Gender-Bending Bird Breaks Migration Record

A gender-bending Scottish bird migrated 16,000 miles, breaking the record for longest European bird migration, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds(RSPB).

The epic round-trip journey, undertaken by a red-necked phalarope, took the well-traveled bird across two oceans. The bird flew from the island of Fetlar in Shetland, Scotland, across the Atlantic, south down the eastern seaboard of the United States, across the Caribbean, and Mexico, ending up off the coast of Peru. After wintering in the Pacific, it returned to Fetlar following a similar route.

It's not the longest bird migration ever, as this list shows, but the feat is still a record-breaker for Europe.

Scientists from the RSPB tracked the red-necked phalarope's travels using a geolocator device that weighs less than a paperclip. Ten of the birds were outfitted with the device while on the Scottish isle.

The researchers couldn't believe how long and far the birds traveled. The scientists conducted the study just trying to figure out where the birds spent the winter. Little did they know that these were world-class fliers.

"To think this bird, which is smaller than a starling, can undertake such an arduous journey and return safely to Shetland is truly extraordinary," Malcie Smith of the RSPB said in a press release. "This tiny tracker has provided a valuable piece of the puzzle when building a picture of where phalaropes go when they leave our shores. We hadn’t realized that some Scottish birds were traveling thousands of miles to join other wintering populations in the Pacific Ocean."

The red-necked phalarope had already captured the attention of researchers, but for another reason. It turns the table on tradition gender roles.

During the summer, male birds can be found incubating eggs and raising young. At the same time, the female birds are out strutting their stuff, showing off their brightly colored plumage in hopes of attracting new partners.

In the bird world, often females are rather drab colored while the males are quite colorful. Since female red-necked phalaropes are the aggressive maters, they instead have the showy feather garb.

The red-necked phalarope is one of the UK's rarest birds. It is now only found in Shetland and the Western Isles, and numbers fluctuate between just 15 and 50 nesting males. Scotland marks the southern limit of its breeding range, with the species far more abundant further north, where it occupies wetlands around the northern hemisphere.

Read more at Discovery News

Beautiful Ice Circle Forms in North Dakota

A rare sight to behold, this circle of ice on North Dakota’s Sheyenne River is a winter spectacle that requires two ingredients to make: freezing cold air and an eddy in a not-so-freezing river. That and patience.

The circle of ice is a “collection of ice cubes,” caught in an eddy, Allen Schlag, a National Weather Service hydrologist in Bismarck told the AP. The cold weather over the weekend froze bits of the river in other areas that then broke apart and drifted with the current until getting caught in the eddy. Snow and frost continue to collect on top of the eddy, which grows larger in a series of concentric rings.

Retired engineer George Loegering came across the spinning disk of ice while out hunting with relatives and calculated the ice circle’s diameter to be about 55 feet. ”At first I thought, no way! It was surreal,” he told the AP. Then he looked up the phenomena online and found it is a  relatively rare event.

Read more and see video at Discovery News

New Nose Is Grown on Man's Forehead

Despite his perhaps bizarre appearance, a man in China who is growing a new nose on his forehead is the beneficiary of a rather common nose reconstruction technique.

The man suffered damage to his nose and an infection after a severe car accident. The infection had eaten away at the cartilage in his nose, making it impossible to for doctors to fix his original one. Instead, the team decided to grow the man an entirely new nose on his forehead, according to the Huffington Post.

But despite its extreme appearance, this method is not that different from plastic surgery techniques used all the time, said Dr. David Cangello, an attending plastic surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital and Manhattan, Eye Ear and Throat Hospital in New York.

"I would call it a different take on a principles that we commonly use in reconstruction," Cangello said.

Forehead nose

The man's doctors placed tissue expanders, which create space to stretch the skin, under the man's forehead, and created the rough shape of a nose, probably using screws and plates. They then harvested cartilage from his ribs to fill in the nose. Once the nose is ready, they will rotate the entire assemblage -- skin, blood vessels, cartilage and all -- and move the new nose to where his current nose sits.

That is only slightly different from current methods of nose reconstruction, Cangello told LiveScience. Though reconstructive surgeons would also put tissue expanders under the forehead skin to stretch the skin enough to cover the new nose, they would place the nose differently.

"We typically take the cartilage from the rib, and we put it right where the nose structure would already be, and we bring the skin flap over it and cover it," Cangello said.

Afterward, the doctors suture together the skin flaps of the forehead, which will usually leave a small scar.

Key blood vessels

Though it may seem like a patient might prefer to grow a new nose on a different part of the body that could be more inconspicuous, there are good reasons to use forehead skin.

