Author: Kate Horowitz

Mother Nature may be timeless, but some of her creations seem kind of, well, dated. Take bioluminescent fungi, for example: funky fluorescent figures that look like they popped right out of a blacklight poster from 1996. Check out the timelapse video below from Planet Earth II for more glowing weirdness and read on for an explanation (as much as something like glowing mushrooms can be explained).

Glowing mushrooms are not a new phenomenon. Both Aristotle and Pliny the Elder wrote of the “foxfire” produced by mushrooms on rotting logs. So far, scientists have discovered 81 different species of bioluminescent fungi. They appear across the globe and take all kinds of weird shapes, but they always emit the same eerie green light.

The precise purpose of that green light remains to be seen. Bioluminescence is kind of the Swiss army knife of natural skills. Some animals use it for hunting, while others use it to hide. Others light up to find mates and reproduce. Glowing fungi could be doing any of these things. Some glowing species are edible, and it’s possible that they’re using their light to attract nocturnal insects who will eat them and scatter their spores. But they might also be using their light for protection, by luring in predators of mushroom-eating insects or by advertising their toxicity. It’s also possible that glowing is simply a byproduct of their natural chemical processes. We really don’t know. The mushrooms remain a mystery.

[h/t Sploid]

Tenants of one Miami apartment building have gotten used to finding water in their parking garage, but even they were surprised to see what this month’s super beaver moon dragged in: a small octopus, the Miami Herald reports.

Resident Richard Conlin snapped photos of the small white octopus lying on the wet parking deck and shared them on Facebook.

After the photos were taken, Conlin wrote, building security scooped the octopus into a bucket, walked out to the ocean, and tossed the critter back.

Improbable? Absolutely—but not as improbable as it once was. The apartment building is located right on the beach. Its drains and pipes are connected to the ocean, and unusually high tides can and do wash onto the parking deck’s concrete floors. Sometimes those tides bear passengers.

Biologist Kathleen Sullivan Sealey of the University of Miami says the octopus was likely either a Caribbean reef octopus or an Atlantic pygmy octopus, and that it may have been following a school of fish through the drainage system when it came out the other side. With their soft bodies, octopuses are very skilled at squeezing through small spaces. This talent can make them very hard to contain, but, as we see here, it can also land them in some pretty strange places.

Sealey told the Miami Herald that we can expect more and more marine visitors as sea levels continue to rise. In the last 10 years alone, flooding in Miami Beach has increased by 400 percent. “The sea is moving in,” she said, “so we have to share the space.”

Behold the coconut crab and its magnificent clampers. Scientists in Japan say the strength of the crab’s “mighty claw” is greater than most predators’ jaws. They published a report of their crab tests in the journal PLOS One.

Coconut crabs (Birgus latro) are strange, strange critters. They’re crustaceans, but they live on land. They climb trees, as if that’s a thing that crabs should be doing. They’re huge—adults can easily reach 3 feet across. They can lift more than 60 pounds at a time. They’ll feed on dead and decaying animals when they have to, but they prefer tropical fruit, especially the coconuts that gave them their name.

But as anyone who’s ever been stranded on a desert island knows, coconuts are not a convenience food. Getting inside requires desperation, persistence, and a very tenacious claw.

Researchers at the Okinawa Churashima Foundation wondered just how strong that claw could be. They didn’t have to go very far to find out; the island of Okinawa is a veritable coconut crab paradise.

 
The scientists rounded up 29 wild crabs, weighed them, and took measurements of their bodies, legs, and claws. Then they dangled stick-like metal sensors in front of the crabs, who predictably grabbed the instruments and clamped down as hard as they could. Once the test was over, the crabs were released … which must have been something to see.

The results of the pinch tests were impressive. The larger a crab was, the harder it could pinch. Using this formula, the researchers determined that a large crab could exert up to 3300 Newtons (N) of force with a single claw.

