Photo: stefanpinto

In the animal kingdom, larger males—think chimpanzees, lions, bulls—often try to acquire or defend more resources, like territory, food, and females, than their weaker underlings. Researchers decided to apply the competitive animal model to human political decision making about redistribution of wealth and income to see if there was any correlation.

The Atlantic describes the study:

Researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and UC Santa Barbara collected from several hundred men and women in Argentina, the U.S., and Denmark. They categorized the subjects by socioeconomic class, their upper-body strength, or “fighting ability” (as measured by the “circumference of the flexed bicep of the dominant arm”), and their responses to a questionnaire gauging their support for economic redistribution.

They hypothesized that men with more upper body strength would be less open to wealth distribution, following the same tendency of stronger males of many animal species. After all, upper-body strength has counted as a major component of dominance throughout human evolutionary history. When economics, strength and gender were taking into account, that hypothesis turned out to be true. Popular Science reports:

Socioeconomic status also showed a correlation with economic views. As expected, rich men were generally opposed to redistribution, and poor men generally in favor of it. Men with stronger upper bodies tended to have stronger views–rich, strong men were very much opposed to redistribution, while less strong but still rich men were less opposed. On the side of those that support redistribution, the trend was reversed: poorer but strong men were strongly in favor of redistribution, while weaker poor men were not as committed.

Political party had nothing to do with the results, the researchers found, and no correlation turned up between women’s opinion on the subjet and their physical strength and/or wealth.

The authors conclude: “Because personal upper-body strength is irrelevant to payoffs from economic policies in modern mass democracies, the continuing role of strength suggests that modern political decision making is shaped by an evolved psychology designed for small-scale groups.”

For many men, apparently, animal antics still hold strong.

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Photo: Timmarec

In Croatia, scientists are working on a new way to detect land mines without risking lives, reports the Associated Press. Honeybees, the scientists say, have an incredible sense of smell, and with the right amount of prodding can be trained to sniff out TNT, the most common explosive used in land mines. In preliminary testing:

Several feeding points were set up on the ground around the tent, but only a few have TNT particles in them. The method of training the bees by authenticating the scent of explosives with the food they eat appears to work: bees gather mainly at the pots containing a sugar solution mixed with TNT, and not the ones that have a different smell.

A common technique in animal behavior training, the bees are taught to associate the smell of TNT with food. Once that association is firm, the bees can be turned loose in search of mines.

”It is not a problem for a bee to learn the smell of an explosive, which it can then search,” Kezic said. “You can train a bee, but training their colony of thousands becomes a problem.”

Bees, with their incredible sense of smell, light weight and ability to fly should be better candidates for mine hunting than other approaches. Mine decommissioning teams already use dogs and rats to hunt down mines. But, some anti-personnel mines are so sensitive that the weight of a pup can set them off. The bees’ training is still underway, says the AP, but if and when they’re ready the Croatian-trained bees will be able to flit from mine to mine without setting them off.

From 1999 to 2008, says the Guardian, 73,576 people reportedly died to hidden land mines or unexploded munitions. “Of these, around 18,000 were confirmed deaths – 71% of victims were civilians and 32% were children.” Aside from their destructive potential, land mines are also a psychological and social plight.

Landmines and cluster munitions have been described as “weapons of social cataclysm”, which perpetuate poverty and prevent development. They leave a legacy of indiscriminate civilian injuries and deaths, burden struggling healthcare systems and render vast tracts of land uninhabitable and unproductive. As Kate Wiggans, from the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Munition Coalition (ICBL-CMC) says: “They keep poor people poor, decades after conflict.”

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Image: imelda

There are still some pretty annoying things about being left-handed. But in America, at least, we’ve mostly stopped forcing lefties to learn to use their right hand. That’s not the case everywhere, though. China, for example, claims that less than one percent of students are left-handed. If that were true, it would be strange: the global average of lefties comes in at 10-12 percent. A study in the journal Endeavor recently took on this question: Why are there no left-handers in China? The researchers also looked at India and Islamic countries and discovered that nearly two-thirds of the world’s lefty population faces discrimination.

