Author: Kate Horowitz

The final meal of the false blister beetle pictured below ended on a traumatic note 105 million years ago. As it struggled to free its body from a gob of sticky tree sap, the grains of pollen clenched in its jaws tumbled free, rolling to their ultimate resting places around the beetle’s soon-to-be-still body. But one beetle’s bad day is a scientist’s gold mine: Researchers say the tableau in amber is proof of an entirely different form of prehistoric pollination. A report of the findings was published in the journal Current Biology.

 
The newly discovered beetle (Darwinylus marcosi) and its golden tomb date back to the mid-Mesozoic era. It was an exciting time to be alive—especially if you were a plant. The Earth was still mostly the dominion of non-flowering plants (gymnosperms), but the first flowering plants (angiosperms) had begun to arrive on the scene.

When we think of pollination today, we generally think of angiosperms, with their oh-so-subtle pistils and stamens gyrating in the breeze or quivering under the antennae of a honeybee. Gymnosperm reproduction is a rougher affair, as trees like pines and gingkos drop hard cones stuffed with spores. But it wasn’t always that way.

Recent discoveries like the unfortunate beetle shown above suggest that gymnosperms’ sex lives used to be much more varied. They had no fewer than four different demographics of non-plant partners. Moths, scorpionflies, and lacewings plunged their long, needle-like snoots deep into pinecone crevices and sucked out drops of liquid pollen. Other flies used sponge-like mouthparts to soak pollen up. Little bugs called thrips used their mouths like hole punchers, perforating pollen grains and draining the juice. And then there’s our unfortunate beetle friend, who likely used its jaw-like mouthparts to crack the little grains open and scarf up the good stuff within.

As flowering plants spread and took over, gymnosperm reproduction began to shift toward a more plant-centric model, eventually dumping its insect partners altogether. With no access to gymnosperm-based food, you’d think its former pollinators would die out. Many did. But the descendants of D. marcosi found a way to make it work: transferring their attention to flowering plants instead. Today, false blister beetles are an angiosperm-only family.

Paper co-author Conrad Labandeira is a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. He says we could learn a lot from D. marcosi’s ability to move on after a pollination breakup. “Modern insect pollinators and their host plants may be facing similar conditions today,” he said in a statement, “and our understanding of this earlier transition may help us better grasp and comprehend the present situation.”

Spring is busting out in Washington, D.C. The city’s beloved cherry trees have already begun to bloom, forcing organizers of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival to start the event one week earlier than planned, ABC News reports.

The National Park Service is currently estimating that peak bloom—that is, the short period when 70 percent of the Yoshino cherry blossoms will be open—will begin around March 14. Last year, peak bloom began on March 25. In the years before that, the blossoms peaked in early April. The Cherry Blossom Festival will begin March 15, rather than March 20, and continue through April 16.

“Cherry tree dates vary from year to year, but the long-term trend shows earlier and earlier blooming,” climate change scientist Patrick Gonzalez said in a video for the National Park Service. Blooms can be forced by unseasonably warm winters, although as the last three years have been the hottest ever recorded, we may soon need to adjust our definition of “unseasonably warm.”

The National Park Service notes that the exact dates of prime pink-petal viewing are “almost impossible” to predict more than 10 days in advance.

The hundreds of cherry trees planted throughout the nation’s capital and the Tidal Basin were a gift from Japan to the United States in 1912 and have since become one of D.C.’s most famous tourist attractions. Yet as big as the blossoms are here, they’re even bigger in Japan, where their fragility, loveliness, and oh-so-brief appearance represent the beauty and impermanence of life.

[h/t: ABC News]

Here’s a distressing statistic: More than 60 percent of hearts and lungs collected for organ transplant are thrown away. That’s because the window of time in which a newly harvested organ is safe to transplant is very small: about four hours for hearts and lungs; eight to 12 hours for livers, intestines, and pancreases, and 36 hours for kidneys. Meanwhile, people who need organ replacements are waitlisted for years.

Scientists have made great progress in freezing tissue and organs, but they haven’t yet figured out a way to safely thaw them out. We may have gotten one step closer to solving that problem: A paper published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine describes a new method of safely defrosting cryopreserved human tissue.

Vitrification is a preservation method in which the liquids inside an organ are transformed into crystals or glass through deep cooling. It works well until it’s time to reheat the now-fragile tissue, which tends to crack unless the heat is perfectly distributed. If we could just spread that heat evenly, vitrification could be an answer to the puzzle of longer-term organ storage.