That’s a lot of Newtons. To put it in context: scientists estimate that human jaws have a bite strength of about 754 N. Wolves have 1267, black bears 1747 [PDF]. Pound for pound, a coconut crab’s claws come down almost twice as hard as a black bear’s jaws. The authors estimate that there’s only one land predator that can outclamp the coconut crab, and that’s an alligator.

The crab’s “mighty claw” is what’s allowed it to survive, the authors write. Not only is it a weapon, but it’s also a tool, allowing the crab to get inside just about any organism, plant or animal, it wants.

So, kids, for your fingers’ sake: Please don’t tease the coconut crabs. Leave that to the professionals.

The relationship between humans and turkeys may not be a great one, but it’s certainly enduring. Archaeologists have discovered the remains of domesticated turkeys at the site of a 5th-century CE ritual sacrifice in Oaxaca, Mexico. They published their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Archaeologists have theorized that humans had started raising turkeys by the year 400 or 500 CE, but they had relatively little evidence. Then, in 2009 and 2010, researchers excavating the famous ancient fortress of Mitla in Oaxaca uncovered piles of turkey bones and eggs.

One of those researchers was archaeologist Gary Feinman of The Field Museum in Chicago. “It was very exciting because it’s very rare to find a whole cluster of intact eggs,” he said in a press statement. “This was very unexpected.”

Bone expert and lead author Heather Lapham of the University of North Carolina recognized the remains and their significance immediately. Lapham counted five intact or unhatched eggs, plus the bones of seven newly hatched turkey poults: an offering. Nearby were broken eggshells and the remains of many other juvenile and adult turkeys.

Feinman, Lapham, and their colleague Linda Nicholas brought the turkey eggs back to the laboratory and examined them under high-powered scanning electron microscopes. They discovered that the eggs were not all the same age. Some were unfertilized, while others had been recently fertilized when they were buried under the floors and in the walls. Others still contained embryos that were nearly ready to hatch.

The presence of eggs and turkeys of all different developmental stages suggests that the fortress’s inhabitants had regular access to a flock. These birds weren’t hunted or collected from the wild. They’d been raised here. 

 
The domestication of these birds by the Zapotec people would have been hugely beneficial to their culture and economy. “There were very few domesticated animals in Oaxaca and Mesoamerica in general compared with Eurasia,” Feinman said. “Eurasia had lots of different meat sources, but in Oaxaca 1500 years ago, the only assuredly domestic meat sources were turkeys and dogs.”

That changed with the arrival of the Spanish, who brought over domesticated pigs, chickens, and cows. Yet turkeys remain an important part of life in Oaxaca to this day. They’re given as gifts, included in important feasts, and are still used in ritual offerings. “The reasons might be different,” the authors write, “certainly the gods are different, but this practice among the Zapotec of ritually sacrificing turkeys and egg offerings shows amazing continuity over an extended period.”

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that the USSR’s breakup and subsequent turmoil allowed one strain of tuberculosis to evolve in a virulent, drug-resistant form that continues to plague Central Asia. They also traced the spread of the strain from Central Asia to Afghanistan and then to Europe due to armed conflict and population displacement. 

Every action we take has unpredictable consequences on the world around us, and geopolitical events are no different. With this fact in mind, an international team of anthropologists and disease experts set out to investigate if and how human history could have altered the evolution of one widespread human disease.

The tuberculosis-causing bacterium (Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, or MBTC) exists in seven distinct subtypes, or lineages. The second, third, and fourth lineages have been wildly successful as diseases go, but exactly how they’ve done it remains the subject of some disagreement. For this study, the researchers focused on the second lineage (L2), the so-called “Beijing lineage,” a particularly nasty strain that’s rapidly spreading and shows drug resistance.

The team collected samples of L2 tuberculosis germs from patients in Europe, South Asia, and Central Asia. They scanned all the bacterial genes in order to sort out the geographic origins of each patient’s TB, as well as to pinpoint the moments in the disease’s evolution when specific mutations—like those that make it resistant to medication—first appeared.

