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sciencehabit writes:
To fend off predators, the black-saddled pufferfish famously inflates its body with water, much like a person puffing up his cheeks and holding his breath. But unlike the blue-faced human—and in contrast with scientists' expectations—the pufferfish does not actually stop breathing, researchers report. In fact, compared with resting rates, the fish’s respiration increased close to fivefold during the inflation process. Even if they don’t stop breathing, the defense strategy is energetically taxing for the pufferfish; after the test, most took hours to return to resting respiration rates.
67398289
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sciencehabit writes:
Geckos are renowned for their ability to scurry up walls, clinging to surfaces with the help of tiny rows of hair on their toes that generate a subtle electrical attraction known as the van der Waals force. But scientists don't know whether the lizard actively controls its clinging ability using fine muscle movements in its feet or whether its feet are just intrinsically sticky. To decide the issue, biologists at the University of California, Riverside, tested the clinging force of five tokay geckos before and immediately after the lizards were sacrificed. To the scientists’ surprise, a dead gecko's foot held to the surface just as tightly as a live gecko's foot.
67345837
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sciencehabit writes:
The leading scientific theory of how the universe evolved has again proved accurate—for some, frustratingly so. The latest study of the afterglow of the big bang—the so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation—confirms even more precisely the standard model of cosmology, researchers with Europe's Planck spacecraft reported today at a press conference in Ferrara, Italy. That's a victory for the theory, but it leaves researchers with no discrepancies that might point to a deeper understanding.
67341171
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sciencehabit writes:
Craving a stiff drink after the holiday weekend? Your desire to consume alcohol, as well as your body’s ability to break down the ethanol that makes you tipsy, dates back about 10 million years, researchers have discovered. The new finding not only helps shed light on the behavior of our primate ancestors, but also might explain why alcoholism—or even the craving for a single drink—exists in the first place.
67016885
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sciencehabit writes:
A brightly lit smart phone display looks good, but drains the battery quickly. Much of this can be blamed on a screen component called a polarizer. Light points in all directions, which can be mathematically broken down into two parts that are perpendicular to each other. A polarizer allows only one of the two to pass through, which is required for liquid-crystal display (LCD) screens to work but wastes at least 50% of the light. In practice, most polarizers waste much more. In a study published this month in Optica, researchers report a newly designed polarizer with much higher energy efficiency. The team says that if it can optimize the approach, such displays could extend battery life and enable brighter screen settings in future smart phones.
67008661
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sciencehabit writes:
The universe may be a lonelier place than previously thought. Of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, only one in 10 can support complex life like that on Earth, a pair of astrophysicists argues. Everywhere else, stellar explosions known as gamma ray bursts would regularly wipe out any life forms more elaborate than microbes. The detonations also kept the universe lifeless for billions of years after the big bang, the researchers say.
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sciencehabit writes:
Researchers have used an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) named SeaBED that is armed with upward-looking sonar to map the underside of sea ice in Antarctica. During two different research expeditions, in the mid- to late springs of 2010 and 2012, the AUV—which resembles a 2-meter-long bunk bed with twin hulls stacked on top of one another—traveled back and forth through several different Southern Ocean waters in a lawn mower–like pattern at depths of 20 to 30 meters under the ice to collect a 3D survey of the topography of the sea ice’s underbelly. After compiling 10 floe-scale maps of the ice from the Weddell, Bellingshausen, and the Wilkes Land regions of the continent, the researchers found that the sea ice thickness tended to be highly variable, with many ridges and valleys. On average, Antarctic sea ice may be considerably thicker than once thought, which could significantly change how scientists assess sea ice dynamics and their interactions with the ocean in a warming world.
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sciencehabit writes:
When it comes to small space rocks blowing up in Earth’s atmosphere, not all days are created equal. Scientists have found that, contrary to what they thought, such events are not random, and these explosions may occur more frequently on certain days. Rather than random occurrences, many large airbursts might result from collisions between Earth and streams of debris associated with small asteroids or comets. The new findings may help astronomers narrow their search for objects in orbits that threaten Earth, the researchers suggest.
66848603
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sciencehabit writes:
Thick sheets of ice coating roads, homes, and pastures. Dead reindeer, no radio transmissions, and flights canceled for days. When ice came to this Arctic mining outpost on the Svalbard archipelago two winters ago, it crippled the community for weeks and devastated wildlife for months. Now, scientists are saying such weather extremes in the Arctic—known as rain-on-snow events—may become more frequent in the future.
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sciencehabit writes:
An unusual object about 90 million light-years from Earth might be a supermassive black hole kicked out of its home galaxy during a collision with another galaxy, a new study suggests. If so, it’s the first evictee to be confirmed as such by astronomers. The object, dubbed SDSS1133, lies about 2600 light-years from the center of a dwarf galaxy known as Markarian 177 (both of which lie within the bowl of the Big Dipper, a familiar star pattern in the constellation Ursa Major). SDSS1133 has brightened substantially over the past 2 years but has been spotted in images taken by various instruments during the past 63 years, hinting that the object—whose brightest features measure less than 40 light-years across—probably isn’t a recently exploded supernova. Recent observations of Markarian 177 reveal specific areas of intense star formation, possible signs of a recent galactic collision that expelled SDSS1133 from the parent galaxy where it once resided.
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sciencehabit writes:
Ebola, flu, and colds have given viruses a bad rap. But there may be a good side to these tiny packages of genetic material. Researchers studying mice have shown that a virus can help maintain and restore a healthy gut in much the same way that friendly bacteria do. The work "shows for the first time that a virus can functionally substitute for a bacterium and provide beneficial effects," says Julie Pfeiffer, a virologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas who was not involved with the study. "It's shocking."
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sciencehabit writes:
When scientists slap an acoustic tag on a fish, they may be inadvertently helping seals find their next meal. The tags, rods a few centimeters long that give off a ping that can be detected from up to a kilometer away, are often used to follow fish for studies on their migration, hunting, or survival rates. Researchers working with 10 gray seals (Halichoerus grypus) who were captive for a year have now reported that the animals—including the female seal pictured above, named Janice—can learn to associate the pings with food. If the findings hold true in the wild, the authors warn, they could skew the results of studies trying to analyze fish survival rates or predation.
66762353
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sciencehabit writes:
In the 2011 movie Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Tom Cruise climbs the exterior of the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, using nothing more than a pair of gloves. Now, scientists have invented the real deal: hand-sized, gecko-inspired adhesives that can lift a human up glass walls—and that one day may even catch space junk. “This is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in years,” says biomechanist Kellar Autumn of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, who was not involved with the study.
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sciencehabit writes:
For decades, geologists have noted the signs of ancient landslides in southwestern Utah. Although many parts of the landscape don’t look that odd at first glance, certain layers include jumbled masses of fractured rock sandwiched among thick veins of lava, ash, and mud. Now, new fieldwork suggests that many of those ancient debris flows are the result of one of Earth’s largest known landslides, which covered an area nearly 39 times the size of Manhattan.
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sciencehabit writes:
If you had the choice between hurting yourself or someone else in exchange for money, how altruistic do you think you’d be? In one infamous experiment, people were quite willing to deliver painful shocks to anonymous victims when asked by a scientist. But a new study that forced people into the dilemma of choosing between pain and profit finds that participants cared more about other people’s well-being than their own. It is hailed as the first hard evidence of altruism for the young field of behavioral economics.
