Author: Kate Horowitz

We’re just going to come right out and say it: mushrooms are weird. They pop up without warning and they can change the weather. Many of them can also glow in the dark, and we don’t know why. Now, at least, we might know how, as researchers writing in the journal Science Advances reveal the bizarre, “promiscuous” process of fungal bioluminescence.

Lots of animals light themselves up, glowing or flashing to send messages, find prey, or flirt with potential mates. And scientists have a pretty good understanding of how that happens. When a pair of enzymes called luciferin and luciferase combine with energy and oxygen, the resulting chemical reaction makes a compound called excited oxyluciferin. But excitation is not sustainable, so the oxyluciferin releases its fizzy energy in the form of light.

Scientists hypothesized that fungi were probably doing something similar (although really, with fungi, anything is possible).

To learn more, an international team of researchers analyzed extracts from two glowing mushrooms, Brazil’s Neonothopanus gardneri and Vietnam’s poisonous Neonothopanus nambi.

They found that both species were sticking with the traditional luciferin-luciferase playbook … kind of. They were definitely making their own proprietary blend similar to excited oxyluciferin.

But the luciferase that the mushrooms were using was, in the scientists’ words, “promiscuous”—that is, it was happy to mix and mingle with multiple types of luciferin. And while the only bioluminescent fungi we know about all glow green, the researchers write that the luciferase’s indiscriminate approach could lead to a rainbow of lights in different colors and intensities.

“Future work on the isolation, characterization, and heterologous expression of the luciferase will stimulate the development of fungal bioluminescence–inspired applications,” the authors write. In other words, hey, we know about this bizarre thing now. We might as well use it.

Researchers writing in the journal Science Advances say blue mussels are rapidly evolving stronger shells to protect themselves against rising acid levels in sea water.

Bivalves like mussels, clams, and oysters aren’t good swimmers, and they don’t have teeth. Their hard shells are often the only things standing between themselves and a sea of dangers.

But even those shells have been threatened lately, as pollution and climate change push the ocean’s carbon dioxide to dangerous levels. Too much carbon dioxide interferes with a bivalve’s ability to calcify (or harden) its shell, leaving it completely vulnerable.

A team of German scientists wondered what, if anything, the bivalves were doing to cope. They studied two populations of blue mussels (Mytilus edulis): one in the Baltic Sea, and another in the brackish waters of the North Sea.

The researchers collected water samples and monitored the mussel colonies for three years. They analyzed the chemical content of the water and the mussels’ life cycles—tracking their growth, survival, and death.

Analysis of all that data showed that the two groups were living very different lives. The Baltic was rapidly acidifying—but rather than rolling over and dying, Baltic mussels were armoring up. Over several generations, their shells grew harder.

Their cousins living in the relatively stable waters of the North Sea enjoyed a cushier existence. Their shells stayed pretty much the same. That may be the case for now, the researchers say, but it definitely leaves them vulnerable to higher carbon dioxide levels in the future.

Inspiring as the Baltic mussels’ defiance might be, the researchers note that it’s not a short-term solution. Tougher shells didn’t increase the mussels’ survival rate in acidified waters—at least, not yet.

“Future experiments need to be performed over multiple generations,” the authors write, “to obtain a detailed understanding of the rate of adaptation and the underlying mechanisms to predict whether adaptation will enable marine organisms to overcome the constraints of ocean acidification.”

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have successfully grown the first-ever working 3D brain circuits in a petri dish. Writing in the journal Nature, they say the network of living cells will allow us to study how the human brain develops.

Scientists have been culturing brain cells in the lab for some time now. But previous projects have produced only flat sheets of cells and tissue, which can’t really come close to recreating the three-dimensional conditions inside our heads. The Stanford researchers were especially interested in the way brain cells in a developing fetus can join up together to create networks.

“We’ve never been able to recapitulate these human-brain developmental events in a dish before,” senior author Sergiu Pasca, MD said in a statement.

Studying real-life pregnant women and their fetuses can also be ethically and technically tricky, which means there’s still a lot about our journey into the world that we don’t know.