"Skin that comes from another area of the face will most resemble the skin of the nose, as opposed to skin that came from another body part," Cangello said.

The forehead also has blood vessels that nourish the tissue transplant, so the surgeons don't have to disconnect and reconnect those vessels to place the nose in its correct position. If the doctors were to grow the nose on a forearm or a leg, for instance, they would have to undertake a laborious microsurgery to take the blood vessels that feed and drain the transplant.

Read more at Discovery News

Golden Eagle Attacks Deer in Camera Trap Footage

A rare death match between a golden eagle and a young deer was inadvertently captured by a camera trap set up to snap pictures of Russia's endangered Siberian tigers.

The sika deer (Cervus nippon) was found dead in December 2011 by a researcher tending to the camera trap, which was being used to monitor the habits and movements of tigers in Lazovsky State Nature Reserve in Russia's Far East.

Conservationist Linda Kerley, of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), recalled that something felt immediately wrong as she approached the carcass.

"There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died," Kerley, who runs the ZSL's camera trap project, said in a statement. "It was only after we got back to camp that I checked the images from the camera and pieced everything together. I couldn't believe what I was seeing."

The camera trap footage only captured two seconds of the attack in three photos, but it showed quite clearly an adult golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) clinging to the young deer's back.

"I've been assessing deer causes of death in Russia for 18 years," Kerley said in a statement. "This is the first time I've seen anything like this."

An adult golden eagle can weigh more than 12 lbs. (5.4 kilograms) and have a wingspan of about 7.5 feet (2.3 meters). Though they do not regularly prey on deer, the raptors are known for ambitious attacks on large animals, the researchers said. The birds, however, have not been known to attack people, despite what the "golden eagle" hoax video would have viewers believe.

"The scientific literature is full of references to golden eagle attacks on different animals from around the world, from things as small as rabbits — their regular prey — to coyote and deer, and even one record in 2004 of an eagle taking a brown bear cub," Jonathan Slaght, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in a statement. (ZSL and WCS have been partnering on tiger monitoring in the region.)

"In this case I think Linda just got really lucky and was able to document a very rare, opportunistic predation event," Slaght added.

Read more at Discovery News

Cockatoo 'Can Make Its Own Tools'

A cockatoo from a species not known to use tools in the wild has been observed spontaneously making and using tools for reaching food and other objects.

A Goffin's cockatoo called 'Figaro', that has been reared in captivity and lives near Vienna, used his powerful beak to cut long splinters out of wooden beams in its aviary, or twigs out of a branch, to reach and rake in objects out of its reach. Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Vienna filmed Figaro making and using these tools.

How the bird discovered how to make and use tools is unclear but shows how much we still don't understand about the evolution of innovative behaviour and intelligence.

A report of the research is published this week in Current Biology and an accompanying video showing the behaviour is available here: http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/group/kacelnik/movie_figaro_for_media.mov

Dr Alice Auersperg of the University of Vienna, who led the study, said: 'During our daily observation protocols, Figaro was playing with a small stone. At some point he inserted the pebble through the cage mesh, and it fell just outside his reach. After some unsuccessful attempts to reach it with his claw, he fetched a small stick and started fishing for his toy.

'To investigate this further we later placed a nut where the pebble had been and started to film. To our astonishment he did not go on searching for a stick but started biting a large splinter out of the aviary beam. He cut it when it was just the appropriate size and shape to serve as a raking tool to obtain the nut.

'It was already a surprise to see him use a tool, but we certainly did not expect him to make one by himself. From that time on, Figaro was successful on obtaining the nut every single time we placed it there, nearly each time making new tools. On one attempt he used an alternative solution, breaking a side arm off a branch and modifying the leftover piece to the appropriate size for raking.'

Professor Alex Kacelnik of Oxford University, an author of the study, said: 'Figaro shows us that, even when they are not habitual tool-users, members of a species that are curious, good problem-solvers, and large-brained, can sculpt tools out of a shapeless source material to fulfil a novel need.

'Even though Figaro is still alone in the species and among parrots in showing this capacity, his feat demonstrates that tool craftsmanship can emerge from intelligence not-specialized for tool use. Importantly, after making and using his first tool, Figaro seemed to know exactly what to do, and showed no hesitation in later trials.'

Professor Kacelnik previously led studies in the natural tool-using New Caledonian crows. One of them, named Betty, surprised scientists by fashioning hooks out of wire to retrieve food that was out of reach. These crows use and make tools in the wild, and live in groups that may support culture, but there was no precedent for Betty's form of hook making. Her case is still considered as a striking example of individual creativity and innovation, and Figaro seems ready to join her.

