mystery of walking of water solved

Posted on August 12, 2003 by agnieszka

No, walking on water is not a miracle, at least not for the small insects known as water striders. But even for striders, the ability has remained mysterious — until now. John W. M. Bush and his colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report in the August 7 Nature that they have solved the mystery. Michael Dickinson of the California Institute of Technology writes in a related article, “Much of animal locomotion distills down to a simple application of Newton’s third law: to move forwards, animals must push something backwards.” It was long thought that striders pushed forward off tiny surface waves they created with their long, thin legs. But, even though baby water striders didn’t have enough strength in their legs to generate these waves, they were still able to walk on water. So how do they do it? Using high-speed video and particle-tracking studies to analyze the insects’ movements, the MIT researchers found that water striders’ legs create swirling whirlpools below the surface that propel the insect forward. MIT being MIT, the team also built a robotic version of the insect, named Robostrider, which walks on water, too.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 8/12/2003.
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the nighttime is the right time

Posted on August 12, 2003 by agnieszka

After all this time, people are still debating nature vs. nurture: whether humans are blank slates, shaped by their external environments, or whether they’re completely determined by their genes. A complex question, and one I’m not particularly interested in. I’m more than happy to ascribe my flaws to my mother (either my genes or my upbringing) and my few good character traits to, well, to me and to my great strength of character. Continue reading →

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words and music

Posted on August 5, 2003 by agnieszka

Want your children to remember their vocabulary lists? Perhaps you should make them take music lessons. Music training improves verbal memory in children, according to a study published in the July issue of Neuropsychology. Agnes S. Chan, a psychologist at the University of Hong Kong, and her colleagues studied 90 boys between the ages of 6 and 15. Half belonged to their school’s orchestra and had studied music for one to five years; the other half had no musical training at all. The children were given verbal memory tests, to see how many words they could recall from a list, as well as visual memory tests, in which they had to recall images. Though no differences were found among the two groups in recalling images, students with musical training recalled significantly more words than the control group, and retained more words after a 30-minute delay. The researchers think that musical training stimulates the left side of the brain, aiding other left-brain functions, such as verbal learning. Further study also revealed that verbal memory improved with longer musical study. But music-school dropouts shouldn’t feel too bad. Though the researchers didn’t find any further improvement, the dropouts didn’t lose the advantage they had previously acquired.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 8/05/2003.
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fleas dethroned as jumping champs

Posted on August 5, 2003 by agnieszka

At the Insect Olympics, the froghopper, also known as the spittlebug, has just set the world record for the high jump. The tiny, thumbtack-sized insect can reach heights of 70 centimeters (more than 2 feet), equivalent to a man leaping 700 feet, reports Malcolm Burrows of University of Cambridge in England in the July 31 Nature. Burrows used a high-speed camera to study the bug’s jumping mechanism. In hopping, the insect can accelerate to more than 400 times the force of gravity as its immensely powerful hind legs explosively release stored energy, catapulting it into the air. These legs are used exclusively for jumping and are merely dragged along the ground during walking. According to Burrows, the froghoppers exceed “the height jumped by the flea relative to body length,” accelerate four times faster than fleas, and exert triple the force in jumping. “Fleas are considered to be the champion jumpers, but here I show that froghoppers are in fact the real champions,” he writes. Go froghoppers!

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 8/05/2003.
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sky higher

Posted on August 5, 2003 by agnieszka

The sky is rising and human-caused changes in ozone and greenhouse gases are largely to blame, say researchers in the July 25 Science. The height of the tropopause — the boundary between the stratosphere and the troposphere, the atmosphere’s lowest layer that extends to the Earth’s surface — has risen by almost 700 feet since 1979. The tropopause is important because it plays an active role in the development of weather systems, said Brian Hoskins of the University of Reading’s Department of Meteorology in a related article. B. D. Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and colleagues used weather forecasts and other data from the past 20 years to computer-model a series of atmospheric simulations. The researchers discovered that greenhouse-gas warming in the troposphere and ozone-related cooling in the stratosphere accounted for about 80 percent of the rise. Hoskins writes, “Continuing changes in the properties of the tropopause as a result of human activity could have wide-ranging implications because of its physical and chemical roles in the climate system.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 8/05/2003.
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confessions of a birdaholic