There’s nothing special about the genetics of people living in China that makes them less likely to be lefties. Chinese-Americans are just as likely to be left handed as any other Americans. The lefties in China are actually switching their dominant hands. Why? Because it’s simply more difficult for them to stick with their naturally dominate hand than for people in Europe of the United States. Many Chinese characters require a right hand, says Discovery News.

Elsewhere, stigma against lefties still exists. Discovery News reports:

 In many Muslim parts of the world, in parts of Africa as well as in India, the left hand is considered the dirty hand and it’s considered offensive to offer that hand to anyone, even to help. The discrimination against lefties goes back thousands of years in many cultures, including those of the West.

Even the word left comes from “lyft” which meant broken. The German words “linkisch” also means awkward. The Russian word “levja” is associated with being untrustworthy. Synonyms for left in Mandarin are things like weird, incorrect and wrong.

And for a long time there were all sorts of ways to “retrain” lefties. An article in The Lancet explains the “scientific” rationales used:

The methods used to obtain this result were often tortuous, including tying a resistant child’s left hand to immobilise it. Typical of the reasoning to justify such practices is a 1924 letter to the British Medical Journal endorsing “retraining” of left-handers to write with their right hands, because otherwise the left-handed child would risk “retardation in mental development; in some cases…actual feeble-mindedness”. As late as 1946 the former chief psychiatrist of the New York City Board of Education, Abram Blau, warned that, unless retrained, left-handed children risked severe developmental and learning disabilities and insisted that “children should be encouraged in their early years to adopt dextrality…in order to become better equipped to live in our right-sided world”.

While today in the United States and Europe, left handed kids aren’t punished and retrained, these same sorts of biases still exist in large parts of the world, proving that righties are just as capable as being sinister as lefties.

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Timmins, Ontario, has a long history as a mining town. Photo: Michael Jacobs

In the small city of Timmins, Ontario, a town nestled half way between Michigan and Hudson Bay, there is a mine. Actually, there are many mines—it’s a mining town. But this story is about just one, a mile and a half deep, where there is water bubbling up from below that has been cut off from the rest of the world for at least a billion years—maybe as much as 2.6 billion years.

The longer end of that timeline, Ivan Semeniuk points out in the Globe and Mail, is about half the age of the Earth. This water hasn’t been in contact with the rest of the planet since before the rise of multicellular life.

But like the water trapped in frozen lakes below Antarctica’s massive ice sheets, researchers suspect there might be life in these flows.

“It’s been called the Galapagos of the subsurface,” says Barbara Sherwood Lollar to New Scientist. The water, “is packed with hydrogen and methane – chemicals that microbes love to eat.”

“What we have here,” says Sherwood Lollar, a microbiologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, “is a plate of jelly donuts.” While she has yet to confirm whether the water is inhabited, she says the conditions are perfect for life.

The scientists don’t know whether there is any life in the ancient, isolated water. But they’re working on it. The water is young enough that it would have been locked away after life arose on Earth. But it’s been trapped for so long that any life that does exist would likely be unique—a relic of an ancient world. The CBC:

Some Canadian members of the team are currently testing the water to see if it contains microbial life — if they exist, those microbes may have been isolated from the sun and the Earth’s surface for billions of years and may reveal how microbes evolve in isolation.

One can’t help but be reminded of the Balrog: “Moria! Moria! Wonder of the Northern world. Too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear.”

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Photo: Arnett Gill

Why do we LOL? Is ROFLing an innate piece of human behavior? Does our tendency to LMAO say something about us—something that separates us from the non-kekekeing species who share our planet?

For Scienceline, William Herkewitz explores the evolutionary history of laughter, a story that shows us that maybe we’re not quite so unique as we’d like to think. It’s not just that we laugh at funny things. The roots of this behavior, scientists think, go back much further and actually play an important purpose.

Herkewitz finds that various theories abound, but that the current “best guess” says that humans laugh to tell other humans not to get too fussed over something that could otherwise be regarded as scary or dangerous.

If you’re an ancestral human, says Ramachandran, and you come across what you think is a dangerous snake but actually turns out to be a stick, you’re relieved and you laugh. “By laughing, you’re communicating: ‘All is OK,’” says Ramachandran.