“[This] process happens in the second half of pregnancy, so viewing it live is challenging,” Pasca said.

The latest project builds on earlier work from Pasca and his colleagues. In 2015, they devised a way to encourage pluripotent stem cells to grow, not into flat sheets, but into dense little spheres that can connect in three dimensions. The researchers used these spheres to grow two types of neurons, each found in a different region of the brain. Once the cells were functional, the researchers gently introduced the two groups to one another and watched to see what would happen.

The results were extraordinary. Within three days, the two batches had begun reaching toward and networking with one another. Experiments on the new circuits showed that the still-growing cells were sending signals back and forth, strengthening connections between two areas of the brain. It was like watching a brain come into being.

“Our method of assembling and carefully characterizing neuronal circuits in a dish is opening up new windows through which we can view the normal development of the fetal human brain,” said Pasca. “More importantly, it will help us see how this goes awry in individual patients.”

Need a reason to get up from your desk? Scientists say each step we take sends a boost of blood to our brains, making us feel sharper and better overall. The research will be presented today at the Experimental Biology 2017 meeting in Chicago.

It’s no secret that exercise makes us happy. It raises our heart rates and floods our bodies with feel-good hormones. But until quite recently, scientists had not considered its effect on the flow of blood to the brain, or how that flow might affect our state of mind.

Researchers at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU) began by studying the hemodynamic (blood-moving) effects of pedaling a bike, then looked at running. They found that both activities increased cerebral blood flow, as the impact of each footstep on the ground or pedals squeezed athletes’ arteries, sending a pulse of blood to the brain. The effect was especially pronounced in runners, whose feet hit the ground hard.

The scientists wondered if the same might be true of walking, with its relatively gentle footfalls. They hooked 12 healthy young volunteers up to heart monitors and ultrasound machines, then set them walking on a treadmill.

Sure enough, even a casual stroll boosted blood flow to the volunteers’ brains. The effect was significant, somewhere between the low-impact ride of cycling and running’s hard steps.

“What is surprising is that it took so long for us to finally measure these obvious hydraulic effects on cerebral blood flow,” first author Ernest Greene said in a statement. “There is an optimizing rhythm between brain blood flow and ambulating. Stride rates and their foot impacts are within the range of our normal heart rates (about 120/minute) when we are briskly moving along.”

The authors believe these boosts of blood—and therefore oxygen—to the brain may help clear our heads and lead to an “overall sense of wellbeing during exercise.”

Rejoice! After a bleak and drippy winter, the good feelings and mouthwatering aromas of grilling season are nearly upon us, which means that now is the time to perfect your recipes and technique. We recommend you start by bettering your burgers with one very strange addition: ice cubes.

Master Chef judge Graham Elliot knows a thing or two about grilling. He says the best burgers are simple, juicy, and flavorful, making the meat the star of the show. And while it may sound extreme, he suggests eschewing seasoning altogether.

“People always end up doing the same mixture for a burger as they do with meatloaf or a meatball, they put all the pepper and onion in it,” he told Fox News. “You don’t want to do that. You want it to be just straight meat.”

Straight meat on the rocks, that is: Elliot’s secret to keeping burgers juicy is to fold an ice cube right into the center of each one. “Make your patties, then put your little ice cube in there and then when you grill it, it keeps it moist and keeps it from getting dried out.”

You can get Elliot’s own burger recipe here.

Don’t feel like cooking? Check out our list of the best burgers in all 50 states.

[h/t Delish]

The more we learn about the star-nosed mole, the stranger this animal gets—and that’s saying something. We learned just a little bit more this week, as mole expert Kenneth Catania presented his latest findings at the 2017 Experimental Biology Meeting in Chicago.

The neuroscientist has been obsessed with the lumpy, hamster-sized creatures since his days as a research assistant at the National Zoo.

“Obviously they are among the weirdest looking creatures on the planet,” he said in a statement. “But when I began trying to understand the star, the mole’s brain organization, and its behavior—that’s when things got really surprising.”

