Biochemists Resurrect 'Molecular Fossils': Findings Challenge Assumptions About Origins of Life

Before there was life on Earth, there were molecules. A primordial soup. At some point a few specialized molecules began replicating. This self-replication, scientists agree, kick-started a biochemical process that would lead to the first organisms. But exactly how that happened -- how those molecules began replicating -- has been one of science's enduring mysteries.

Now, research from UNC School of Medicine biochemist Charles Carter, PhD, appearing in the September 13 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, offers an intriguing new view on how life began. Carter's work is based on lab experiments during which his team recreated ancient protein enzymes that likely played a vital role in helping create life on Earth. Carter's finding flies in the face of the widely-held theory that Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) self-replicated without the aid of simple proteins and eventually led to life as we know it.

In the early 1980s, researchers found that ribozymes -- RNA enzymes -- act as catalysts. It was evidence that RNA can be both the blueprints and the chemical catalysts that put those blueprints into action. This finding led to the "RNA World" hypothesis, which posits that RNA alone triggered the rise of life from a sea of molecules.

But for the hypothesis to be correct, ancient RNA catalysts would have had to copy multiple sets of RNA blueprints nearly as accurately as do modern-day enzymes. That's a hard sell; scientists calculate that it would take much longer than the age of the universe for randomly generated RNA molecules to evolve sufficiently to achieve the modern level of sophistication. Given Earth's age of 4.5 billion years, living systems run entirely by RNA could not have reproduced and evolved either fast or accurately enough to give rise to the vast biological complexity on Earth today.

"The RNA world hypothesis is extremely unlikely," said Carter. "It would take forever."

Moreover, there's no proof that such ribozymes even existed billions of years ago. To buttress the RNA World hypothesis, scientists use 21st century technology to create ribozymes that serve as catalysts. "But most of those synthetic ribozymes," Carter said, "bear little resemblance to anything anyone has ever isolated from a living system."

Carter, who has been an expert in ancient biochemistry for four decades, took a different approach. His experiments are deeply embedded in consensus biology.

Our genetic code is translated by two super-families of modern-day enzymes. Carter's research team created and superimposed digital three-dimensional versions of the two super-families to see how their structures aligned. Carter found that all the enzymes have virtually identical cores that can be extracted to produce "molecular fossils" he calls Urzymes -- Ur meaning earliest or original. The other parts, he said, are variations that were introduced later, as evolution unfolded.

These two Urzymes are as close as scientists have gotten to the actual ancient enzymes that would have populated Earth billions of years ago.

"Once we identified the core part of the enzyme, we cloned it and expressed it," Carter said. "Then we wanted to see if we could stabilize it and determine if it had any biochemical activity." They could and it did.

Both Urzymes are very good at accelerating the two reactions necessary to translate the genetic code.

"Our results suggest that there were very active protein enzymes very early in the generation of life, before there were organisms," Carter said. "And those enzymes were very much like the Urzymes we've made."

The finding also suggests that Urzymes evolved from even simpler ancestors -- tiny proteins called peptides. And over time those peptides co-evolved with RNA to give rise to more complex life forms.

In this "Peptide-RNA World" scenario, RNA would have contained the instructions for life while peptides would have accelerated key chemical reactions to carry out those instructions.

Read more at Science Daily

Quake-Causing Hotspot Hides Under Eastern U.S.

Is there a blow torch under North America that causes rare, but deadly, earthquakes? Some geologists think they might have found the buried track of just such a hotspot from Missouri to Virginia.

Hotspots are points in Earth’s interior that melt the crust above, generally creating volcanoes. The classic hotspot is the Hawaiian Islands, which stretch out in a line for 1,500 miles, tracing the movement of the Pacific Plate over the Hawaiian hotspot over millions of years. Most hotspots are seen on thinner, oceanic crust, like that of Hawaii. When they burn up through continents, they generally leave their trace in the form of diamond-bearing rocks, which are pretty rare.

But a team of Chinese and American scientists think they have found the track of a hotspot hidden in the very old, thick crust of Eastern United States, based on seismic data from the 2011 Virginia 5.6-magnitude earthquake. That event essentially lit up the structure of the crust in that part of North America for the USArray seismic network to see.