Ramachandran believes the “false alarm” signaling purpose of laugher explains its loud sound and explosive quality. If you want to signal something to a larger social group, they better hear it. His theory also helps explain the contagiousness of laughter — a curious quality exploited by the laugh tracks of TV sitcoms. Strangely enough, hearing the sound of laughter, on its own, is enough to elicit more laughter in others. “A signal is much more valuable if it amplifies and spreads like wildfire in the group,” says Ramachandran.

People also laugh to show pleasure, to bond with other members of the group. And in this regard, humans’ laughter isn’t special.

Our laughter, the Tommy gun staccato sound of “ha-ha-ha,” is unique in the animal kingdom. Beyond scientific anomalies like Mister Ed or Babe the pig, if you visit your local zoo you’ll be hard-pressed to find any animals making a sound you’d confuse with human laughter. But do humans, in the vast gallery of life, laugh alone? Ask Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist and veterinarian at the University of Washington, and he’ll tell you no. Panksepp studies laughter where you might least expect it, in lab rats.

“In the mid 1990’s we found [rats] have a sound — a high-pitched chirp — that they made most often during play,” says Panksepp. “It crossed my mind it might be an ancestral form of laughter.” And Panksepp, eager to investigate, dove hands-first into his theory. He tickled his rats.

What he found lead to two decades of research. “They’re just like little children when you tickle them,” says Panksepp. “They ‘love’ it.”

Dogs, too, laugh in their own way. As do primates. The work is a reminder that for all that humans are, and all the things we do, there’s actually very little that makes us special.

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The tiny bladder of the humped bladderwort plant. Photo: Enrique Ibarra-Laclette, Claudia Anahí Pérez-Torres and Paulina Lozano-Sotomayor

The carnivorous bladderwort plant is a small aquatic species with cheery yellow flowers. It uses tiny traps that act like vacuums (the “bladders” in its name) to suck up prey such as water fleas. It’s a complex little plant. But compared to, say, a tomato, the bladderwort has extremely short DNA—just 80 million DNA base pairs to a tomato’s 780 million.

Tomatoes, like humans, have long strands of DNA that don’t do much. Only 2 percent of the human genome codes for genes—the portion of DNA that contains instructions for building proteins and functional RNA chains. The rest is known as noncoding or junk DNA. Researchers still speculate about the role of this genetic matter, which dominates the genome of not only humans but many other organisms, too.

Not the bladderwort, though. The plant’s DNA might be shorter than the tomato’s, but both plants have around 28,500 genes. The bladderwort just doesn’t have the noncoding DNA. Researchers who sequenced the bladderwort’s genome were surprised to find that 97 percent of the plant’s DNA consists of genes and sections of DNA that control those genes. This shows that complex life is possible without all of the junk DNA, they write.

In a paper published in Nature, the researchers hypothesize that—unlike humans and other plants and animals—the bladderwort actively deleted its junk DNA over many years of evolution. Some species, like the bladderwort, may have a built-in mechanism for deleting noncoding DNA, while others, like humans, may favor DNA insertion and duplication, leading to extraneous quantities of junk DNA. Neither mechanism is likely preferable over the other; they simply represent different paths in life.

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If you know of one of these female Mangarahara cichlids, let the London Zoological Society know. They need her help to save the species. Photo: Berlin Zoo

There are just three Mangarahara cichlids left in the world, so far as we know, and they’re all men. Two are at in the London Zoo, one is in Germany at the Berlin Zoo. The species was wiped out in the wild when the Mangarahara River in Madagascar dried up because of dams built to block the river, says the Associated Press.

The Berlin Zoo used to have a female, but she has unfortunately passed away, along with the best chance to revive the species in captivity. Now, the Zoological Society of London says in a release, they’re on a global quest to find a lady friend for their male cichlids. If you or anyone you know has one in a fish tank somewhere, they would really, really like to hear from you.

Launching the appeal, ZSL London Zoo’s Brian Zimmerman said: “The Mangarahara cichlid is shockingly and devastatingly facing extinction; its wild habitat no longer exists and as far as we can tell, only three males remain of this entire species.