Read more at Science Daily

Rare Specimens From a World-Class Skull Collection

If you were to go clicking down Alan Dudley’s anonymous-looking English street in Google’s Street View, there’d be no reason to stop outside his anonymous-looking English home. But inside, in a space no bigger than a child’s bedroom, Dudley has amassed one of the world’s most impressive private collections of skulls -- some 2,500 of them, incredibly well-organized and impeccably preserved. A good chunk of the animal kingdom is represented -- fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals fill the space.

British journalist Simon Winchester’s first reaction to the collection was horror. “I thought, ‘This is macabre, this is horrible, this is grotesque,’ because I was, I think like most of us, brought up to associate skulls with piracy or warning or danger or death,” Winchester says. “But then you see beneath the muscle and the skin something so beautiful, so finely constructed, that you can understand the fascination that someone like Dudley has. It may sound rather corny, but it gives you a new reverence for life.”

Winchester was so moved that he, along with an ex-BBC producer, created an app that showcased the collection. Though highly regarded when it launched last year, the app didn’t sell particularly well. But publishers in New York were interested in the material. When he was asked to turn the app into a book, Winchester happily agreed. The result is Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley’s Curious Collection, which was published earlier this month. The book features hundreds of Dudley’s skulls, supplemented with rarer specimens and Winchester’s writings on skull lore and history. We spoke to Winchester about what he learned and the most interesting skulls he discovered. These are some of his favorites.

Above:

Babirusa from North Sulawesi

Winchester loves “the extraordinary canine teeth that look like horns but are actually teeth which curve back into its own head and make it look utterly weird.”

Read more at Wired Science

Incredible Halloween Light Show: Gotta-See Video

There's a new contender for king of the YouTube nighttime light show displays.

Edwards Landing Lights in Leesburg, Virginia has created a Gangnam Style synchronized show akin to many seen on YouTube before. Why the attention this year? The previous king of the light show was a man named Kevin Judd, but his were so popular (see below) that his Home Owner's Assocation (HOA) passed rules to prevent him putting up lights ever again. Yikes.

There's no question that Psy's Korean pop song is one of the hits of 2012, so this is apt to be a hit this Halloween. If you're in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area, stop by Leesburg and check out the show, but be respectful, it's a residential neighborhood. via Gawker

Kevin Judd of Riverside, California was one of the kings of nighttime light displays, until his HOA shut him down. Apparently, visitation of his nightly "shows" was so big the visitors would start gathering around 2pm for a 7:30pm show.

The HOA received complaints. Judd owns a company that produces light shows, and according to Judd,'s company's website, "many of our neighbors would come out to watch every night. It’s a shame that some of those same neighbors in the community now do not wish the display to remain."

Read more at Discovery News

A Whale With a Distinctly Human-Like Voice

For the first time, researchers have been able to show by acoustic analysis that whales -- or at least one very special white whale -- can imitate the voices of humans. That's a surprise, because whales typically produce sounds in a manner that is wholly different from humans, say researchers who report their findings in the October 23 issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

"Our observations suggest that the whale had to modify its vocal mechanics in order to make the speech-like sounds," said Sam Ridgway of the National Marine Mammal Foundation. "Such obvious effort suggests motivation for contact."

It all started in 1984 when Ridgway and others began to notice some unusual sounds in the vicinity of the whale and dolphin enclosure. As they describe it, it sounded as though two people were conversing in the distance, just out of range of their understanding.

Those unusually familiar sounds were traced back to one white whale in particular only some time later when a diver surfaced from the whale enclosure to ask his colleagues an odd question: "Who told me to get out?"

They deduced that those utterances came from a most surprising source: a white whale by the name of NOC. That whale had lived among dolphins and other white whales and had often been in the presence of humans.

In fact, there had been other anecdotal reports of whales sounding like humans before, but in this case Ridgway's team wanted to capture some real evidence. They recorded the whale's sounds to reveal a rhythm similar to human speech and fundamental frequencies several octaves lower than typical whale sounds, much closer to that of the human voice.

"Whale voice prints were similar to human voice and unlike the whale's usual sounds," Ridgway said. "The sounds we heard were clearly an example of vocal learning by the white whale."

That's all the more remarkable because whales make sounds via their nasal tract, not in the larynx as humans do. To make those human-like sounds, NOC had to vary the pressure in his nasal tract while making other muscular adjustments and inflating the vestibular sac in his blowhole, the researchers found. In other words, it wasn't easy.

Read more at Science Daily

World's Tallest Dog and Cat Named

Guinness Book of World Records has just named the world's tallest known dog and cat.

