Love Bug Wears Its Heart on Its Leg

Valentine’s Day is every day for a newly discovered group of beetles whose members sport a prominent “heart” on their legs.

The heart is actually a trochanter, a joint or leg segment that helps connect the upper leg to the abdomen. Humans also have a part called the “greater trochanter,” only not in such a fancy shape.

The beetles, described in a new study in the journal Acta Entomologica, have another connection to Valentine’s Day. They only seem to think about one thing: mating.

“All of the specimens so far have been male. We have yet to see a female,” lead author Max Barclay said in a press release. “Its closest relatives are parasites developing inside other insects. We don’t yet know what its heart-shaped joint is used for, but we do know that the males don’t even have a functional mouth to eat, so their only purpose is to search for mates. They certainly have a one-track mind.”

Barclay is the beetle collections manager at London's National History Museum, which houses specimens representing more than half of the known beetle species on Earth, making it the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind in the world. Barclay is, therefore, arguably the planet’s foremost beetle expert.

While examining a batch of several thousand mixed insects collected during a field trip to Central America, Barclay spotted the unusual beetles. He knew they were extraordinary when he spotted the prominent heart-shaped joints.

More research determined that the beetles represent a new genus, named Ivierhipidius, whose members live in a Belize rainforest.

“There are more than 400,000 known beetle species. They are the largest group of organisms on the planet, playing a critical role in ecosystems,” Barclay said.

“One in five of living creatures is a beetle," Barclay added, "and we are still uncovering new species today, even some with new modifications of body parts that disclose more about their evolution and way of life.”

From Discovery News

Pacific Coast Apartments Are About to Fall Off a Cliff

Plenty of people love the idea of living in a house or apartment close to the ocean. It’s safe to say that nobody likes the idea of their house or apartment actually tumbling into the ocean, but that’s precisely the situation that’s facing residents of an apartment complex in Pacifica, Calif.

They find themselves living closer and closer to the sea as the 80-foot cliff on which their dwellings are perched crumbles away. And yet remarkably, at least some of them are reluctant to move away.

Both the scale of the problem and the determination of the residents are vividly highlighted in the video below. At around the 30-second mark, a chunk of cliff collapses into the sea; yet, later on, the video shows people calmly smoking on their balcony.

The Pacifica cliffs have been crumbling for decades, but the pace has steadily increased as sediment from the San Francisco Bay, which sustained the beaches and protected the cliffs, has been greatly reduced by damming, water diversion and dredging. Increasing sea level rise will only exacerbate the problem; but by then, the buildings will likely be long gone.

“I filmed a small portion of a very large problem with that city,” Duncan Sinfield, an assignment editor at KTVU told The New York Times. “It’s got to be happening a lot more often. We’re just not seeing it.”

Read more at Discovery News

Wasps Fly Backwards to Ensure They Can Get Home

When sand wasps leave home in the morning they capture snapshots of the landscape around their nest to make sure they can find their way back later, a study using high-speed video has found.

The field study, published today in the journalCurrent Biology, is the first to reconstruct what a homing insect in the field sees, co-author Professor Jochen Zeil from the Australian National University’s Research School of Biology said.

“They look back at the nest from the view point of their future return,” he said.

“It’s a bit like when you leave a hotel in an unfamiliar environment. To make sure you recognise it when you come back, you turn back as you are leaving it.

“It’s a very smart way of obtaining all the information you need to get back.”

It has long been known that insects use orientation flights to help find their way back to the nest, but until now, no-one knew exactly what information they used in this process and how they used it.

To investigate this question, Dr Zeil and colleagues used two high-speed cameras to record the brief orientation flight of the female ground-nesting wasp Cerceris australis.

The researchers captured both the three-dimensional path travelled by the wasp and the direction the insect was looking at the time.

“In a way we were sitting in cockpit of this animal while it was learning how the scene looks like around the nest on departure,” Dr Zeil said.

Wasps have compound eyes that capture the world in low resolution and panoramic vision.

The researchers combined this fact with flight path information to reconstruct what the wasps saw on their orientation flight.

Dr Zeil and colleagues showed that during the orientation flight the wasp flies backwards away from the nest in a very systematic zigzag pattern of arcs around the nest, slowly getting higher and further away (see video below).

The researchers hypothesized that during the orientation flight, the wasp would produce a systematic sequence of views of the nest in its landscape, which they used when deciding what direction to fly in on their return.

Read more at Discovery News

Goa May List India's Treasured Peacocks as Vermin

India’s popular tourist state of Goa has ruffled a few feathers with its proposal to reclassify the national bird the peacock as vermin, making them easier to cull, reports said Friday.