That seismic data has revealed an unexpected scar in the lower part of the crust extending from eastwards from Missouri to Virginia, reported Risheng Chu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues in the Sept. 15 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

The seismic anomaly, as it is called, cuts through the New Madrid rift system, which is responsible for some of the most powerful earthquakes in North American history. It also crosses a 75-million-year-old diamond-bearing formation in Kentucky. Despite all this, there is no sign of the hotspot track on the surface, they said.

To back up their claim, they created a geodynamic model to show how a plume of heat upwelling from the Earth’s mantle could create just such a seismic feature on the underside of a thick continental crust.

Read more at Discovery News

Origins of Life Found in Smashing Ice

Comets and other icy celestial bodies have some basic building blocks for life, but it takes violent impacts to take them to the next level, according to researchers who claim to have successfully created amino acids in the lab by recreating icy interplanetary collisions.

First the researchers created mixtures of water ice and light organic chemicals roughly based on what has been observed on comets and what is suspected to exist on the Saturn's moons. Then they shocked the ice by firing at it with a steel projectile at very high, interplanetary planetary collision speeds approaching 16,000 miles per hour (7 kilometers per second).

They found that the hypervelocity impact shock of a typical comet ice mixture produced several amino acids, including equal amounts of D- and L-alanine (that means right and left-handed versions of that amino acid molecules). Meanwhile, analyses of the non-shocked "control" samples of the same ice contained none of these important steps towards genuine proteins needed for life. The results suggest that icy impacts within our solar system may play an important role for making ingredients for life.

The team ran the experiment twice, a year apart, to show that their amino acids were not flukes. They also went to great pains to keep their ice mixtures and equipment free of earthly contamination.

"We needed everything to be extremely clean and we needed to show that the results were reproducible," said Zita Martins of Imperial College London and lead author on the paper published in the Sept. 15 issue of Nature Geoscience.

The study is an important step forward because it goes beyond simulations of impacts, of which there are many, she said.

“There are lots of theoretical studies,” said Martins. “But every time they publish they get criticized for not being experimental.” But with the success of this work, it's likely others will follow.

"It's an exciting paper and it's definitely going to spur ancillary work," said icy impacts researcher Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He is especially interested in what will happen if the experiments are done with a wider range of icy mixtures -- including those that match some of the latest discoveries about the composition of comet ices. "It suggests a whole range of mixtures."

Read more at Discovery News

Spider Silk Coated With Carbon Nanotubes Has Multiple Surprising Uses

Eden Steven, a physicist at Florida State University's MagLab facility, discovered that simple methods can result in surprising and environmentally friendly high-tech outcomes during his experiments with spider silk and carbon nanotubes, the results of which are now published in the online research journal Nature Communications.

"If we understand basic science and how nature works, all we need to do is find a way to harness it," Steven said. "If we can find a smart way to harness it, then we can use it to create a new, cleaner technology."

Steven is the lead investigator on the paper "Carbon nanotubes on a spider silk scaffold." The experiment may result in practical applications in electrical conductivity and more.

Think of a nanotube as a one-atom thick sheet of carbon that's been rolled into an infinitesimally tiny tube. A nanotube's diameter is at least 10,000 times smaller than a strand of human hair. Physicists know that when things get that microscopically minute, they act very strange. Researchers worldwide are intrigued by the properties of carbon nanotubes, including their amazing strength and ability to conduct electricity and heat.

Steven wanted to see what would happen when strands of spider silk were coated with carbon nanotubes. Keeping with his theme of simplicity, he gathered the spider silk himself, hiking around the MagLab and using a stick to gather webs. To adhere the powdery carbon nanotubes to the spider silk, he ultimately discovered that just a drop of water worked best.

"It turns out that this high-grade, remarkable material has many functions," Steven said of the silk coated in carbon nanotubes. "It can be used as a humidity sensor, a strain sensor, an actuator (a device that acts as an artificial muscle, for lifting weights and more) and as an electrical wire."

Rather than add to the already immense amount of toxic elements and complex, non-biodegradable plastics found in today's electronic devices and as pollution in our environment, Steven wanted to investigate eco-friendly materials. He was especially interested in materials that could deal with humidity without complicated treatments and chemical additives. Spider silk fit the bill.

"Understanding the compatibility between spider silk and conducting materials is essential to advance the use of spider silk in electronic applications," Steven wrote in the Nature Communications paper. "Spider silk is tough, but becomes soft when exposed to water. … The nanotubes adhere uniformly and bond to the silk fiber surface to produce tough, custom-shaped, flexible and electrically conducting fibers after drying and contraction."