The dog, seen in the above video, is a Great Dane named Zeus. When Zeus stands on his hind legs, he towers 7 feet 4 inches above his owner, Denise Doorlag of Otsego, Michigan.

The three-year-old measures 44 inches from foot to withers, making Zeus the same size as an average donkey.

The humongous hound weighs a whopping 115 pounds and eats around 12 cups of food a day, which is equivalent to an entire 30-pound bag of food. Despite his voracious appetite and the corresponding cost, Doorlag is very happy about her pet and his new honor.

"Zeus is an awesome dog," she was quoted as saying in a Guinness press release."The only downside is that everything costs more; the food, medicines, transport. We had to get a van to be able to transport him, oh, and if he steps on your foot - he leaves bruises!"

When she goes out with Zeus, "The most common thing people ask is: 'Is that a dog or a horse?' and 'Where's his saddle?'"

Zeus broke the record of the previous record-breaking tallest dog, Giant George, who is 1 inch shorter. Zeus is therefore the tallest dog ever recorded in history, according to Guinness.

I hope Giant George and Zeus get along, as that would be quite a sight to have the two of them walking together down the street.

In terms of the tallest cat, that honor went to a feline named Savannah Islands Trouble. (You can see and learn all about him here.) Unfortunately, the cat isn't around to celebrate the victory. He died on August 15 at the age of four years and five months, according to owner Debby Maraspini's tribute page. He "escaped his home on August 15 and was tragically killed," she wrote.

He was 19 inches tall, earning him the Guinness record.

Read more at Discovery News

'Fire Rainbow' Over South Florida

So-called "fire rainbows" are neither on fire nor are they rainbows, but they sure are stunning.

They are technically known as iridescent clouds, a relatively rare phenomenon caused by clouds of water droplets of nearly uniform size, according to a release by NASA. These clouds diffract, or bend, light in a similar manner, which separates out light into different wavelengths, or colors.

That makes them similar to rainbow-colored glories, which are also formed by diffraction, and also produce an oscillating pattern of colors ranging from blue to green to red to purple and back to blue again.

Although iridescent clouds have rainbow-like colors, the way light is scattered to produce them is slightly different. Rainbows are formed by refraction and reflection. When light is refracted, it is bent by passing through mediums of different densities, such as water or a prism. Reflected light bounces off a surface at an angle equal to the angle it hit the surface at. Diffraction, though, involves light waves being scattered into a ring-like pattern.

 As with other iridescent objects, like peacock feathers, the color changes depending upon one's position relative to the sun and the object.

Iridescence usually occurs in newly formed clouds. That appears to be the case here as well. According to the Weather Channel, these are pileus clouds caused by a fast-growing thunderstorm that shoved air into the upper atmosphere through a layer of moisture. This created a fog-like cloud that looks like a glowing dome atop the thunderstorm.

Read more at Discovery News

Glowing Scorpion Exoskeletons May Be Giant Eyes

Scorpion bodies are studded with eyes, sometimes as many as twelve — and scientists may have found one more.

A scorpion’s entire exoskeleton may act as one giant light receptor, a full-body proto-eye that detects shadows cast by moonlight and starlight.

That’s still just a hypothesis, but it would help explain why they glow so brilliantly under ultraviolet light.

“It might be a sort of alarm that’s always going off until the scorpion finds shelter,” said biologist Douglas Gaffin of the University of Oklahoma. “Shade might turn down the alarm on that part of their body, so they preferentially move in that direction.”

No matter their color in daylight, be it jet-black or translucent, ultraviolet light makes pigments embedded in their exoskeletons emit photons.

That property is called fluorescence, and nobody knows quite why scorpions possess it. Suggested explanations include mating signals or evolutionary leftovers of natural sunscreen needed before they became nocturnal. Whatever the case, 430 million-year-old fossils of scorpion relatives called eurypterids suggest their fluorescence has been around for a very long time.

Gaffin, leader of a study published Dec. 19 in Animal Behavior, noticed during scorpion collection expeditions that one desert grassland species, called Paruroctonus utahensis, always seemed to scurry under something, even in total darkness.

“You eventually wonder, “how do they find that one blade of grass and stay under it?” he said.

Gaffin wasn’t the first to wonder if fluorescence played a part, perhaps by converting ultraviolet sunlight and moonlight into a color visible to scorpion eyes, which are attuned to greenish wavelengths.

One researcher bleached fluorescent pigments from scorpions, covered their eyes and showed they could no longer discern shelter from open space. Another study showed nerves in their tails fired when green light (the same color of fluorescence) was shined on the body part.