“It might be too late for their wild counterparts, but if we can find a female, it’s not too late for the species. Here at ZSL London Zoo we have two healthy males, as well as the facilities and expertise to make a real difference.

If a female can’t be found, this wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had to sit idly by and watch a the last of a species wait out its final end. Just recently, Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, passed away. And botanical gardens around the world feature the identical faces of the last E. woodii, each of them a clone of the same male plant.

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A new and improved model of the human tongue. Photo: Sanders and Mu, The Anatomical Record

Though the human tongue is one of our most important structures, write the authors of a new paper, it’s also one of the least understood. To dispel some of the mystery, their study models where each muscle in the tongue is positioned and also indicates those muscles’ association with the jaw, reports Charles Q. Choi for ScienceNOW. Eventually, the model could reveal some of the intricacies of how we talk, eat and swallow.

Choi describes their findings, revealed in the 3D computer model they built:

Unlike arms and legs that rely on bones to behave in a familiar way, like classical levers, tongues operate bonelessly like the tentacles of an octopus, with the motion of any lone muscle depending on the activity of surrounding muscles in a complex manner that researchers do not yet fully grasp. A number of tongue muscles overlap so extensively, for example, that they might best be treated as a single entity.

To build a better tongue model, the researchers drew upon images of a male and female tongue taken from the Visible Human Project, which is creating complete 3D representations of a male and female body by scanning millimeter-thin slices of two donated cadavers. The researchers also drew upon slices from three other human tongues, which they made translucent in order to better study their inner structures. According to the paper authors:

One reason for the relative lack of research on the human tongue is its complex anatomy. This is a real barrier to investigators as there are few anatomical resources in the literature that show this complex anatomy clearly. As a result, the diagnosis and treatment of tongue disorders lags behind that for other structures of the head and neck.

The researchers think this new model represents the clearest, most complete guide for understanding the “complex interweaving” of muscles that make up this single, unique organ. 

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An artist’s rendition of Acrotholus audeti. Photo: Julius Csotonyi

What’s 90 pounds, six feet long and has an adorable little bone-cased bump for a head? No, not Cubone. It’s this newly discovered dinosaur, Acrotholus audeti, which was dug up recently in the Canadian province of Alberta.

Like the dinosaur havens of the mountainous west, from Montana and Idaho to Utah and Arizona, Alberta is practically stuffed with dinosaur fossils. But by digging around in the the Milk River Formation in southern Alberta—a region traditionally not known for loads of fossils—researchers found something new: the dome-headed skull of Acrotholus audeti. Dated to 85 million years ago, this is the oldest-known North American member (and maybe the oldest in the world) of the big family of bone-headed dinosaurs.

The little dinosaur was an herbivore and, other than the occasional headbutt, might have been pretty cool to hang around. But more than just being a neat little dinosaur, says Discover, the finding is a hint that little dinosaurs may have been way more common than we think.

Most dinosaur finds are of the bigger brethren: big bones are less likely to get picked over and crushed by scavengers or destroyed by time. But, with their big-boned heads strong enough to survive the trials of millions of years, dinosaurs like Acrotholus audeti are helping paleontologists flesh out the record of little dinosaurs. The new find, says the Canadian Press, “ touched off further investigation that suggested the world’s dinosaur population was more diverse than once believed.”

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Photo: Thomas Marthinsen

Drug addiction is a complicated and messy thing, and fighting a history of heroin use is especially so. In the San Diego Union-Tribune, Bradley Fikes reports on a new tool that may soon be added to the regime of psychological and behavioral counseling and pharmaceutical treatments: a compound he describes as a “heroin vaccine.” So far only tested in rats, the researchers behind the study tell Fikes that the drug is ready for human testing.

Unlike methadone or other synthetic opiates that mimic the behavior of heroin, the new drug actually trains the body to pull heroin from the bloodstream:

Senior study author Kim Janda says the vaccine causes the body to produce antibodies against heroin and its psychoactive products. These antibodies circulate in the bloodstream, and neutralize any of these substances they encounter before they reach the brain.