In 2011, for example, Catania realized that the moles have developed a technique for smelling underwater. They aim their strange snoots at fish or other prey, then start blowing bubbles. The bubbles bounce off the hapless prey and are instantly snorted back up by the mole, who reads the scent of the captured air.

The mole’s “star” is an extraordinary organ unlike anything else in the animal kingdom. It’s a cluster of prehensile tentacles packed with more than 100,000 sensory receptors. (A human fingertip, one of the most sensitive parts of our body, has about 3000.)

The star’s receptors are unbelievably responsive, Catania said—“so sensitive that we have not been able to determine the lowest threshold for activating neurons.”

This super sensitivity gives blind moles a huge advantage over their prey. It only takes 8 thousandths of a second for them to identify something they’ve touched, which means they can spot and gobble up a juicy worm before the worm even realizes what’s happening. No mammal eats faster.

The root of the star’s dazzling capacity is a tiny section called the touch fovea, which functions almost exactly like our eyes. As the mole turns its attention to an object, the touch fovea moves over it and focuses, as your gaze might rest and zoom in on a plate of cookies.

“These parallels suggest there are common strategies by which evolution ‘builds’ high-resolution sensory systems,” Catania said, “whether they are based on sight or on touch.”

Weird? You bet. But to those like Catania who know them best, they’re “truly amazing animals.”

This just in: Organisms of different sexes have different physiology. It’s a wild idea, we know, but hear us out. A new report on pigeon hormones in the journal Scientific Reports refutes the longstanding scientific assumption that studying female organisms is a waste of time.

This is not an exaggeration. “There’s a problem of sex and gender inclusion at all levels of science from faculty to the animals we use,” senior author Rebecca Calisi of the University of California, Davis said in a statement.

Until quite recently, it was standard practice for researchers to use mostly or exclusively male organisms, from cells in petri dishes all the way up to patients in clinical trials. Scientific institutions working to correct this extremely un-scientific imbalance have been met with resistance, as some researchers continue to argue that including females is complicated, expensive, and redundant, as male organisms are surely a good-enough stand-in for an entire species.

Little by little, small experiments and large-scale studies are chipping away at these arguments. The latest evidence in support of balanced research practices comes from Calisi and her colleagues at UC Davis and the University of New Hampshire.

Calisi and her colleagues examined the genes of 24 pigeons (14 male and 10 female), focusing on the expression of genes in each bird’s hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and reproductive organs.

They found differences between male and female birds. A lot of differences. Hundreds, in fact.

“There are incredible differences in gene expression, especially in the pituitary,” Calisi said.

She and her colleagues were restrained in summarizing the significance of their findings, noting simply that “[Their] results highlight the need for sex parity in transcriptomic studies, providing new lines of investigation of the mechanisms of reproductive function.”

Looking for good motivation to brush and floss? Mammal experts say the infamous lions that killed dozens of rail workers in Kenya in 1898 may have been driven by dental disease. They published a report on the unfortunate beasts in the journal Scientific Reports.

There were only two of them, but the damage they did was both extensive and terrifying. “I could plainly hear them crunching the bones,” Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson wrote in his diary, “and the sound of their dreadful purring filled the air and rang in my ears afterwards.”

Patterson eventually killed the lions, and their remains were preserved for scientific study. Today, the two skulls are kept in the collection of Chicago’s Field Museum so scientists can study them.

Historians have long believed that the lions turned to human prey out of desperation when a famine eliminated their usual sources of food. If this was the case, the lions would have relished every last bite of every animal they killed, including the bones.

But when Field Museum researchers examined the Tsavo skulls, they began to suspect that the lieutenant’s “very vivid recollection” may have been at least slightly exaggerated, as the lions had clearly not been crunching anything. The microscopic signs of wear and tear that accompany regular hard use were nowhere to be found in the lions’ jaws.