Taking the research a step further, Gaffin and his colleagues recorded the behavior of more than 100 scorpions under UV, green light and longer wavelengths their eyes couldn’t see. The researchers completely blocked some scorpions’ eyes with foil to determine whether exoskeletons alone could “see” anything.

They found that eyes-blocked scorpions moved just as erratically under UV light as their unblinkered brethren.

“Maybe they’re collecting stray UV light, maybe starlight, and pigments turn it to green, and that’s what their nervous system is picking up on,” Gaffin said. “How do they do this? I don’t know.”

Read more at Wired Science

World's Smallest Frogs Discovered in New Guinea

Field work by researcher Fred Kraus from Bishop Museum, Honolulu has found the world's smallest frogs in southeastern New Guinea. This also makes them the world's smallest tetrapods (non-fish vertebrates). The frogs belong to the genus Paedophryne, all of whose species are extremely small, with adults of the two new species -- named Paedophryne dekot and Paedophryne verrucosa -- only 8-9 mm in length.

The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Previous research had led to the discovery of Paedophryne by Kraus in 2002 from nearby areas in New Guinea, but the genus was not formally described until last year (Kraus 2010, also in Zookeys). The two species described earlier were larger, attaining sizes of 10-11 mm, but the genus still represents the most miniaturized group of tetrapods in the world.

"Miniaturization occurs in many frog genera around the world," said the author, "but New Guinea seems particularly well represented, with species in seven genera exhibiting the phenomenon. Although most frog genera have only a few diminutive representatives mixed among larger relatives, Paedophryne is unique in that all species are minute." The four known species all inhabit small ranges in the mountains of southeastern New Guinea or adjacent, offshore islands. Their closest relatives remain unclear.

The members of this genus have reduced digit sizes that would not allow them to climb well; all inhabit leaf litter, and their reduced digits may be a corollary of a reduced body size required for inhabiting leaf litter and moss. Habitation in leaf litter and moss is common in miniaturized frogs and may reflect their exploitation of novel food sources in that habitat.

Read more at Science Daily

Deep-Sea Camouflage Switcheroo

When swimming near the ocean’s well-lit surface, some octopus and squid become transparent in order to hide from hungry predators. In deeper waters, found a new study, they do something completely different: They turn deep red.

The study, which offers a rare look into the behavior of deep-sea creatures, documents the first known example of an animal using completely different tricks to achieve camouflage in different situations. And it gives new insight into the secrets of invisibility, which has a range of applications, from sustainable fishing to medicine.

The findings also suggest that a decline in water quality from pollution and other sources may harm undersea animals more than researchers have previously realized.

"A lot of ecosystems are balanced on who can see who and who can hide from who," said Sönke Johnsen, a visual ecologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. "If you change the optics of the water, all of a sudden you shift the ecosystem for things that relied on sight for the ability to catch their prey. When the water becomes murkier, species diversity drops."

Cephalopods, the group that includes squid and octopuses, have long impressed divers with their rapid color displays. They can turn from clear to green to nearly black in an instant.

To better explain these rainbow-like behaviors, Johnsen and colleague Sarah Zylinski caught members of one species of octopus and one species of squid, caught while on a ship off the coasts of Peru, Chile and Mexico, they put the animals in shipboard tanks and performed a series of experiments.

Under the room's ambient light, the researchers reported today in the journal Current Biology, both the squid and the octopus were transparent. But when the researchers shone blue light on them, they turned deep red. They did not respond the same way to beams of red light, moving light, or other kinds of light disturbances.

Those findings suggested that the animals might use different strategies for camouflage, depending on how deep they were because in shallow waters, being mostly clear makes an animal basically invisible.

But like a windowpane, a transparent animal reflects light at depths below about 800 meters (2,600 feet), where hiding places are scarce and predators lurk with bioluminescent flashlights that shine in the blue wavelengths. In that environment, it is wisest to be red or black, as those colors absorb blue light rather than reflect it – creating a different kind of invisibility.

To confirm that camouflage was the motivation for switching from clear to red and back again, the researchers measured how much light the squid and octopuses reflected in their alternate color schemes. The results showed that their chosen hues did the best job of hiding the animals under various conditions.

"This is the first time that anyone has ever shown that these animals are actively switching between completely different modes of camouflage," Johnsen said. "Being clear or deeply red are completely different tricks that work under completely different principles."

Read more at Discovery News

Frozen Puck Hovers Over Track Using “Quantum Levitation”

Researchers at the school of physics and astronomy at Tel Aviv University have created a track around which a semiconductor can float, thanks to the phenomenon of “quantum levitation“.

