the European brown hare (Lepus europaeus) can get pregnant while it’s pregnant. Their study appears this week in Nature Communications.

The researchers used selective breeding and high-resolution ultrasonography to demonstrate that a male hare can fertilize a female during late pregnancy. The resulting embryos will develop around four days before delivery of the first pregnancy. The embryos don’t have any place to go at that time, however, since the uterus is occupied by the embryos’ older brothers and sisters. So the embryos hang out in the oviduct, rather like when you wait in your car for a parking space to open up. Once the uterus is free, the embryos move in.

The result is that a female hare can shorten the time between litters from 42 to 38 days and deliver up to 35.4 percent more offspring during a breeding season.

It is not yet know if other members of the hare genus (Lepus) can go through superfetation (also known as superconception). Rabbits, however, may be less likely to share this trait with their hare relatives. Rabbits and hares belong to separate subfamilies that diverged evolutionarily around 11.8 million years ago and rabbits take care of their offspring for a longer period than hares do.

Scientists don’t yet know how life began here on Earth. Mineralogist Bob Hazen, who is profiled in the October issue of Smithsonian, thinks that rocks were key to the development of life. Reporter Helen Fields wrote:

It’s the complexity of the hydrothermal vent environment—gushing hot water mixing with cold water near rocks, and ore deposits providing hard surfaces where newly formed amino acids could congregate—that makes it such a good candidate as a cradle of life. “Organic chemists have long used test tubes,” he says, “but the origin of life uses rocks, it uses water, it uses atmosphere. Once life gets a foothold, the fact that the environment is so variable is what drives evolution.”

But long before Hazen started his research into the origins of life, scientists thought that life might have begun in some “warm little pond,” as described by Charles Darwin. Helen explained in her story:

In 1952, Stanley Miller, a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Chicago, attempted to create Darwin’s dream. Miller set up a container holding water (representing the early ocean) connected by glass tubes to one containing ammonia, methane and hydrogen—a mixture scientists of the day thought approximated the early atmosphere. A flame heated the water, sending vapor upward. In the atmosphere flask, electric sparks simulated lightning. The experiment was such a long shot that Miller’s adviser, Harold Urey, thought it a waste of time. But over the next few days, the water turned deep red. Miller had created a broth of amino acids.

The National Air and Space Museum in its The Universe gallery used to show a video of Julia Child recreating Stanley Miller’s famous experiment, cooking up Primordial Soup. (The gallery is long closed, but Julia’s video can still be seen at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where it plays sometimes on screens near her famous kitchen.) But “soup” probably was the wrong word for whatever existed when life began. Helen wrote:

“We’ve got a prebiotic ocean and down in the ocean floor, you’ve got rocks,” he says. “And basically there’s molecules here that are floating around in solution, but it’s a very dilute soup.” For a newly formed amino acid in the early ocean, it must have been a lonely life indeed. The familiar phrase “primordial soup” sounds rich and thick, but it was no beef stew. It was probably just a few molecules here and there in a vast ocean. “So the chances of a molecule over here bumping into this one, and then actually a chemical reaction going on to form some kind of larger structure, is just infinitesimally small,” Hazen continues.

I guess Primordial Weak Tea just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Local science writers look for fossils on a block of stone that is part of the Duke Ellington Bridge.

This past Saturday, geologist Callan Bentley, of Northern Virginia Community College, led a couple of dozen local science writers on a trip back through Washington, D.C. history. We didn’t learn about Abe Lincoln or George Washington, though. This was geological history, a record of events that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago.

An interesting tangent to our field trip took place on the Duke Ellington Bridge as we walked across Rock Creek Park. The bridge, like many of Washington’s structures, is made of blocks of stone (often from faraway states; Indiana in the case of the bridge). These blocks, Bentley pointed out, are often full of fossils. You just have to look for them. (But a little knowledge is probably helpful; I never would have spotted the fossils on the bridge if Bentley hadn’t been pointing them out to us.)

A close-up shot of the fossil-bearing bridge block.

It seems a person could take a really interesting tour of geological history without ever stepping inside a museum here in Washington. If you don’t believe me, check out dcfossils.org. A local geology enthusiast, with help from people like Bentley, has been cataloging Washington’s architectural fossils—fossils that can be found in the building blocks that are part of buildings, monuments and bridges—photographing them and writing about the locations and the fossils you’ll find there. The blocks that make up the National Museum of the American Indian, for example, are made of Kasota Limestone from Minnesota. Look closely at some of the stones and you can find tube-like patterns created by invertebrates as they traveled through the mud at the bottom of a deep sea that covered Minnesota around 480 million years ago during the Ordivician period.

Washington isn’t alone in its wealth of architectural fossils. There are fossils in the stones that make up Baltimore and Montreal. The Maine State Capitol has them, too. Every city must have collected fossils in its building blocks. Maybe they’re even in your home. You’ll just have to look.

Photos courtesy of Helen Fields.

Graduate students spend years researching sometimes obscure topics, writing page after page of text, and then bundling it into a huge dissertation before they can receive a Ph.D. And then someone asks them to express all that work and discovery in dance.

Science has asked that three times now, and they got 45 brave scientists to enter their “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest this year. The finalists in the four categories of biology, chemistry, physics, and social sciences were announced last week. The winner will be announced next month at the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York along with a reader’s choice award. Watch the videos below and then vote for your favorite.

Chemistry: Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment

Physics: Directed transport without net bias in physics and biology

Biology: The influence of previous experiences on visual awareness

Social Sciences: The negotiation of contributions to public wikis

Runners up can be watched at Science NOW. Which is your favorite?

The Royal Observatory, in Greenwich, England, has announced its 2010 Astronomy Photographer of the Year. Tom Lowe won with this photo, Blazing Bristlecone. Though he won, Lowe wasn’t perfectly satisified with his photo. He said:

If I could change anything about this photo, it would be the artificial lighting! The light on that tree occurred accidentally because I had my headlamp and possibly a camping lantern on while I was taking a series of test shots! The artificial light is too frontal and not evenly distributed, but in the end the light did in fact show the amazing patterns in the tree’s wood. The reason these trees inspire me so much, aside from their striking beauty, is their age. Many of them were standing while Genghis Khan marauded across the plains of Asia. Being a timelapse photographer, it’s natural for me to attempt to picture our world from the point of view of these ancient trees. Seasons and weather would barely register as events over a lifetime of several thousand years. The lives of humans and other animals would appear simply as momentary flashes.

Lowe also won the Earth and Space category. All the winners can be viewed online, and the Royal Observatory has also produced a set of guides to instruct photographers on how to capture astronomical phenomena such as auroras, the Moon and comets.

You might think about putting those lessons to use in Smithsonian magazine’s 8th Annual Photo Contest. The deadline for entries is December 1.

Check out the entire collection of Surprising Science’s Pictures of the Week on our Facebook page.

Photo Credit: Blazing Bristlecone (c) Tom Lowe. White Mountains, California, August 14, 2009