Their results indicated that one especially drug-resistant subtype of L2 was most common in former Soviet states. This would make plenty of sense if the mutations conferring drug resistance had evolved while the states were all part of the same Soviet Union. But the mutations are relatively new. They evolved in those places after the Soviet Union collapsed—a time of intense and violent conflict. On top of that, citizens of these states were being displaced en masse, and public health resources were nearly nonexistent.

The strain has spread as a consequence of armed conflict and population displacement, the authors write. It was introduced to Afghanistan with the 1979–1989 Soviet invasion and occupation. It spread further after the American invasion in 2001, when much of the population experienced further upheavals. L2 continued to mutate in Afghanistan, creating a new strain. More recently it’s been detected in Europe in small TB breakouts mostly limited to Afghan refugees.

The authors say the combination of these factors may have created a perfect environment in which TB could grow, get tougher, and become more virulent. Drug-resistant TB continues to be a major health concern in Central Asia. “Our results highlight the detrimental effects of political instability and population displacement on global TB control,” they write, “and demonstrate the power of [these] methods for understanding bacterial evolution in time and space.”

If your smartphone’s battery life has seemed particularly pathetic lately, it may be time to do a little purging. Android users are reporting a 20 percent boost in battery endurance after deleting the Facebook app.

The app’s appetite for power is well established. Complaints about its drain on the iPhone have been amassing for years, thanks in part to Facebook’s constant location tracking and background refresh features.

Facebook has also had its share of issues with the Android version of its app. Last year, Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox encouraged his staff to switch to Android phones so they could see the problems and frustrations firsthand. The tactic apparently was not enough to get things sorted, and Android users are facing the same issues as their Mac-loving counterparts. Tech bloggers and reporters who removed the app from their Androids consistently saw their sluggish batteries perking up and lasting significantly longer.

“We have heard reports of a few people encountering speed issues coming from our Android application,” a Facebook representative told Tech World Zone. “We are investigating this and will update you as often as possible. We are focused on keeping on enhancing these issues.”

So yeah, the app is an energy vampire. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up your endless Facebook scrolling altogether. It’s still accessible through browsers like Chrome and Safari and through wrappers like Metal.

If you’ve deleted the app and still aren’t satisfied with your battery life, there are plenty of other things you can do. First, stop charging it every night; charge it only when the power is low. Next, switch on Airplane Mode when you’re in an area with no Wi-Fi. This will save your poor phone the fruitless struggle of trying to pick up a signal. You can also reduce the brightness on your screen, be liberal with your use of Low Power mode, and stop force-closing apps when you’re done with them.

[h/t Tech World Zone]

Researchers have figured out how to monitor the genetic health of endangered whale sharks without ever touching them—by testing the waters they swim in. They described their progress in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Keeping tabs on endangered animals is an essential part of keeping them safe. Yet our current monitoring methods are imperfect at best. Some, like aerial monitoring, depend on clear weather and good visibility. Others, like tagging, can actually hurt [PDF] the animals they’re meant to protect. It’s time to find new ways to look out for our fellow animals.

One international research team came up with an interesting idea: rather than taking tissue samples from whale sharks’ bodies, what about testing the environment in which they swim?

Study author and geneticist Philip Francis Thomsen of the Natural History Museum of Denmark has been investigating the various uses of environmental DNA (eDNA) for the last few years. He and his colleagues found that testing the water is a great way to help scientists identify and count its piscine inhabitants. But they’d never used eDNA to examine a given fish population’s genetics—that is, how the members of the group are related to one another and others in their species.

Thomsen and an international team of his peers traveled to a site in the Persian Gulf where whale sharks like to congregate. First, they counted the number of fins at the surface to estimate how many sharks were around. Then they collected 20 small samples of seawater and small tissue samples from the sharks so they could compare their results.

They sequenced the DNA found in the tissue samples and the DNA in the water and found that the two yielded similar results. By combining these genetic family trees with their observations of the site, the researchers were able to estimate the number of sharks present. They found that the sharks in the gulf were more closely related to other populations in the Indian and Pacific Oceans than they were to Atlantic whale sharks.

There’s more work still to be done, the authors write, but this hands-off method shows a lot of promise. Whale sharks, if you’re reading this: We’ll keep you posted.