The move comes just weeks after Goa’s legislative assembly caused similar consternation when it ruled that the resort state’s beloved coconut trees were not in fact trees, but palms.

“We have listed several wild species including wild boar, monkey, wild bison (Gaur), peacock as nuisance animals,” the Press Trust of India quoted Goa’s agriculture minister Ramesh Tawadkar as saying.

“These animals are creating (a) problem for farmers and are destroying their cultivation in rural areas,” he told reporters on Thursday evening, according to the PTI report.

The colourful peacock is India’s national bird and is protected under the country’s Wildlife Protection Act of 1972.

But animal rights groups fear the Goa government’s proposal to reclassify the peacock as a “nuisance animal” is intended to make it easier to cull the birds.

“Goa seems to be trying to… (have) India’s national bird labelled this way so that they may be hunted and killed,” Poorva Joshipura, the CEO of PETA India, told AFP.

“If Goa wants to remain on the tourist map, people expect it to be a paradise for animals too,” she added.

Last month, opposition politicians in Goa reacted with outrage after the state government reclassified the coconut tree as a palm because it doesn’t have any branches.

Read more at Discovery News

Spider Triumphs Over Venomous Snake in Outback Duel

A plucky little spider has once again proved that size doesn’t matter by taking on — and beating — a much larger venomous snake, in a very Australian telling of the story of David and Goliath.

The spindly Daddy Long Legs spider appeared to have come out on top after going head-to-head with a brown snake in rural New South Wales.

Farmer Patrick Lees said he was astonished to discover the expired reptile dangling from a web at his outback home in Weethalle, about 400 kilometres (250 miles) west of Sydney, on Saturday.

“The snake was already dead, I made sure of that before I took the photo,” he told AFP, referring to the creature’s reputation for its deadly venom and quick bite.

Lees’ photo, posted on his Aussie Farmer Facebook page, has proved a huge hit in a country well known for its array of fearsome animals.

Many Australians take Mother Nature in their stride, but visitors to the vast island country marvel at its range of dangerous wildlife, from gargantuan saltwater crocodiles to the deadly Sydney Funnel Web Spider.

Brown snakes are common in eastern Australia, and can be as much as two metres (six feet) long when fully grown, according to the website of the Australian Museum.

Their bite, which delivers a potent mix of neurotoxins and coagulants, can be fatal to humans.

Lees said that after taking his photograph, he left the determined little arachnid to enjoy its moment.

“I can’t deny the spider its victory,” Lees said.

“I’m not sure if it killed it but it definitely won in the long run.”

Wildlife experts said it was possible the snake and the spider had duked it out — to the death — but it was impossible to know for sure.

“The most likely scenario is that the snake got entangled in the spider’s web,” Graham Milledge of The Australian Museum told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Read more at Discovery News

Snowballs Form Spontaneously, Roll On

Here’s the sort of thing that you might expect to see on the reboot of “The X-Files.” Thousands of snowballs spontaneously form, without any human hands to help, and then roll together like a ghostly invasion force through a field in Idaho.

But as agent Mulder probably would explain to us, all those snowballs actually are a natural, albeit extremely rare, phenomenon known as snow rollers.

As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website explains, snow rollers form when an unusual sequence of events occur. First, a smooth crust of snow that’s already on the ground is covered by newer, lighter layer of snow. Then, the weather abruptly changes, warming rapidly, and strong wind kicks up. The wind picks up small pieces of moist, sticky snow and sends them rolling along. Once the pieces are on the move, they collect more snow around them.

While snow rollers often are cylindrical, the ones in Idaho formed spherical shapes that resembled snowballs. Unlike the ones you threw at your neighbors as a kid, snow rollers aren’t packed together firmly, and sometimes they’re even hollow.

While snow rollers don’t occur very often, scientists have known about them for a long time. This 1893 article describes their appearance in a field in Ohio.

In this case, the snow rollers appeared in and around The Nature Conservancy’s Silver Creek Preserve in south-central Idaho. Sunny Healey, the preserve’s manager, told Nature’s Cool Green Science blog that she had never seen them before in 20 years of living on the preserve. She described the snow rollers as being about 18 inches in diameter.

When Healey first glimpsed the snow rollers from a distance, she thought they were trumpeter swans, which sometimes bunch together in the fields. On closer observation, she realized they were frozen spheres, and noticed the roll marks that they left in the snow.