“It’s like the old ’80s game Pac-Man,” Janda said. “They immediately seek out the target and sequester it.”

People looking to quit heroin use, or those trying to help them, would be able to use the vaccine to nullify the effects of any future heroin use. Substance abuse is way more than just a physical addiction: this vaccine could help protect users whose bodies are off heroin but who decide it’d be a good idea to start using again. Combined with existing treatments to get a person used to a drug-free life, the new pharmaceutical would help make sure the treatment sticks.

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A female orb-weaver chowing down on a male. Photo: Kumon

The female black widow spider, as her name suggests, infamously devours her would-be suitors as they attempt to mate with her. These spiders are not the only sexual cannibals in the arthropod kingdom, either. Female praying mantises cannibalize their mates, sometimes decapitating and eating them while they are still mounted. Female orb-weaving spiders eat the smaller, more timid males and mate with the larger, more aggressive ones.

In an interesting case of role reversal, however, researchers just discovered that some male spiders also eat their mates. Micaria sociabilis, a small brown spider that lives in Europe, is more likely to eat his female mate than be eaten by her. The researchers see this phenomenon as evidence of male mate choice.

The study, which was only carried out with spiders in the lab rather than those observed in the wild, involved pairing male and female M. sociabilis of different sizes, ages and mating status to see what would happen. All of the spiders were fed ahead of time to discourage cannibalism due to hunger.

Reverse cannibalism, it turned out, depended heavily on the month in which the spiders met. Males tended to eat females most often in July. In the summer, males tended to be larger and also more cannibalistic, so the researchers speculate that male mate-eating aggression may be correlated with size. Cannibalistic males would eat their potential mates both before and after copulation.

Cannibalism occurred most frequently when large, young males from the summer batch met older females from the spring generation. So the behavior could also be based upon female age. Female body size did not turn out to be a significant factor in whether or not the female gets eaten, and neither did virginity.

Whatever the underlying reasons, in the case of M. sociabilis, males clearly call the shots on who they prefer to mate with and who will just serve as another convenient snack.

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Image: Beautification Syndrome

In the movies, cavemen do a whole lot of grunting and pointing. We modern humans, on the other hand, have evolved language. We have words like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis and twerk. Shakespeare gave us besmirch and gloomy. But our modern language still has some remnants of the grunting cavemen who came before us—words that linguists say might have been conserved for 15,000 years, the Washington Post reports.

The sentence that, according to the Post, contains most of these words goes like this: “You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!”

The list of these “ultraconserved” words, which survived from early languages, includes  “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” “man” “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm.” You can hear the words passed down by our ancestors, and conserved by us, here in this graphic.

The study that found these words used a statistical model to create a family tree of words. Mark Pagel, lead author on the study, told the Washington Post, “We’ve never heard this language, and it’s not written down anywhere. But this ancestral language was spoken and heard. People sitting around campfires used it to talk to each other.”

Some of the words seem obvious to us. “Mother,” “man” and “not” all make sense. But what about ashes and worm and bark? Here’s Pagel, to the Washington Post:

“I have spoken to some anthropologists about that, and they say that bark played a very significant role in the lives of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers,” Pagel said. Bark was woven into baskets, stripped and braided into rope, burned as fuel, stuffed in empty spaces for insulation and consumed as medicine.

It’s hard to explain why some words catch on and some don’t. This happens today, too. Just look at Bing’s recent campaign to make “Bing it” as commonly used as “Google it.” Spoiler alert: they failed. Perhaps they should have gone with “bark it” or “flow it.” At least those words have been with us for far longer than Google.

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Image: Travis Wiens

As the spring warms the earth in the eastern United States, one of the largest insect emergences on the planet is about to happen. Seventeen years after their last appearance, cicadas from this brood will wiggle out from the ground, shed their skin and take to the skies. This is what that looks like (GIF by T. Nathan Mundhenk):

Late spring also happens to be a popular time for weddings. According to Wedding Business Today, the most popular wedding month is June, when 15 percent of the approximately 2.3 million weddings that happen every year in the United States take place. That’s 345,000 weddings that month alone. Even if only fraction of them happen in cicada territory, that’s still thousands of weddings at risk for cicadas on their wedding day.