In the current study, researchers at the University of Minnesota developed a solution made with magnetic nanoparticles and injected it into pig hearts and arteries, as well as human skin tissue, before they were frozen. Then they applied electromagnets to the frozen tissue. Sure enough, the vibration of the nanoparticles was quick, gentle, and uniform enough to reheat the tissue samples without damaging them. The nanoparticles were then completely washed out of the tissue.

 
Pig hearts and skin cells are, of course, not the same as whole organs, and it will likely be years before the technology can be translated to human hearts and kidneys. “We are cautiously optimistic, but we’re not declaring any victory yet,” senior author John Bischof said in a press briefing. “There are some huge scientific hurdles ahead of us.”

Nor should we put all our chips on cryonics. “Cryobiology and cryonics don’t really mix,” Bischof said. “We try to stay science-based. While it’s attractive to think that maybe one day we’ll be able to freeze down and bring back whole people, or their heads, we are still so far away from that.”

Sleep is a funny thing. We literally can’t live without it, yet there’s still a lot about it that we just don’t understand. Now, new insight into the unconscious hours of African elephants may muddle the matter further, as a study in the journal PLOS One finds that the massive beasts spend barely any time asleep at all.

Scientists have hypothesized that the size of a mammal’s body is negatively associated with the amount of time it spends sleeping; in other words, big animals sleep less than small ones. Current record holders for shortest sleep time are the domestic horse (two hours, 53 minutes) and pony (three hours, 20 minutes).

While generally accepted, the theory has been tough to test, since you can’t exactly invite a whale into the laboratory for an overnight sleep study. Many studies have focused on captive animals for this reason, but there’s often a big difference between the lives of animals in zoos and those roaming free.

To check in on the sleeping habits of the wild African elephant (Loxodonta africana), researchers focused on the middle-aged matriarchs of two different herds. The scientists fitted each elephant with a collar to monitor her location and body position. (Elephants have two sleeping positions: lying down, which allows for deep REM sleep, and standing up, which is more of a shallow-sleep, nap-type situation.) They also implanted a small movement tracker at the tip of her trunk. Then both elephants were released to go about their lives as usual. The researchers took the trackers back 35 days later and reviewed the data they’d collected.

As it turns out, the elephants had been living remarkably busy lives. Like high-powered businesspeople, they rarely lay down—just once every three or four nights. The rest they did get—mostly while standing—was shallow and brief, averaging about two hours per night. Some nights they just kept walking and never slept at all.

“Studies of sleep in captive elephants have shown that they sleep for four to six hours per day,” study co-author Paul Manger of the University of the Witwatersrand said in a press statement. “However, the current study shows that in their natural habitat, wild, free-ranging elephants sleep only for two hours per day, the least amount of sleep of any mammal studied to date.”

What this means for elephants and other mammals remains to be seen. With just two participants, this was a very small study, and the researchers only tracked movement, not sleep itself. One of the two elephants was also caring for a calf, a responsibility that likely cut into her sleeping time.

A Siberian crater known locally as the “door to the underworld” is expanding, revealing millennia of climate data, along with long-lost forests and the remains of prehistoric animals. This is fine.

The Batagaika crater, a.k.a. the door to the underworld, a.k.a. the megaslump (we are not making this up), plunges into the permafrost in the northern Sakha Republic.

The kilometer-long, 328-foot-deep chasm has been growing since the 1960s as the result of climate change. As the permafrost thaws and softens, large sections of soil collapse, revealing a wealth of bizarre geological and biological material. Extreme weather events like flooding have accelerated the process. The crater is now gobbling up another 33 to 98 feet of tundra per year, emitting enormous booming sounds as large clods of soil fall in.

It sounds like the stuff of nightmares, but it’s also a scientist’s dream: a ready-made window into the world below the surface, going back hundreds of thousands of years.

“Its size is amazing,” researcher Julian Murton told the Siberian Times. “The crack itself is perfectly exposed, uncovered, all the layers are perfectly visible and can be thoroughly studied.”

Initial estimates put the soil in the deepest part of the chasm at around 120,000 years old, but Murton’s analysis of plant matter in the dirt found it was probably closer to 200,000 years.

The soil and its contents are a rich record of local life, including two wood-rich layers that Murton and his colleagues believe were once forests.

