agnieszka biskup — writer & editor

Finally, what adulterous female songbirds have always wanted: Scientific proof of the evolutionary advantages of promiscuity. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Research Center for Ornithology in Germany and the Zoological Museum in Norway spent four years studying a population of songbirds known as blue tits breeding in the Viennese Forest in Austria. A female blue tit normally chooses a single social partner, a male to defend a territory and to help care for offspring, but she also occasionally mates with other males outside her breeding territory without her partner’s knowledge. The researchers report in the Oct. 16 Nature that they have found that the offspring from these extramarital affairs were more genetically varied than those sired by her social mate, and were more likely to survive and reproduce. Females from these extramarital couplings were found to produce larger clutches of eggs and lived longer. Males from these couplings also produced more surviving offspring. As an added bonus, these males also tended to have more elaborate head crests, assumed to make them more attractive to other females. The study supports the idea that females mate many times to get the best possible genes for their young and gives evidence that evolutionarily speaking — at least for female blue tits — promiscuity may be the way to go.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 10/21/2003.

When you’re flying in a jumbo jet, do you ever think about how much of the plane’s holding capacity is devoted to carrying fuel? A team of researchers from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards, Calif., and the University of Alabama have thought about it quite a bit, and have come up with a way to eliminate aircraft from carrying fuel altogether. They have developed a model airplane that is powered and kept aloft by a laser beam delivered from the ground — no onboard fuel required. Tracking the aircraft in flight, the beam is directed to specially designed photovoltaic cells onboard, which power the plane’s propeller. Robert Burdine, Marshall’s laser project manager, said that “the craft could be kept flying as long as the energy source, in this case the laser beam, is uninterrupted.” So far, the technology has powered only a small, radio-controlled model airplane that was tested indoors, but hopes are high for its potential use in surveillance and telecommunications. “This is the first time that we know of that a plane has been powered only by the energy of laser light,” Burdine said. “It really is a ground-breaking development for aviation.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 10/21/2003.

It may not look much like Kermit, being bloated and bright purple with a long, pointy nose, but a frog recently discovered in the mountains of southern India may well become the next big amphibian celebrity. Described by Franky Bossuyt of the Free University of Brussels in Belgium and S.D. Biju of the Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute in India in the Oct. 16 Nature, the frog not only is a new species, but, according to the researchers, warrants the establishment of a whole new frog family of which it is the only member. Named Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis (Nasikabatrachus is a combination of Sanskrit and Latin meaning “frog with nose”), this “living fossil” diverged from its froggy ancestors during the time of the dinosaurs. In an accompanying commentary, S. Blair Hedges of Pennsylvania State University describes the frog as “a once-in-a-century find.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 10/21/2003.

Now if I were an alien, where would I be? According to astrobiologist Maggie Turnbull of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the best bet would be 37 Gem, the 37th brightest star in the constellation of Gemini, some 42 light years away. Turnbull is choosing targets for Terrestrial Planet Finder, NASA’s deep space telescope project, which will search for earthlike worlds outside our solar system and is scheduled to launch in the next decade. Turnbull has narrowed down the 5,000 stars or so that lie within 100 light years of Earth to a short list of 30 that could hold worlds capable of supporting life. One of the things she looked at was the amount of heavy metals present (more metals means more chance of rocky planets) and she eliminated stars that were too young, telling New Scientist: “On Earth, it was two billion years before enough oxygen built up to support complex life, so we won’t look at stars that are less than a few billion years old.” The star 37 Gem is at the top of her list because it is most like our solar system: “The closer we look, the more we realize how [most] other stars are different from the sun.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 10/14/2003.