New moms just cannot win. Two new studies published in the journal Maternal & Child Nutrition find that women are criticized when they don’t breastfeed—and even when they do.

Everybody—friends, family, strangers, advertisers, public health officials—wants to tell new mothers what to do. Some of those people are qualified to make recommendations. But those recommendations, while created with the best intentions, don’t always take real-world experience into consideration.

Current recommendations from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the World Health Organization (WHO) are firm: women should exclusively breastfeed their babies for the first six months of their lives. There’s plenty of science to back this idea up; breast milk is a super-duper superfood, providing an infant with nutrients, helpful bacteria, and immune-boosting antibodies and proteins. Scores of studies have linked formula feeding with poor health, obesity, and disease risk. In an expert’s ideal world, every baby would be exclusively breastfed.

But we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world where breastfeeding is undesirable or downright impossible for many women. It’s a physically demanding and time-consuming endeavor that’s become more common among upper-class women who have the resources to spare. There’s a strong link between formula feeding and poverty, and it’s not because poorer women don’t also want the best for their babies.

Myriad studies have investigated the breastfeeding/formula divide, asking who’s doing it and why. But few have asked how women feel about the way they feed their babies or how it affects the way people treat them. So researchers at the UK’s University of Liverpool conducted two surveys: one of 679 women who at least partially breastfed their babies, and another of 601 women who used infant formula. They asked the women about their current feeding practices and if those differed from the ideas about feeding they’d had while pregnant. They asked how they felt about the way they fed their babies and how they felt other people treated them because of it.

As expected, formula feeding came with some real emotional baggage. The authors note “a worryingly high percentage of mothers experienced negative emotions as a result of their decision to use formula.” Sixty-seven percent of respondent said they felt guilty; 68 percent felt stigmatized, and 76 percent felt the need to defend their choice to others.

But even women who breastfed were stressed by, and judged for, their choice. Fifteen percent of nursing mothers said they felt guilty; 38 percent of nursing mothers felt stigmatized, and 55 percent found themselves defending their decision. Some of their guilt came from introducing formula after breastfeeding. Others felt bad about returning to work while their baby was still nursing. They felt bad that they were neglecting other family members and stigmatized when breastfeeding in public. Women in both studies felt judged by doctors, family members, the media, and other parents. They simply could not catch a break.

Co-author Victoria Fallon notes that less than 1 percent of British women actually breastfeed their infants for a full six months. “We need social reform to fully support and protect those mothers who do breastfeed,” she said in a statement, “and a different approach to promotion to minimise negative emotions among the majority who don’t.”

She notes that well-intentioned public health recommendations can still contribute to stigma, shame, and guilt. “The ‘breast is best’ message has, in many cases, done more harm than good,” she said, “and we need to be very careful of the use of words in future breastfeeding promotion campaigns. It is crucial that future recommendations recognize the challenges that exclusive breast feeding to six months brings and provide a more balanced and realistic target for mothers.”

We’ve all got hidden potential within us. Some of it is apparently hidden very, very deep: scientists have used bacteria found in the human body to create two powerful new antibiotics. They described their work in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

The search for new antibiotics has become something of an arms race between researchers and the bacteria they’re trying to kill. The more antibiotics we use, the faster bacteria become resistant to our drugs, and the more pernicious their infections become. If we don’t come up with some new solutions soon, we’ll be facing a world awash with dangerous superbugs and no cures.

So drug researchers at The Rockefeller University have started thinking outside the box. Rather than building new pharmaceuticals from the ground up, they’ve been looking for them, well, in the ground, investigating natural materials like soil and sand in the hopes of finding a new bacteria-slaying tool.

One team of researchers at the university has set their sights ever so slightly higher, tapping not only the dirt but the bacteria-covered organisms that walk it. And by organisms, we mean people. Our bodies are crawling with bacteria, inside and out. Who knows what those little critters can do?