Additional exploration of the chasm has yielded the bodies of bison, horses, elks, mammoths, and reindeer, as well as a 4400-year-old foal, all beautifully preserved by the region’s year-round blistering cold.

The chasm is fascinating but problematic. Climate experts are concerned that the dissolution of the permafrost is unleashing thousands of years worth of stored carbon into the atmosphere. It’s “what we call positive feedback,” Frank Günther of Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute told the BBC. “Warming accelerates warming, and these features may develop in other places.”

Get ready for some next-level daydreaming: NASA has just released a retro-style travel poster for the newly discovered TRAPPIST-1 star system.

The star system is home to seven newly discovered Earth-like exoplanets, some of which may have the ability to support life. The discovery has experts demonstrably giddy. “Answering the question ‘are we alone’ is a top science priority, and finding so many planets like these for the first time in the habitable zone is a remarkable step forward toward that goal,” NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen said in a statement.

In describing the vivid poster, NASA makes a good case for grabbing a suitcase and leaving the planet:

“Some 40 light-years from Earth, a planet called TRAPPIST-1e offers a heart-stopping view: brilliant objects in a red sky, looming like larger and smaller versions of our own moon. But these are no moons. They are Earth-sized planets in a spectacular planetary system outside our own. These seven rocky worlds huddle around their small, dim, red star, like a family around a campfire. Any of them could harbor liquid water, but the planet shown here, fourth from the TRAPPIST-1 star, is in the habitable zone, the area around the star where liquid water is most likely to be detected.”

Download a printable version of the poster here.

All images courtesy of NASA-JPL/Caltech

Scientists have found the jumbo shrimp of the primate world: a new bushbaby species best described as a “giant dwarf.” The researchers described the new bushbaby in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Bushbabies, also known as galagos, are nocturnal, delightfully weird little primates that live in the forests of Africa. They’ve got huge ears, massive eyes, and long, bony fingers, and they communicate via eerie, infant-like screams in the night (hence the name).

It’s these shrill cries that help scientists track them down. Like birds, each species has its own distinctive call. So when scientists in Angola’s Kumbira Forest heard the characteristic crescendo call used by tiny Galagoides thomasi and Gd. demidovii, they expected the call’s creator to be tiny, too. Instead, they found a whopper.

“We were struck by its remarkably large size,” lead author Magdalena Svensson, of Oxford Brookes University, said in a statement. “Until now call types have been the most reliable way to distinguish galago species, and to find one that did not match what we expected was very exciting.”

Now, “remarkably large” for a dwarf galago is still pretty petite; the adults Svensson and her colleagues found averaged between 6 and 8 inches long from head to rear. But compared to their minuscule cousins, the new animals were massive.

Modern scientists typically rely on DNA testing to determine if a newly discovered animal represents a new species or not. In the case of the giant dwarf bushbaby, the researchers didn’t have to. The evidence was right in front of them.

Co-author Anna Nekaris, also of Oxford Brookes, said the giant dwarf’s big body and crescendo call represent “really a whole new kind of bushbaby.”

“We have been seeing this emerging diversity in Madagascar over the last two decades,” she said in the statement, “yet the nocturnal species of Africa and Asia remain still comparatively unexplored, and this giant dwarf galago is just the tip of the iceberg in new discoveries.”

All images courtesy of Elena Bersacola

Cats can be manipulative. There’s no doubt about that. But are they controlling our minds with their poop? Probably not. Contrary to prior reports, a new study published in the journal Psychological Medicine found that living with a cat in early life did not increase subjects’ risk of psychotic episodes in adolescence.

The premise behind the original idea is less improbable than it sounds. Cats are the host of choice for Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that has been shown to cause dramatic behavior changes in rodents. (Mice infected with T. gondii lose their fear of cats and become downright friendly, which leads to them getting eaten, which buys the parasite a ticket into its favorite feline hangout.) A few controversial studies have linked cat ownership with schizophrenia and psychotic episodes, but many researchers remain skeptical.

Psychiatrist Francesca Solmi and her co-authors are among those skeptics. They decided to put the theory to the test, focusing specifically on the effects of cat ownership on two vulnerable populations: kids ages 4 to 10 and developing fetuses.

They tapped into a large-scale survey called the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), which has monitored the health of thousands of British kids since the 1990s. For the current study, the researchers compared the mental health of teenagers who had grown up with cats with that of kids in cat-free homes.