Steven collaborated with six other scientists on the research project, including Florida State University Physics Department Chair James Brooks and Fulbright scholar and Iraqi physicist Wasan Saleh. Saleh worked with Steven and Brooks at the MagLab in 2011 as one of 10 Iraqi Fulbright scholars, and the only woman in the Iraqi group, to visit Florida State that summer.

In addition to Saleh, with the University of Baghdad, the other researchers who collaborated on the paper were: Steve F.A. Acquah, with the FSU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry; Rufina G. Alamo, with the FAMU-FSU Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering; Victor Lebedev, with the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona; and Vladimir Laukhin, with the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona.

Read more at Science Daily

Tuna Closely Related to Some of the Strangest Fish in the Sea

Some of the strangest fish in the sea are closely related to dinner table favourites the tunas and mackerels, an international team including Oxford University scientists has found.

Deep sea fish such as the black swallower, with an extendable stomach that enables it to eat fish larger than itself, and manefishes, some sporting spiky fins like a Mohican haircut, are close cousins to mackerels and tuna despite having completely different body shapes and lifestyles.

The team, led by Dr Masaki Miya at Chiba Natural History Museum in Japan, suggests that this extended family of fishes might owe its success today to the devastating extinction that marked the demise of dinosaurs and many other creatures 66 million years ago.

The researchers report in the journal PLOS ONE this week how they combined DNA analysis of over 5,000 modern fish species with fossil evidence to solve the mystery of which species were closest to tunas and mackerels in the fish family tree.

'What was immediately clear from our result is that the extended family of tunas and mackerels is made up of fishes that all look very different from one another, with different ways of life, but which share one key trait: they all dwell in the open ocean,' said Dr Miya of Chiba Natural History Museum. 'This had been suggested before, but we were able to show that many additional groups of fishes inhabiting the open ocean -- called the pelagic realm -- were closely related to one another and to tunas.'

Reflecting this preference for the open ocean the team has called the extended tuna family tree: 'Pelagia'. Although they share a preference for open-ocean habitats, members of Pelagia show radically different ways of life ranging from deep-sea fishes that live inside sac-like invertebrates to speedy, shallow-water predators such as the tuna.

'Discovering that such radically different fish species are related is a bit like finding that a seal is more closely related to a cat than it is to a walrus!' said Dr Matt Friedman of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, a co-author of the PLOS ONE paper. 'By comparing genetic data with fossil evidence we were able to show that the origins of all these disparate groups lie in a period of rapid evolution that occurred around 65 million years ago. This is significant because this is when the Cretaceous extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs also killed off many groups of large fishes inhabiting the open ocean.

'It's likely that the common ancestor of this family lived in the deep ocean, helping it to survive this ancient extinction. It then emerged from its refuge to diversify and colonise the shallower waters to produce the profusion of related, but very different, species we see today.'

According to the team the new findings suggest a different way of thinking about past extinctions.

Read more at Science Daily

Pinpointing When the First Dynasty of Kings Ruled Egypt

For the first time, a team of scientists and archaeologists has been able to set a robust timeline for the first eight dynastic rulers of Egypt. Until now there have been no verifiable chronological records for this period or the process leading up to the formation of the Egyptian state. The chronology of Early Egypt between 4500 and 2800 BC has been reset by building mathematical models that combine new radiocarbon dates with established archaeological evidence. Over 100 fresh radiocarbon dates were obtained for hair, bone and plant samples excavated at several key sites including the tombs of the kings and surrounding burials.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Egypt was the first territorial state to be brought under one political ruler, and the new dating evidence suggests that this period of unification happened far more quickly than previously thought.

Until now scholars had relied on archaeological evidence alone, using the evolving styles of ceramics excavated at human burial sites to try to piece together the timings of key chronological events in the Predynastic period and the First Dynasty. For example, among the most significant pieces of evidence surviving today are two mud seals, excavated at the royal tombs at Abydos, containing lists in successive order of the First Dynasty kings.

Using the fresh radiocarbon dates combined with existing archaeological evidence, the research team's mathematical model pinpointed the likeliest date for each king's accession. The date for each king is thought to be accurate to within 32 years (with 68% probability). The modelled timeline reveals lengths of reign that are approximately what you would expect in terms of lifespan, say the study authors.