From Discovery News

Meet the Bird That Lies and Tricks Its Way Into Sex

Disneyland’s a lie. Mickey Mouse, for instance, isn’t a mouse at all, but a costume with a person inside. The architecture, too, is deceptive. That giant castle isn’t as tall as it looks, because designers deployed something called forced perspective, making the windows near the top smaller so they seem farther away.

It’s some next-level sneakiness that the great bowerbird would find laughable. It was deploying its own visual tricks long before Walt Disney came around. The male great bowerbird constructs a beautiful tubular structure out of twigs, depositing bones and snail shells to make courts at either end. He arranges these in a very specific way, though, opposite of what’s going on in Disneyland: By deploying forced perspective, the male bowerbird actually makes his court look smaller. Also very unlike Disneyland, he does it to help him get laid.

This is the saga of bowerbird hanky-panky, a romance packed with more lies, illusions, and thievery than a soap opera—with none of the insufferable soft focus.

In Australia and New Guinea, 24 species of bowerbird undertake some of the most bizarre mating rituals among avians. Some males build big cave-like structures—known as bowers—out of sticks, clearing a court in front where they hoard objects of very particular colors. A pile of blue junk, for instance, might include berries and the odd piece of blue plastic. Other bowerbirds build simpler, smaller “avenue” bowers—two rows of sticks arranged vertically to create a kind of tunnel.

The male great bowerbird is in this latter camp. Among the builders, his bower is kind of meh if I’m being honest: He chooses drab rocks and snail shells and bones to decorate his court.

The female bowerbird doesn’t really care, though. Here’s how the seduction goes down. The male flutters into a bush above his bower and calls to the female. Should she join him, he’ll drop down to his crib and take up position in one of the courts. “He starts strutting about and then she goes inside [the bower], and he struts about a bit more and makes a funny sound,” says evolutionary ecologist John Endler of Australia’s Deakin University. “It’s sort of like, tick tick tick tick.”

Now pretend you’re a female great bowerbird. The tight walls of the structure direct your attention to the court. If the male had placed objects of any size willy-nilly throughout the court, to your eye the court would seem fairly large: Objects farther away of course look smaller and give a sense of depth.

Notice the arrangement of larger objects farther away from the bower. This tricks the female into thinking that the court is smaller or, at the very least, that she’s on acid.

But that’s not what you see here. The bones and stones and such all look to be the same size because the male is tricking you. He’s placed the larger objects farther away from your eye and the smaller ones closer to you. “The effect of that is to make a more even pattern,” says Endler. “It would probably have an effect of making the court look smaller and therefore the bird itself might look larger.” He’s using the art of forced perspective to show off.

That’s not the only visual illusion the bowerbird uses. In another part of the mating process, he takes up a position off to the side of the bower entrance, popping just his head into view to wave objects at the female, real needy-like. The males who find the best, most colorful objects are the most desirable, after all.

Here’s where it gets interesting: While the outside of the bower looks fairly plain, the male has painted the inside red by chewing up bits of plants and fruits. He didn’t do that to get the female in the mood—he’s actually messing with her color vision. The male picks up a typically colorful object, which she sees set against the dullness of the court, and gives it a wave. He throws the object away, grabs a new one, and gives that a wave. He’ll also flash the vivid crest on the back of his head every so often for good measure.

All the while the female’s eyes are adjusting to the red paint lining the bower. As this is happening, her retina is comparing the data from its red-sensitive cones and green-sensitive cones in order to sense colors.

But the paint is overwhelming the red cones. “The effect on the bowerbird is she’s going to become less sensitive to red light, which means that green objects are going to be brighter,” Endler says. The battle between red cones and green cones has tipped toward the greens. (Human peepers work the same: You can see how tightly green and red are paired in your eyeball with this demo. By staring at green stripes, you desensitize your green cones, so when you look at something white, red magically replaces the green.) Indeed, the male will wave a disproportionate amount of green objects to red ones in order to impress her.

The male great bowerbird’s beautiful crest is as alluring to female bowerbirds as the human male’s fedora is to women. Wait…

After an average of a minute or so of all this, the male will run around the back. If the female is receptive, she’ll let him mate with her. If not, she’ll just burn him and fly away.

Males don’t only have to worry about how to best seduce the ladies. Opportunistic males will often tear down their neighbors’ bowers or steal objects left unattended. This is relatively rare if bowers are nice and spaced out, perhaps over a half mile apart, but as density increases, so does the marauding. “There’s the other side of the story: If you’re going away to maraud someone, your own bower might get ruined,” Endler says. “Sounds a lot like politicians, doesn’t it?”