Posted on August 5, 2003 by agnieszka

It all started with a stuffed loon. I’m not usually a souvenir type of girl, but I had enjoyed my trip to Canada last summer, and a stuffed loon, at that moment, seemed just right. It was a small Audubon Society-approved plush toy that, when squeezed, played a recording of the loon’s strange, haunting song. Haunting is the word, because that one bird started me down the road of obsession. I had no idea that my $6 purchase would lead me to where I am now, a birder with a bookcase filled with every single Audubon stuffed bird, 12 different field guides, eight CDs of bird songs, a computerized bird-call gizmo, binoculars, a birding journal, and a special bag to carry all my gear. Continue reading →

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planet more likely to revolve around heavy metal star

Posted on July 29, 2003 by agnieszka

Last year, it seemed as if the entire planet revolved around Ozzy Osbourne, and now there’s a scientific explanation (if the Oz were a gargantuan exploding ball of hydrogen, that is). Stars rich in iron, nickel, and other metallic elements are more likely to have planets, reported Debra Fischer of the University of California at Berkeley and her colleagues at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Sydney last week. The astronomers compared 754 stars, some with planets, most without, and proved a correlation between the amount of metal in a star and whether or not it formed planets. More metal means more raw material to build planets. “These results tell us why some of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy have planets while others do not. The heavy metals must clump together to form rocks, which themselves clump into the solid cores of planets,” said Geoffrey Marcy, a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. Added Fischer, “If you look at the metal-rich stars, 20 percent have planets. That’s stunning.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/29/2003.
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poetry red in tooth and claw

Posted on July 29, 2003 by agnieszka

Poems are duking it out in a Darwinian sense on David Rea’s website. He’s designed a computer program that allows poems to evolve. Starting with 1,000 random words culled from “Hamlet,” “Beowulf,” and the “Iliad,” among others, his program randomly assembles them to create a short verse. If you visit his website (www.codeasart.com/poetry/darwin.html), you are given two of these verses and you choose the one you like best. The unpopular ones are killed off, but the poems with the most votes get to “breed” with each other, exchanging words like genes. Rea has also programmed in a mutation, where every new poem has a one-in-a-thousand chance of having a dropped or added word, or a word shifting its place. The resulting offspring poems are once again put up and voted on, and so on and so forth. After enough generations, Rea says on his site, “we should eventually start to see interesting poems emerge.” One recent survivor of this (un)natural selection was “Hellhound the beds though to/Puppeteer shout ho recesses now/For in the sphere it is cricket curfews/With therein of stolen.” Charmingly incoherent as it is, it looks like poetry requires a creator.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/29/2003.
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why doesn’t she throw the bum out?

Posted on July 29, 2003 by agnieszka

Some women just give and give to the men in their lives, never getting anything but the fuzzy end of the lollipop in return. And so do the females of the semi-aquatic insect species known as the Zeus bug. In contrast to most other animal species, where males give the females nuptial gifts of food as a form of “paternal investment” in their eventual offspring, the female Zeus bug provides tasty morsels for the male during mating, report researchers in the July 24 issue of Nature. A male Zeus bug is smaller than a female, and rides upon her back, mating, and eating secretions produced from a special gland near her head for up to a week. Goran Arnqvist of the University of Uppsala in Sweden and colleagues found that the food-giving is not necessary to ensure a regular sperm supply, so why does the female allow herself to be used in this manner? One of the paper’s authors, Mark Elgar of the department of zoology at Australia’s University of Melbourne, , stated in a press release: “A constant stream of suitors wanting to participate in a polygamous free-for-all could possibly lead to greater harassment, leading to the female expending more energy and placing herself at greater risk than if she doted on just the one man.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/29/2003.
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city bird, country bird

Posted on July 22, 2003 by agnieszka

It’s a cliche that people who live in large cities generally talk faster and louder than their rural counterparts. And it looks like city birds also sing differently than their country cousins. In the July 17 Nature, Hans Slabbekoorn and Margriet Peet of Leiden University in the Netherlands report that urban great tits generally sing higher notes than rural great tits. (For any snickering 12-year-old, a great tit is a bird common in Europe that looks a little like a black-capped chickadee.) The birds do so, say the researchers, to make sure that their mating songs are heard above the low-frequency noise pollution of planes, automobiles, and other urban racket. Great tits in quieter locales, in contrast, sing more low-frequency notes. The researchers write: “Our findings show, to our knowledge for the first time, that human-altered environments might change the communication signals of a wild bird species.” They also worry that bird species that can’t adjust their songs to human noise may suffer breeding declines.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/22/2003.
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