The Egyptian state is often defined as starting when King Aha acceded to the throne. According to the new model, this is likely to have happened between 3111 BC and 3045 BC (with 68% probability). It also shows that the Predynastic period -- when inhabitants along the River Nile started to form permanent settlements and concentrate on crop farming -- was shorter than previously thought. It had been widely assumed that the Predynastic period started around 4000 BC. However, this model suggests it was probably closer to 3800-3700 BC, and the Neolithic period that preceded it lasted longer and finished later.

Lead author of the study Dr Michael Dee, from the Research Laboratory for Archaeology at the University of Oxford, said: 'The origins of Egypt began a millennium before the pyramids were built, which is why our understanding of how and why this powerful state developed is based solely on archaeological evidence. This new study provides new radiocarbon dating evidence that resets the chronology of the first dynastic rulers of Ancient Egypt and suggests that Egypt formed far more rapidly than was previously thought.'

The first kings and queens of Egypt in order of succession were Aha, Djer, Djet, Queen Merneith, Den, Anedjib, Semerkhet and Qa'a. They would have ruled over a territory spanning a similar area to Egypt today with formal borders at Aswan in the south, the Mediterranean Sea in the north and across to the modern-day Gaza Strip in the east.

Read more at Science Daily

Dating of Beads Sets New Timeline for Early Humans

An international team of researchers led by Oxford University have new dating evidence indicating when the earliest fully modern humans arrived in the Near East, the region known as the Middle East today. They have obtained the radiocarbon dates of marine shell beads found at Ksar Akil, a key archaeological site in Lebanon, which allowed them to calculate that the oldest human fossil from the same sequence of archaeological layers is 42,400-41,700 years old. This is significant because the age of the earliest fossils, directly and indirectly dated, of modern humans found in Europe is roughly similar. This latest discovery throws up intriguing new possibilities about the routes taken by the earliest modern humans out of Africa, says the study published online by the journal PLOS ONE.

The research team radiocarbon dated 20 marine shells from the top 15 metres of archaeological layers at Ksar Akil, north of Beirut. The shells were perforated, which indicates they were used as beads for body or clothes decoration by modern humans. Neanderthals, who were living in the same region before them, were not making such beads. The study confirms that the shell beads are only linked to the parts of the sequence assigned to modern humans and shows that through direct radiocarbon dating they are between 41,000-35,000 years old.

The Middle East has always been regarded as a key region in prehistory for scholars speculating on the routes taken by early humans out of Africa because it lies at the crossroads of three continents -- Africa, Asia and Europe. It was widely believed that at some point after 45,000 years ago early modern humans arrived in Europe, taking routes out of Africa through the Near East, and, from there, along the Mediterranean rim or along the River Danube. However, this dating evidence suggests populations of early modern humans arrived in Europe and the Near East at roughly the same time, sparking a new debate about where the first populations of early humans travelled from in their expansion towards Europe and which alternative routes they may have taken.

In Ksar Akil, the Lebanese rockshelter, several human remains were found in the original excavations made 75 years ago. Unfortunately since then, the most complete skeleton of a young girl, thought to be about 7-9 years of age buried at the back of the rock shelter, has been lost. Lost also are the fragments of a second individual, found next to the buried girl. However, the team was able to calculate the age of the lost fossil at 40,800-39,200 years ago, taking into account its location in the sequence of archaeological layers in relation to the marine shell beads.

Another fossil of a recently rediscovered fragment of the upper jaw of a woman, now located in a museum in Beirut, had insufficient collagen to be dated by radiocarbon methods. A method using statistical modelling was used to date by association the jaw fragment at 42,400-41,700 years old.

Ksar Akil is one of the most important Palaeolithic sites in Eurasia. It consists of a 23 metre deep sequence of archaeological layers that lay undisturbed for thousands of years until a team of American Jesuit priests excavated the rockshelter in 1937-38, and again after the end of the WWII, in 1947-48. The cave layers were found to contain the human fossils and hundreds of shell beads, as well as thousands of stone tools and broken bones of hunted and consumed animals.

Study lead author Dr Katerina Douka, from the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, said: 'This is a region where scholars have been expecting to find early evidence of anatomically and behaviourally modern humans, like us, leaving Africa and directly replacing Eurasian Neanderthal populations that lived there for more than 150,000 years. The human fossils at Ksar Akil appear to be of a similar age to fossils in other European contexts. It is possible that instead of the Near East being the single point of origin for modern humans heading for Europe, they may also have used other routes too. A maritime route across Mediterranean has been proposed although evidence is scarce. A wealth of archaeological data now pinpoints the plains of Central Asia as a particularly important but relatively unknown region which requires further investigation.'