To find out, scientists from the Laboratory of Genetically Encoded Small Molecules decided to conduct a thorough search of the human microbiome (the collective term for the microscopic ecosystems sharing our bodies). They tapped into public microbiome databases, searching for gene clusters that could make molecules called non-ribosomal peptides (NRPs). NRPs have a lot of different skills. Some produce toxins, while others produce pigment. Others kill bacteria.

The search yielded 30 different NRP-making gene clusters, which the team then recreated in the lab. They set their newly grown clusters to work and coaxed them into producing 25 different chemical compounds. The team then pitted those compounds against various human pathogens to see if any could win. Two compounds, both derived from microbes in the genus Rhodococcus, succeeded. The researchers dubbed these new antibiotic contenders humimycins (from “human,” “microbiome,” and “mycin,” a common suffix for antibiotics).

The new humimycins were especially tough on Staphylococcus and Streptococcus bacteria (commonly known as staph and strep)—two pathogens known for overcoming and growing resistant to other drugs. Not only did the humimycins work on their own, but they also proved to be pretty good at breaking down the bacteria’s drug resistance so that other antibiotics could get in there and finish them off. 

Combining these new compounds with existing drugs could be the secret to shutting infection down, lead researcher Sean Brady said in a statement. “It’s like taking a hose and pinching it in two spots,” he said. Even if neither kink can stop the flow of water on its own, “eventually, no more water comes through.” 

Even in the technology-intensive world of medicine, there’s a lot to be said for simplicity. A new study [PDF] from the World Health Organization (WHO), which monitored 340 locations in five countries for five years, finds that bed nets treated with pesticide continue to stop malaria transmission, even as mosquitoes develop pesticide resistance. The report was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene (ASTMH).

Mosquito nets have literally been around for ages; the Greek historian Herodotus noted their use in Egypt as early as the 5th century BCE. For all that time, they were pretty effective—certainly effective enough that people kept using them—but that efficacy got a boost in the mid-20th century when we started spraying them with pesticide. The year 2000 saw the introduction of the long-lasting insecticidal net (LLIN), an inexpensive bed net made with insecticide-treated fabric that drove down the number of malaria cases even further.

But heavy insecticide use has its costs. Pesticides are similar to antibiotics, in that they can’t kill every single one of the species they’re meant to destroy. The survivors reproduce, creating new generations that are able to resist the treatment. And the more we use, the faster they can adapt. We’re now facing a crisis of antibiotic resistance, and pesticide resistance is not far behind. Mosquitoes in 60 countries have already developed a resistance to the pesticides used in LLINs.

 
Consequently, researchers at the WHO’s Global Malaria Programme were concerned that the rise of pesticide-resistant mosquitoes would create a decrease in LLIN effectiveness. They spent five years surveying LLIN use and pesticide resistance in 340 sites in malaria-heavy Benin, Cameroon, India, Kenya, and Sudan.

The results were surprisingly positive. People who used LLINs around their beds at night were significantly less likely than others to become infected. From 2000 to 2015, the WHO estimates, interventions like LLINs prevented around 663 million new malaria infections in sub-Saharan Africa. And of those potential cases, 69 percent were prevented by LLINs.

Co-author Tessa Knox of the WHO notes that the potency of LLINs comes not from the pesticide or the net alone, but from their combined power. “A resistant mosquito may not die immediately after landing on a net, but it could continue to absorb insecticide as it seeks a way to get through and bite a person beneath the net,” she said in a statement. “This may eventually kill the mosquito and stop onward transmission of malaria parasites.”

Encouraging though these findings may be, experts caution that there’s still a lot more work to do as pesticide resistance continues to spread.

Stephen Higgs is president of the ASTMH. “This study provides encouraging news that we have not yet run out of time in battling insecticide resistance,” he said in the statement. “However, we must take advantage of the time we now have to invest in research and generate new tools that will allow us to finally defeat this complex and challenging disease.”

A handful of those new tools are already in the works. Some researchers are exploring chicken feathers as a natural mosquito repellent, while others are developing high-tech pills that could deliver a week’s worth of malaria medication with one swallow.