At first, it seemed like the psychosis theory might have been at least a little bit correct: The results did suggest a small link between cat ownership and psychotic symptoms at age 13. But once the team adjusted their analysis to consider other variables like family income and crowded home situations, the link disappeared.

“The message for cat owners is clear: there is no evidence that cats pose a risk to children’s mental health,” Solmi said in a statement. “Previous studies reporting links between cat ownership and psychosis simply failed to adequately control for other possible explanations.”

But even if T. gondii has no hand in mental health issues, that doesn’t mean it’s harmless. “There is good evidence that T. gondii exposure during pregnancy can lead to serious birth defects and other health problems in children,” senior author James Kirkbride said. “As such, we recommend that pregnant women should continue to follow advice not to handle soiled cat litter.”

Scientists say they’ve found neurological evidence of four different subtypes of depression—a discovery that may someday help doctors select the best treatment for their depressed patients. The research was published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Depression is an exceptionally slippery beast. Unlike ailments located elsewhere in the body, mental illnesses are classified and diagnosed not by concrete physical signs, or biomarkers, but by patients’ behavior. There are a lot of problems with this approach, including the fact that a lot of different illnesses can cause the same symptoms—and that the same illness can cause different symptoms in different people.

What we call “depression” is an experience that likely has many different causes, co-author Conor Liston of Weill Cornell Medical College told Scientific American. “The fact that we lump people together like this has been a big obstacle in understanding the neurobiology of depression.”

Liston and his colleagues analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans from 17 different research sites around the world. They took in scans from 1188 people, about 40 percent of whom had depression, and were able to look closely at an astounding 258 brain regions in each person.

The team had expected to find some differences between the brains of people with depression and without. They found those, but they also found differences within the group of depressed people. Differences in brain activity and connectivity revealed four distinct subtypes among people with depression.

Most excitingly, these brain-activity subtypes matched up with different medical profiles. Patients in subtypes 1 and 2 described feeling more fatigue, while people in subtypes 3 and 4 had trouble feeling pleasure.

The subtypes also responded differently to treatment techniques. People in subtype 1, for example, were more likely to experience relief with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a non-pharmaceutical method that uses electromagnetic impulses to stimulate a sluggish brain.

More research is needed, but these findings are both heartening and promising, Liston says. Depression “is not just one biological thing.”

[h/t Scientific American]

If one out of every four of your sexually active friends got eaten, you’d probably start to consider a sex-free lifestyle. Unless, of course, you’re a male praying mantis, in which case you’d go for it anyway. The male bugs’ apparent eagerness to go to their mid-coital deaths has puzzled scientists for some time. One 2016 study may have an explanation: being eaten could actually increase a male’s chance of passing on his genes. The study was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 

Mantis sex is … intense. About 25 percent of encounters include sexual cannibalism, in which the female mantis literally bites her mate’s head off. But a little thing like that is not going to deter the missing male, who will go on humping like nothing has happened, even as the female continues to nibble him into nothingness. This can take hours.

He is, in essence, offering his body as a present. This sexual gift-giving is not uncommon in insects—the males in one cricket species even make gummy snacks for their mates—but most of these gifts are not also the gift-givers. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes a lot of sense: females can share the nutrient boost with their fertilized eggs, which gives the kids a better chance of surviving. Was that what was going on in mantises? To find out, researchers set up a little mantis love hotel. 

The first step was to provide a romantic meal. The scientists treated small crickets with radioactive amino acids, then fed those crickets to a group of male mantises. Then each male was paired with a female and allowed to mate. Half of the mantis pairs were separated before the female could get her chow on. The other half were left alone to play out their grisly romance. 

In eating her partner, a female also ate the contents of his stomach. So by tracking those radioactive cricket particles, the scientists were able to determine how females’ bodies were using their most recent meal.

As it turns out, even uneaten males were giving their partners a little something. On average, male mantises who survived passed on 25 percent of their radioactive amino acids via their ejaculate. But, as expected, a dead dad could do even more for his kids; gobbled-up males gave their mates a full 90 percent of their nutritious amino acids, and their mates passed the goodness on to their young. 

Being devoured also improved a male’s genetic success by increasing the number of eggs laid by his partner. Females in the coitus interruptus pairings—those who didn’t get to eat—laid about 37 eggs apiece. Those who finished their dinner dates, on the other hand, produced around 88. 

We’ve still got plenty to learn about these beautiful creatures and their slightly terrifying sex lives. But these findings do, at least, make sex-positive male mantises seem slightly less foolhardy.