They did, however, find evidence of dental problems. One lion had broken a canine tooth several years earlier, was missing three incisors, and had a periapical abscess, or pus pooled around the root of a tooth. The other had a fractured upper left carnassial (the equivalent of a molar) and exposed pulp (tissue at the center of a tooth).

Bruce Patterson (no relation) is the museum’s curator of mammals. He and his colleagues think the Kenyan lions’ suspiciously smooth teeth and dental injuries could have played a role in their attacks on humans. These types of injuries aren’t uncommon, and they can be painful.

“Lions normally use their jaws to grab prey like zebras and wildebeests and suffocate them,” he said in a statement. If you’ve got a mouthful of hurt, you’re not going to leap face-first at a kicking wildebeest. “Humans are so much easier to catch,” Patterson said.

“We humans like to think we’re at the top of the food chain, but the moment we step off our paved streets, these other animals are really on top.”

Why buy the cow when you can get the termite hole for free? The insects known as termitophiles make themselves right at home in termites’ cozy nests. Now scientists say they may have found the first enterprising moocher to move in—99 million years ago. They published their findings in the journal Current Biology.

The amber mines of Myanmar have yielded some incredible discoveries. Last year, paleontologists reported finding both dinosaur wings and tail feathers in amber markets. The latest discovery, of minuscule, horseshoe-crab-like beetles, may be less flashy, but is no less important in the history of life on this planet.

With a body length of just 0.03 inches, the new specimens may look itsy-bitsy to us, but they’re actually pretty big compared to the rest of their family. Modern rove beetles in the Trichopseniini tribe are all tiny, and they all perform the insect equivalent of couch-surfing, setting up shop in termites’ nests and snacking on the fungi inside without bothering anybody. 

Scientists previously believed that Trichopseniini and other moochers made their first foray into termite nests around 19 million years ago. Yet the newly discovered specimens (named Cretotrichopsenius burmiticus after the Burmese mine where they’d been hanging out) are at least 80 million years older than that.

“The fossil reveals a richer ecology within early insect societies during the Cretaceous,” the authors note, “and a lengthy period of co-evolution between termites, the first of all social insects, and their numerous arthropod associates.”

Experts say a common, needle-free treatment for adults with migraines may be a good option for kids, too. They presented their findings on March 5 at the annual meeting of the Society of Interventional Radiology in Washington, D.C.

Your sphenopalatine ganglion (SPG) is a cluster of nerves pressed against the back wall of your nasal cavity. These nerves help inform the brain of all kinds of sensations, including pain, and have been a target for migraine treatments since the early 1900s. Today, adults with migraines and other head pain may be given an SPG block, in which a small catheter of local anesthetic is pushed into their nostril to numb the cluster of nerves. Doing so can bring fast relief and disrupt the debilitating migraine cycle.

The SPG block has been proven to be safe and effective—at least in adults. To find out if it could help kids, too, researchers at Phoenix Children’s Hospital recruited 85 migraine patients between the ages of 7 and 18. Each kid was asked to rate their pain on a scale of one to 10 before the treatment and again 10 minutes afterward.

Like their grownup counterparts, juvenile patients saw fast, significant pain relief with the SPG block. Post-treatment pain levels went down an average of more than two points on the 10-point scale. A two-point decrease may not sound like much, but it could help a kid with a migraine avoid missing school or—in the most severe cases—hospitalization.

Paper co-author Robin Kaye is section chief of interventional radiology at the hospital. She says the block has a lot of advantages, including eliminating the need for additional treatments. “By reducing the need for medications that come with serious side effects or intravenous therapies that may require hospital stays, children don’t have to miss as much school and can get back to being a kid sooner,” she said in a statement.

The treatment is currently only available at Phoenix Children’s, but Kaye says that will likely change soon, as she’s received a lot of interest from other pediatric radiologists.

She told mental_floss: “Until then, parents should either talk to their child’s pediatrician about the best plan of action to treat their child’s migraines, or seek out a pediatric neurologist that specializes in headaches and ask him/her about the possibility of their child receiving this treatment.”

Editor’s note: This post has been slightly updated for clarity.