Read more at Wired Science

Fear of Vengeful Gods Helped Societies Expand

Belief in an all-seeing punitive god motivates people to be more charitable towards strangers outside their own family and community, particularly to those of similar beliefs, researchers have found.

A study, published Wednesday in Nature, suggests religiosity may contribute to greater cooperation and collaboration despite geographic separation.

“People may trust in, cooperate with and interact fairly within wider social circles, partly because they believe that knowing gods will punish them if they do not,” the study’s authors wrote.

“Moreover, the social radius within which people are willing to engage in behaviors that benefit others at a cost to themselves may enlarge as gods’ powers to monitor and punish increase.”

To explore these ideas, researchers studied 591 people from eight diverse communities in Brazil, Mauritius, Siberia, Tanzania, Fiji and Vanuatu.

People in these communities adhere to a wide array of religions such as Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism as well as local traditions such as animism and ancestor worship.

The participants played a game in which they were given the option to exercise financial favoritism towards themselves and their local community, or to be completely impartial by obeying the roll of a die, which could mean giving money to a distant person of the same religion.

Each participant’s religious beliefs were also explored through interviews designed to assess how much their god or gods cared about morality, punishment, and how much those knowledge the gods had of individual’s behavior.

The researchers found people who believed in a more punitive, all-knowing god ended up giving more money to distant people who shared the same religious belief.

Lead author Benjamin Purzycki said the results suggested people of the belief that one’s actions are monitored, judged and punished by a deity were more likely to play fair than to play favorites.

“Ultimately we’ve all got very similar constitutions; we behave a certain way when we feel like we’re being watched and if there’s a threat of a punisher around, that alters our behavior,” said Purzycki, post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture at the University of British Columbia.

“So what these gods seem to do is they harness that suite of psychological predispositions we have and it can steer our sociality and pro-sociality in specific ways.”

Purzycki said the stronger motivation provided by the threat of punishment rather than reward reflected human nature; when driven by reward, people are more likely to do dishonest things than when driven by the threat of punishment.

This can even overcome our evolutionary drive to look after our own – although the study did show that the more children people had, the more likely they were to play favorites.

“We found exactly what you would expect from a rational being where the more children people had the more likely they were to favor themselves and their local community at the expense of these geographically distant communities who shared the same religion beliefs and practices,” Purzycki said.

Given we live in an unprecedented global culture, the authors suggested religiosity may have helped to expand cooperation, trust and fairness towards far-flung strangers of similar religious persuasions.

“In addition to some forms of religious rituals and non-religious norms and institutions, such as courts, markets and police, the present results point to the role that commitment to knowledgeable, moralistic and punitive gods plays in solidifying the social bonds that create broader imagined communities,” they wrote.

Read more at Discovery News

Neanderthal Genes Make Us Depressed, Smoke

Having Neanderthal DNA in your genes significantly increases the risk for depression, nicotine addiction, stroke, pregnancy complications and many other health problems, finds a new survey.

The study, published in the journal Science, provides a living reminder that no human today is a "purebred," since early Homo sapiens interbred with different species in Africa, Asia and Europe. Less is known about what happened in Africa, but sequencing of the Neanderthal genome has made it possible to link Neanderthal DNA to aspects of appearance and the health risks of today's Europeans and Asians.

"This study has modern-day clinical relevance, because it reveals how evolutionary history has led to some differences in disease risk between populations," senior author John Anthony "Tony" Capra told Discovery News.

"In terms of treating these diseases, it will be important to understand how these bits of Neanderthal DNA exert their influence at the molecular level."

Capra, an evolutionary geneticist and assistant professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, and his colleagues analyzed a database containing the anonymous health records of 28,000 U.S. patients. The scientists next looked at the genomes of each person, focusing on their Neanderthal DNA, and then compared the two sets of data to see how the DNA had influenced the patients' risks for the different health problems.

A finding is "that having Neanderthal DNA at one location in the genome significantly increased risk for blood hyper-coagulation," Capra said. Back in the day, this trait might have helped early humans to seal wounds more quickly, preventing infections, but now it can increase the risk for stroke, blood clots and pregnancy complications.

Neanderthal DNA also appears to affect skin and hair color, freckles, and even warts and calluses.

"We also found several surprising associations between Neanderthal DNA and psychiatric and neurological phenotypes (resulting behaviors) like depression and nicotine addiction," Capra said.

He quickly added that Neanderthals did not even have tobacco, which is native to the Americas. They probably were not depressed, either.