This levitation effect is explained by the Meissner effect, which describes how, when a material makes the transition from its normal to its superconducting state, it actively excludes magnetic fields from its interior, leaving only a thin layer on its surface.

When a material is in its superconducting state — which involves very low temperatures — it is strongly diamagnetic. This means that when a magnetic field is externally applied, it will create an equally opposing magnetic field, locking it in place.

A material called yttrium barium copper oxide can be turned into a superconductor by exposure to liquid nitrogen — which makes it one of the highest-temperature superconductors.

Read more at Wired Science

Two-headed Cat ‘Frankenlouie’ Turns 12

“A two-headed cat in Worcester, Mass., has twice the reasons for celebrating his recent birthday: It got him in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The double-domed feline is named “Frankenlouie,” and according to its owner, who only wants to be known as Marty, he turned 12 on Sept. 8, according to the Worcester Telegram.

In doing so, he earned a place in the record books for being the longest-lived Janus cat (the term for cats with two heads, which comes from the name of a two-faced Roman god).

“He is the most astounding two-headed animal of all,” according to Todd Ray of the Venice Beach Freakshow, who has some by estimates, the largest collection of bizarre animals in the world — including 22 living two-headed animals and a five-legged dog.

Still, he says Frankenlouie is in a class by his two-headed self.

“We might never see another one in our lifetime,” Ray told HuffPost Weird News. “I have seen many two-headed animals die within a week. To see one alive for weeks is incredible, but to have one alive for years is truly amazing.”"

Read more at Huffington Post

Naughty 'Faster Than Light' Neutrinos a Reality?

Those wacky neutrinos are at it again, mystifying physicists by refusing to behave like they're supposed to.

First we had the mystery of the "missing" solar neutrinos, except it turns out they weren't missing, just in disguise -- the three types of neutrinos can change flavors, or "oscillate," into other flavors. They can do this because -- gasp! -- they have a tiny bit of mass, despite the fact that physicists had assumed for decades that neutrinos were massless, like photons.

And now, it seems, neutrinos might be able to violate Albert Einstein's cosmic speed limit by traveling just a wee bit faster than the speed of light, based on a startling new result from the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion tRacking Apparatus) collaboration. Yeah, you heard me. All the other particles fall in line, heck, even photons obey the speed of light limit, but neutrinos just have to be special. It's like they think the rules don't apply to them.

Honestly, so much has been written about these results in the last few days, it's hard to know where to begin, but here's the gist: In experiments conducted between the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland and a laboratory in Italy, neutrinos were clocked zipping along at 300,006 kilometers per second -- i.e., slightly faster that the speed of light.

Scientists blasted a laser-like beam producing billions upon billions of neutrinos from CERN to the Gran Sasso Laboratory 730 kilometres (453 miles) away. It takes fractions of a second for neutrinos to travel that distance, and when they get to OPERA, they strike the detector, which is comprised of 150,000 bricks of alternating lead plates and photographic emulsion films. To figure out just how fast they're going, you divide the distance between the two points by the measured time it took for the neutrinos to travel between them.

The result: the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds earlier than the 2.3 milliseconds taken by light. "This result comes as a complete surprise," said physicist Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the OPERA experiment. "We wanted to measure the speed of neutrinos, but we didn't expect to find anything special." Hah! You're studying neutrinos, dude. Expect the unexpected.

As Sean Carroll points out over at Cosmic Variance, this isn't one of those pesky three-sigma results that pop up all the time in particle physics -- most recently in the ongoing search for the Higgs boson -- and then just as quickly disappear as more data is added to the mix, because it turned out to be a statistical fluctuation.

A five-sigma result (five standard deviations) is usually sufficient to claim a discovery. The OPERA collaborators are reporting an impressive six-sigma result -- in other words, it's probably not due to a random statistical fluctuation.

So why aren't they enthusiastically claiming discovery from the highest mountaintop? They recognize that, as the saying goes, extraordinary results demand extraordinary evidence. "Whenever you touch something so fundamental, you have to be much more prudent," Ereditato told The Guardian. "A result is never a discovery until other people confirm it." That's why the team spent six months double, triple, and quadruple checking their analysis. "If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because trivial things we are clever enough to rule out."

Don't Believe the Hype (Yet)

I'm sorry to report that, for all the hoopla, the general consensus that has emerged over the last couple of days is that (a) it's a really interesting, potentially exciting result, but (b) it probably won't hold up over time. Even the OPERA team isn't entirely convinced they're right; they're putting their work out there and basically asking their colleagues to poke holes in it and find anything they've missed. These are world-class physicists, mind you, but nobody is perfect, particularly when it comes to such tricky measurements.