The earliest European modern fossil, from Romania, dates to between 42,000-38,000 years before the present time, and specialists have estimated the age of Kent's Cavern maxilla from southern England, between 44,000-41,000 years, and that of two milk teeth in southern Italy, at 45,000-43,000 years old. The new dating evidence from Ksar Akil is largely comparable to these ages, if not slightly younger.

Read more at Science Daily

Evolution’s Clock Ticked Faster at the Dawn of Modern Animals

Five hundred thirty million years ago, the number and diversity of life forms on Earth mushroomed. This so-called Cambrian explosion kept Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, awake at night, as he worried that his theory of natural selection couldn’t explain the sudden proliferation of species. Now, researchers have combined evidence from the fossil record with clues in the genes of living species to estimate the speed of that evolutionary explosion. Their finding—that the rate of change was high, but still plausible—may put Darwin’s fears to rest.

The dawn of the Cambrian period divides two very different Earths. In one, primitive, mostly single-celled creatures “sat on the mud and did very little,” says evolutionary biologist Matthew Wills of the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. In the other, life forms as diverse as our modern fauna roamed the planet. The abrupt appearance of these creatures in the fossil record “gave Darwin a headache,” Wills says, and critics of evolution have argued that the tree of life couldn’t possibly produce so many branches and bear such a variety of fruit so quickly.

Some scientists explained away this dilemma by claiming that the fossil record is deceptive. Perhaps, they speculated, the first representatives of modern animal groups appeared long before the Cambrian period, but had tiny, soft bodies what were not easily preserved as fossils. But based on fossil evidence, most paleontologists believe the “fuse” on the explosion must have been short, with new life forms proliferating only a few tens of millions of years before the Cambrian period. Just how quickly would species have to evolve to squeeze in all these new developments?  “No one has actually tried to quantify just how fast the rates were,” says Michael Lee, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Adelaide in  Australia and the South Australian Museum, who led the new research. “They just literally took Darwin’s word that they must have been pretty fast.”

So Lee and colleagues estimated that speed by studying the evolution of arthropods—Earth’s most diverse phylum, which includes insects, crustaceans, and arachnids. They looked at how changes evolved in both the genetic code and the anatomy of arthropods, comparing 62 different genes and 395 physical traits. For any two branches of the arthropod family tree—centipedes and millipedes, for example—they picked out important physical differences and variations in genetic sequence in modern specimens. Then, using evidence from the fossil record about how quickly the two branches diverged, the group calculated roughly how fast genetic and anatomical differences must have emerged for each lineage over time.

They found that when some early branches of the arthropod family tree were splitting off, creatures were evolving new traits about four times faster than they did in the following 500 million years. The creatures’ genetic codes were changing by about .117 percent every million years—approximately 5.5 times faster than modern estimates, the group reports online today in Current Biology. Lee calls this pace “fast, but not too fast” to reconcile with Darwin’s theory.

This combined model for genes and anatomy represents “quite a stride forward,” Wills says. The results not only show that the evolutionary clock ticked much faster around the time of the Cambrian, but also hint at what may have sped it up. The fact that genes and anatomy evolved at roughly the same rate suggest that pressures to adapt and survive in a world of new, complex predators drove both, the authors speculate. Innovations such as exoskeletons, vision, and jaws created new niches and evolution sped up to fill them. Wills agrees that the new research makes this explanation for the Cambrian explosion “look a lot more probable now.”

Others caution that such analysis is in its infancy. “It’s an excellent first step,” says Douglas Erwin, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., but the exact rates of evolution in the study might not be reliable. He points out that while the study uses fossil data to determine when a given arthropod branch emerged, it doesn’t include the known characteristics of these extinct ancestors in its comparisons of physical traits, which involve only living creatures.

Read more at Wired Science

Ig Nobel Prizes: A Duck-Gnawed Penis, Dung Beetles

Amid a flurry of paper airplanes, hosts adorned with little more than silver body paint, and the world's first and only opera about a centrifugal-force birthing machine, the 2013 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded tonight (Sept. 12).

The Ig Nobels, which are awarded each year in the historic Sanders Theater on the Harvard University campus, honor scientific research that makes people laugh, then makes them think -- and then makes them laugh again. The science is real, and though it's been published in prestigious, peer-reviewed academic journals, it all has considerable popular appeal.