In fact, the most common question that Cicada Mania gets is about weddings. They have a few suggestions for avoiding or dealing with the bugs. First, they say you should try the “cicada emergence formula” to see if the cicadas are in fact emerging on your big day. All you do is plug in the Average Mean Temperature in Celsius in April for your area. So wedding goers in Central Park should see cicadas on May 15th.

If cicadas are going to rain on your parade, here’s what you might expect, according to the Cicada Wedding Planner:

1. The bodies of dead cicadas littering the ground.
2. The constant hum of cicada song.
3. An occasional cicada landing on a guest. Guests screaming.
4. An occasional cicada crawling on a table, chair, barbecue.

They say to rent a hall or a tent to keep the insects from literally raining on you. Bagpipes are good for drowning out cicadas, they write, and keeping the food covered until it’s eating time is a good idea. And relax, they say: “Like rain, there’s not much you can do about it. If the property is full of cicadas, get set for some hilarious pictures.”

Bloomberg’s Constance Casey argues that wedding goers should stop complaining and appreciate the bugs:

The main point is, however, how about a little awe? It’s a long time to wait to come up into the light. These insects spend 17 years as little wingless nymphs, feeding on tree roots — a dark and quiet life. Their only tasks are to grow bigger and bigger with successive molts, and to count. How, speaking of awe, do they count?

If you’re not convinced that cicadas on your wedding could be awesome, here’s a video for you:

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Right now, astronauts on the International Space Station live on periodic supply drops, but if we’re ever going to really live in space, with colonies on other planets or aboard interstellar transports, we’ve got to figure out the food situation. Plants have spent their entire history growing under Earth’s gravity, and biologists know that living in zero-G stresses them out. But to really figure out exactly how plants get stressed meant killing the plant and cutting it open—an herbal autopsy.

On the ISS, says NASA, researchers are growing a strain of genetically engineered plant that glows when and where it gets stressed. With this tool, researchers can track how these plants are affected by living in space without having to cut them down.  The researchers are using a heavily researched flowering plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, more commonly known as thale cress. According to NASA, the research is important for learning how plants can grow in preparation for “future long-duration exploration.”

Arabidopsis thaliana. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

But more than just being about growing plants in space, the scientists want to use the cress to understand the fundamentals of how stressed-out plants might adapt to climate change. So, they’re deliberately trying to stress the cress out, “exposing the plant to extremes of pressure, temperature, and drought.”

This isn’t the first thing we’ve genetically modified to glow-in-the-dark, either. In Japan, says David Biello, researchers used jellyfish genes to make glow-in-the-dark cats. We’ve also got glowing tobacco, that lets you know when it needs to be watered. And a still-ongoing Kickstarter campaign wants your help to grow glowing-plant technology, and they’ll give you a glowing arabidopsis to do so.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The cicadas of Brood II are starting to emerge. For the past 17 years they’ve been hiding, buried underground across the northeastern United States, waiting for this moment. But something has been waiting for them. Something dangerous. A killer, evolved to sit idly by while the larval cicadas grow underground and to strike just when they crawl to the surface.

As cicadas dig their way from their underground lairs, the fungus Massospora attacks. It infects the cicada, eating it alive from the inside out, says Cornell student Angie Macias:

This little white fungus eats the cicada alive until nothing is left in its abdomen but spores. Then it ruptures the tissues holding the abdomen together, breaking the end off, and thereby turning the still-alive-and-flying cicada into a salt shaker of death for others below.

The spores, falling from the sky from the guts of ruptured cicadas, go on to infect insects still crawling around on the ground below.

This first group of cicadas, infected in their tunnels, will die during the time they’d normally mate, while producing spores than can directly infect other cicadas. But the second group of cicadas—those infected on the wing—will die filled with thick-walled resting spores. Resting spores are entrusted with the long wait in the soil til the next generation emerges, a year or perhaps 17 years down the road.

The Massospora fungus is found wherever cicadas thrive, says Macias. No one is really sure how the fungus evolved to patiently wait out the cicadas and their staggeringly-long lifecycle.

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