Capra explained that "depression is an incredibly complex disease and we don't fully understand the genetic and environmental drivers of depression today in modern populations. Thus, like nicotine addiction, depression might not even make sense as a 'disease' 50,000 years ago. Nonetheless, this does suggest a potential influence of Neanderthal DNA on related systems."

Reaction to the new study reflects ongoing debates about human history and evolution. Some researchers, for example, believe that Neanderthals and humans were very different, with Neanderthals going extinct possibly at the hands of Homo sapiens around 40,000 years ago. Still others believe that Neanderthals were simply absorbed into the Homo sapiens population. These are just two theories.

There are also ongoing debates about "Out of Africa" and "Out of Asia" on where various human species originated and migrated to over the years. One thing is clear: our family trees are far more complex than anthropologists from earlier generations had ever imagined.

Ian Tattersall, a curator and professor emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History, told Discovery News that "any (DNA) admixture did little to affect the future evolutionary trajectory of either Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens. Whether or not the conditions the authors discuss are based on Neanderthal-derived genes, they present identical issues to clinicians. Blaming certain forms of depression on 'Neanderthal' genes doesn't help us much in dealing with them."

Read more at Discovery News

We Just Heard the Spacetime 'Chirp' of Black Hole Rebirth

Today will go down in the history books as the day we directly detected gravitational waves. The discovery, made by scientists of the LIGO Science Collaboration, is a Nobel Prize-worthy event that equals, and maybe even surpasses, the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and the realization by Edwin Hubble in 1929 that the universe is expanding.

“We can now hear the universe,” said LIGO physicist and spokesperson Gabriela Gonzalez during Thursday’s National Science Foundation’s historic meeting in Washington D.C. “The detection is the beginning of a new era: The field of gravitational astronomy is now a reality.”

Although gravitational waves were first theorized by Einstein’s theory of general relativity a century ago, it’s only now that humanity has the technology to physically measure these ripples in spacetime. Using LIGO, which stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, exquisitely tiny fluctuations in spacetime can be measured and, shortly after its sensitivity upgrade in September last year, the universe gave LIGO a gravitational gift.

Gravitational waves are generated when massive objects accelerate, collide or explode. If we can measure the gravitational wave signature of these events, we can learn a lot about their properties and even use them in a new era of gravitational wave astronomy.

It would be a paradigm shift away from “regular” astronomy that studies cosmic radiation from the electromagnetic spectrum; the gravitational wave spectrum can reveal the “dark” universe, where black holes collide and neutron stars quietly orbit one another in the night.

And on Sept. 14, 2015, one of the biggest eruptions of gravitational waves thought possible to occur in the universe was detected by LIGO’s freshly upgraded laser system.

Approximately 1.3 billion light-years away, two black holes became trapped in their mutual gravitational well and started to rapidly orbit one another. Binary black holes are thought to be an inevitable part of the cosmic landscape, but this is the first time that we have directly detected two black holes — 29 and 36 times the mass of our sun — just before merging. Watch a computer visualization of merging black holes:

Their gravitational battle was short-lived, however. In a fraction of a second, the two rapidly spinning objects touched and unleashed a fury of energy. In an instant, the black holes lost 3 times the mass of our sun — this mass was converted into pure gravitational energy, peaking in power output 50 times the output of all the stars in the universe combined.

If we remember our “tossing a pebble in a pond” analogy for the generation of gravitational waves, this black hole merger was like throwing a brick into that pond; a gargantuan surge of gravitational wave energy erupted, blasting these spacetime ripples into the universe.

Then, 1.3 billion years later, these waves reached Earth. And it just so happened that LIGO had only just been upgraded to detect this ancient event. It’s cosmic serendipity at its finest.

Theory suggests that when two black holes collide and merge, their gravitational wave signal should produce a very fast pulse and, if slowed down sufficiently, the rapid spinning and collision should be represented in the waves as a “chirp.” And guess what? Almost exactly as predicted by computer models based on Einstein’s 100-year-old equations of general relativity, the black hole merger "chirped." Listen:

What you just heard were two black holes spiraling into one another and merging as one — an event that is thought to occur somewhere in the universe once every 15 minutes. This is the physical embodiment of a quest that has taken 100 years for physicists to achieve.

There is no question about the validity of the signal, this is the cutting edge of physics theory meeting observation; the chirp was predicted and this chirp represents black hole rebirth.

When you sit down and really think about it, it’s hard to comprehend that this signal, from two black holes, washed through our planet. In fact, it washed through each and every person on the planet. This has happened countless times and will continue to do so in the future, it’s only just now that we have the right “hearing aid” installed to actually detect these signals.

Read more at Discovery News