Who hasn't wondered, for example, about the effect that opera music might have on mice after they've had a heart transplant? (It helps, apparently.) And who among us, when seeing an amputated penis -- after it's been partially gnawed on by a duck -- hasn't asked, "Hey, is there a surgical technique that can help here?" (Answer: No, there isn't.)

The Joint Prize in Biology and Astronomy Prize went to a team for their celestial discovery that lost dung beetles find their way home by looking at the Milky Way, that is, after they do a little jig on their perfectly rolled balls of poo. Physicists snagged an Ig Nobel for figuring out that walking on water is possible, if the water walker and the water are located on the moon.

Finally, these and other scientific inquiries are getting the recognition they've long deserved. And while some recipients are in on the spoof on the Nobel Prizes and enjoy the laughs as much as the spirited audience, others are apparently nonplussed by the honor bestowed by the Ig Nobels.

Notably absent, for example, was the winner of this year's Ig Nobel Peace Prize, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, who declared it illegal to applaud in public. He shares the prize with the Belarus State Police, who arrested a one-armed man for clapping. But neither of these visionaries sent representatives to the unceremonious ceremony.

Another no-show was the winner in the Safety Engineering category, Gustano Pizzo, who invented an electro-mechanical system to drop would-be airplane hijackers through a trap door, seal them in a package, and then parachute that package — hijacker and all — into the arms of the police. Sadly, Pizzo died in 2006 before he could receive his Ig Nobel Prize, which comes with a $10 trillion bill (a $10 trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill, that is).

And though there's no category for research that could be greeted with a resounding "duh," the winners of this year's Ig Nobel Psychology Prize were a group of international scientists who confirmed that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive. Their gobsmacking research was published in the prestigious British Journal of Psychology.

Among the highlights of this year's ceremony was the premiere of an original opera in four acts, "The Blonsky Device," which celebrates the work of George and Charlotte Blonsky. The couple was granted a U.S. patent in 1965 for a machine that would facilitate the birth of a child by centrifugal force. (The theme of this year's award ceremony was Force.)

The Blonskys' innovation featured a large circular table onto which a pregnant woman was strapped. Like a giant record player, the table — and its passengers — rotated at high speeds. For their invention (which was apparently never built, let alone used), the Blonskys were awarded an Ig Nobel in 1999.

The Ig Nobel award ceremony is, according to the playbill, "reluctantly inflicted upon you by the international science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)."

Read more at Discovery News

Interlocking Gears Found on Common Insect

Embedded in the back legs of a common jumping insect are rotating gear wheels that allow the tiny creatures to leap with astounding speed.

It is the first time that anything resembling gears have been found in a living creature, and the discovery goes to show that nature often tends to beat us at our own engineering game. In this case, evolution produced gears long before people figured out how to build them.

“We always think of gears as a human invention -- we are familiar with them on our bikes and on our cars, but we never associate them with animals,” said Malcolm Burrows, a neurobiologist and biomechanist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “It’s a very simple and neat solution to what would otherwise be an incredibly difficult problem.”

Common in both North America and Europe, the planthopping insect called Issus can’t fly but it is able to launch itself with impressive power and speed by pushing off with its two hind legs. As adults, Burrows said, the insects accelerate faster than a Ferrari.

Unlike grasshoppers, whose legs are located on the sides of its trunk, Issus’ legs lie beneath its body. That creates a problem. Whereas a grasshopper can push off with one leg and still hop straight, a planthopper that tried jumping with just one leg would spin rapidly around the axis of its body.

Instead, the insect’s two rear legs move with remarkable coordination.

To better understand how, Burrows and colleague Gregory Sutton took high-speed videos that captured up to 30,000 frames each second of Issus nymphs as they jumped.

The images showed that the insect’s two hindlegs always moved within 30 microseconds of each other. A microsecond is one millionth of a second, and 30 microseconds is significantly less time than it takes for a single nerve impulse to reach the muscles in the animal’s legs.

Because their nervous systems are too slow to synchronize movement of the hind legs, the insects have developed a mechanical solution. Close-up high-speed images revealed gear wheels on each hind leg with about a dozen teeth that interlock, the researchers report today in the journal Science. These gears ensure that the force of movement transfers almost instantly from one leg to the other.

“Their gears are remarkably similar to the way we build gears,” Burrows said. “Insects obviously evolved this mechanism many millions of years ago and we only got around to it fairly recently.”

Read more at Discovery News