So, what could be the problem? Per Carroll:

    There is another looming source of possible error: a “systematic effect,” i.e. some unknown miscalibration somewhere in the experiment or analysis pipeline. (If you are measuring something incorrectly, it doesn’t matter that you measure it very carefully.) In particular, the mismatch between the expected and observed timing amounts to tens of nanoseconds; but any individual “event” takes the form of a pulse that is spread out over thousands of nanoseconds. Extracting the signal is a matter of using statistics over many such events — a tricky business.

A similar method was used by scientists with the MINOS collaboration, which also saw hints of neutrinos traveling slightly faster than light in 2007, although with much smaller statistical significance -- so much so, that Fermilab physicist Joseph Lykken described the result as "inconclusive."

"It's a pretty messy way to try to test a fundamental property," Lykken told Discovery News. "You have a proton beam at CERN that makes the neutrinos, but you don't know which proton made which neutrino. This makes it tough to claim nanosecond timing of the neutrinos. OPERA says they can do this on a statistical basis. Maybe so, but normally in experiments you use something well understood to measure something messy, not the other way around."

Another objection: "In a way, this experiment has been done," according to Marc Sher, a particle physicist with William & Mary College. We can look to the neutrinos detected from Supernova 1987A, which arrived roughly three hours before the light from the exploding star reached the detectors. But that's not because neutrinos traveled faster than light. Rather, they were able to pass right through all the material forming an envelope around the dying star, whereas photons would have to work their way through.

Physicists did the calculations and expected a three-hour delay, and that's exactly what they observed with the neutrinos from SN1987A. However, as Sher (and many others) have pointed out, if the OPERA result is real, those neutrinos should have traveled much faster, so much so that they would have arrived even sooner -- say, in 1984. I think physicists probably would have noticed.

"Supernova neutrinos are known, experimentally, to travel at the same speed as light to better than a part in a trillion," Sher emphasized. "The OPERA claim is that they are traveling faster than light by a part in 30,000." And, well, that's problematic.

John Beacom of Ohio State University told Discovery News that the comparison to SN1987A neutrinos might not be the best one to make: "It's meaningless without knowing how the speed might vary with neutrino energy, distance, etc." If you want a possible good cross-check of the OPERA results, he suggests a closer analog would be to look to experiments like IceCube, which searches for high-energy neutrinos associated with gamma ray bursts.

Read more at Discovery News

Around the World on the Space Station: Video

Now watch it 14 more times for an idea of what the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) get to see every day. No wonder after five months up there they still don't want to come down!

This gorgeous video was made by science teacher James Drake using images downloaded from The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. This is a great online resource with basically all of the images taken from orbit, categorized into a searchable database by region and date. He used a free program called VirtualDub to create the final edit.

ames explains on YouTube: "This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy."

Read more at Discovery News

Clever Dolphins Use Shells to Catch Fish

Already famed as Earth’s first tool-using marine mammals, the bottlenose dolphins of Australia’s Shark Bay have proved handy yet again, by using conch shells to trap tasty fish, then shaking them into their mouths like sardines from a tin.

Unlike sponging, however, in which dolphins use sponges to find fishes hiding in mud, conching isn’t yet widespread in Shark Bay. It appears to be a relatively new innovation, pioneered by a few individuals and finally catching on.

“The extent to which the conch shell is manipulated and the rarity of the behavior suggest that ‘conching’ takes some skill and practice and might thus be another rare individual foraging tactic in Shark Bay,” wrote biologists led by the University of Zurich’s Michael Krutzen in Marine Mammal Science.

While that study came out in April, an August 24 press release from Australia’s Murdoch University, home of co-authors Simon Allen and Lars Bejder, reported that conching has been observed at least 6 times in the last four months. That’s as often as conching was seen between the first sighting in December 1996 and the afternoon of July 31, 2007, when during a survey of western Shark Bay the researchers spotted an unfamiliar dolphin.

As they lingered nearby, hoping to dart a biopsy sample from her skin, the dolphin dived and then surfaced with her beak lodged in a conch shell, which she waved back and forth above the water. She dove again. Before she surfaced, four more dolphins arrived. When she returned with the conch, they were waiting and watching. So were the researchers.

“Photographs were taken, with two of these clearly revealing the posterior portion of a fish protruding from the conch aperture and held in the dolphin’s jaws,” they wrote in Marine Mammal Science. “The dolphin lifted the conch out of the water and manipulated it in such a manner as to drain the water and the fish from the shell.” It appeared to be an emperor fish.