Have you ever had your heart broken or your feelings hurt? That pain may be more real than you’d guess. Researchers in the October 10 issue of Science report that the brain responds to rejection in the same way as physical pain. Naomi Eisenberger of UCLA and her colleagues monitored the brain activity of 13 undergrads playing a computer ball-tossing game. The game included two other computer-controlled players on the screen, but the human player was led to believe that they corresponded to real students playing elsewhere. The player experienced different situations of social exclusion. In the first scenario, the player couldn’t toss the ball to the other players due to “technical difficulties.” In the other, after being tossed the ball a few times in the beginning, the human player was excluded from the game. For both scenarios, the brain scans revealed heightened activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain implicated in generating physical pain, and students reporting greater distress showed greater activity. In the second situation, a part of the brain called the right ventral prefrontal cortex, linked to reducing suffering from pain, was also activated. The researchers think that a person has to be consciously aware of being snubbed before this “buffering mechanism” can work.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 10/14/2003.

Do you blame your genes for what you do? A study in the October 10 issue of Science says that honeybees should. An individual bee’s occupation can be predicted by knowing what genes are active in its brain. “We have discovered a clear molecular signature in the bee brain that is robustly associated with behavior,” principle researcher Gene Robinson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said in a press release. Honeybees normally live about six weeks. When they first mature, they are nurses who help care for the young in the hive. Within a few weeks, however, they become foragers, seeking nectar and pollen. The researchers measured gene activity in adult bee brains and were able to identify genetic profiles that could be used to correctly classify a bee as a nurse or a forager. Analyzing about 5,500 honeybee genes, the researchers found that 39 percent of the studied genes were turned on and off to make a nurse become a forager. There are usually many steps between genes and behavior, and to find them so closely linked is surprising.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 10/14/2003.

The world’s oceans may be becoming more acidic due to the burning of fossil fuels, say researchers in the Sept. 25 Nature. Ken Caldeira and Michael E. Wickett from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California used a computer model to predict what would happen if carbon dioxide emissions remained at current levels over the next few hundred years. As fossil fuels are burned, carbon dioxide is released in the air, most of which is dissolved by the ocean, forming carbonic acid and lowering its pH. The researchers believe that this change in the ocean’s pH could harm marine life, particularly coral reefs and other organisms whose calcium carbonate shells and skeletons may dissolve in a more acidic environment. The researchers warn that “unabated carbon dioxide emissions over the coming centuries may produce changes in ocean pH that are greater than any experienced over the past 300 million years, with the exception of those resulting from rare, catastrophic events in Earth’s history,” such as a giant asteroid strike.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 10/07/2003.

Saturn’s moon, Titan, has always been rather mysterious: Its thick nitrogen atmosphere and methane clouds have made observations of its surface difficult. But now Donald Campbell of Cornell University and his colleagues report in the Oct. 2 Science online that they have used radar to cut through the haze. Analyzing radar observations from radio telescopes, they have found areas on the moon’s surface that have properties consistent with those of liquid hydrocarbons. They speculate that up to three-quarters of Titan may be covered by hydrocarbon seas and lakes. But they can’t be completely sure until the Cassini Mission makes its rendezvous with the Saturn system next year. If the researchers are right, when Cassini drops the Huygens probe down on Titan’s surface, it may end up making quite a splash.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 10/07/2003.

Fugitive gorillas like Little Joe may be getting all the headlines, but zoos may have a more long-term problem on their hands: Stressing out their captive carnivores. A new study by British zoologists in the Oct. 2 Nature says that carnivores who normally roam over large territories – such as lions and polar bears – fare much worse in zoos than animals with smaller territories. Continue reading →

Have you ever noticed how some people look eerily like their dogs and vice versa? Now there’s genetic evidence to account for some of those similarities. Researchers from the Institute for Genomic Research, working with J. Craig Venter and others from the Center for Advancement of Genomics, report in the Sept. 26 Science that they have assembled a draft of the dog genome – the genetic coding that makes a dog a dog, or in this case, a poodle a poodle. (Just as Venter had his own genome sequenced a few years back, cells from Venter’s male standard poodle, Shadow, were used to decode the dog genome.) Continue reading →