Until the researchers photographed CON — sort for “Concher,” as they code-named the dolphin — the purpose of conch-wielding was unknown. From their handful of fleeting glimpses over the years, the researchers thought it likely that dolphins were simply eating conch snails inside their shells, or perhaps showing off, as do stick-wielding, clay-throwing dolphins in the Amazon.

Almost two years later, in April 2009, the researchers saw another conching dolphin, this time in a shallow, seagrass-covered spot where a wildlife observer had seen dolphins digging through seabed with shells of baler, another large marine mollusc.

Exactly how the shells are used underwater isn’t yet known. Fish might swim into them while being chased, unwittingly turning themselves into packaged snacks. The dolphins could also use the shells like nets or containers, a possibility suggested by the wildlife observer’s report of seabed-digging.

Read more at Wired Science

Orangutan Washes With Washcloth

(Orangutans are remarkably intelligent. This individual, from the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, spontaneously whistles. Another orangutan was recently filmed cleaning itself off with a washcloth. Credit: Smithsonian National Zoological Park)

An orangutan at Tokyo's Tama Zoo has become an Internet star thanks to a video that shows the tidy primate cleaning itself with a washcloth.

The two-minute clip, shot on an 86 degree day at the zoo, shows the orangutan dipping a washcloth in water, ringing it out and wiping its face and upper body. The primate even mops up spilt water droplets afterward.

A smaller orangutan carefully watches and wants to check out the washcloth, but is gently moved aside.

Most likely, the adult orangutan was taught this behavior -- since the washcloth was provided -- but it appears to be acting spontaneously, putting his knowledge to good use on a hot day when a cleansing cool-off was refreshing.

Since the little orangutan was watching, the behavior will most likely be passed down. Some years ago, Duke University scientists proved that orangutans have culture, permitting them to learn new things and share that knowledge with others.

Carel van Schaik of Duke and colleagues presented evidence for cultural transmission of 24 behaviors among orangutans. These include:

-- using leaves as protective gloves or napkins;
-- using sticks to poke into tree holes to obtain insects, to extract seeds from fruit or to scratch body parts;
-- using leafy branches to swat insects or gather water;
-- "snag-riding," the orangutan equivalent of a sport in which the animals ride falling dead trees, grabbing vegetation before the tree hits the ground;
-- emitting sounds such as "raspberries," or "kiss-squeaks," in which leaves or hands are used to amplify the sound;
-- building sun covers for nests or, during rain, bunk nests above the nests used for resting.

In the above cases, I believe the orangutans were just using what was available to them in the wild. If such studies include zoo chimps, which have access to human "tools" like washcloths, the list could probably go on and on.

The last common ancestor of humans and orangutans is thought to have lived about 15 million years ago, so the primate drive to learn and share knowledge (even if it's via unwanted eavesdropping) go way back. We share 96.4 percent of our DNA with orangutans.

Van Schaik said such findings "suggest that the first ancestral man-apes must have had a pretty solid evolutionary cultural foundation on which to build."

Environment helps in that process. The orangutan exhibit at the Tama Zoo opened on April 28, 2005 and took almost 2 years and around 1 billion yen to build, according to Tokyo Guidebook. The exhibit includes a tall "Sky Walk" where the orangutans can swing across towers between living areas. If orangutans poke sticks into a large ant hill-type structure, they are rewarded with a sticky paste, similar to how they'd be rewarded with ants in the wild. The orangutans even have a vending machine that they operate to get drinks for themselves.

More at Discovery News

Bulletproof Skin Made From Spider Silk

Just last week we learned about spiders coming to the aid of burn victims. Now it looks like our friendly neighborhood arachnids are being used to create the ultimate superhero power: bulletproof human skin.

Well, almost.

In her new project, 2.6g 329m/s, Dutch artist Jalila Essaidi, along with Forensic Genomics Consortium Netherlands, created a swatch of nearly bulletproof skin made from spider silk and human skin cells. The project takes its name from the maximum weight and velocity a Type 1 bulletproof vest can withstand from a .22 calibre Long Rifle bullet.

By grafting spider silk between the epidermis and dermis, the skin was able to stop a bullet that was fired at a reduced speed. However, it failed to repel a bullet that was fired at normal speed from a .22 calibre rifle.

But that's fine with Essaidi. She's more interested in the conversation that her project will generate.

"With this work I want to show that safety in its broadest sense is a relative concept, and hence the term bulletproof," Essaidi said in a press release. "The work did stop some partially slowed bullets but not the one at full speed."

"But even with the skin pierced by the bullet the experiment is still a success. It leads to the conversation about how which form of safety would benefit society."

Read more at Discovery News