Sea Star: University of Southern Denmark / Speech Bubble: Amada44 via Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
Sea stars are much stranger than we imagined. Biology students at the University of Southern Denmark implanted a group of the animals with microchips and went about their business. When they checked in days later, the chips were lying on the floor of the sea stars’ tank.
The students realized that the sea stars had spit the trackers out—not through the original implantation sites in their skin, but through the tips of their arms. As Mary Beth Griggs notes in Popular Science, “That would be like a human getting shot in the leg and then ejecting the bullet from their fingers without any internal injuries.”
Rather than getting frustrated, the young biologists put their scientific curiosity to work and decided to conduct formal experiments to better understand the animals’ behavior. The researchers microchipped another 53 sea stars and monitored them using ultrasound scanners, watching the animals’ bodies to see where the chips were going.
What they saw was strange. The chips moved through the sea stars’ bodies at a rate of about 10 percent of the distance from entry to exit point per day, but the route they took was far from direct. First, they were sucked into the sea stars’ body cavities. From there, they took what the researchers call “a somewhat haphazard wander” through the body, down the arm, and out the tip. It’s hardly an efficient process, and it took about 10 days, but it did work—and the sea stars didn’t appear to be hurt or distressed as they did it.
Like so many discoveries about the natural world, these findings raise more questions than they answer. Why would an animal need to do this? Why don’t they just spit out foreign objects from the same holes they came in? How are they even doing this?
One question, at least, has a very clear answer. Are sea stars bizarre, wonderful, alien monsters? Yes. Yes, they are.
Birds are magic, you guys. They may not have mammals’ sweet mammaries or fishes’ shiny scales, but birds still clean up when it comes to hidden talents and clever life hacks. There are pigeons that can read mammograms and crows that use bait to catch fish. Some birds set fires to trap their prey. Some build little patios outside their nests. Others divorce their parents and go find new ones.
Not sold yet? Check out the video above from the mental_floss List Show for even more avian awesomeness.
Saint Hildegard of Bingen was a smasher of stained-glass ceilings. From traumatic beginnings, she fought and flourished, becoming one of the most accomplished and enduring authors, artists, healers, composers, and visionaries of the Middle Ages.
THE TITHE
Hildegard was born in 1098 to noble parents in West Franconia, now part of Germany. At the age of three, she is said to have experienced her first vision of dazzling, divine light. A strange and sickly child, within a few years her parents had passed her off to the church. After all, devout Christians were obligated to tithe, or give the church one-tenth of all they owned—and Hildegard, by many accounts, was their tenth child.
By the time Hildegard was eight, her parents had delivered her to the monastery at Disibodenberg. There, she was assigned to serve a young noblewoman named Jutta von Sponheim. Jutta was not content simply to pray; she wanted to be literally buried in religion. She dressed herself in rags, moved into a tiny cell, and brought Hildegard with her. Then she told the monks to wall them in. Jutta had sealed herself, and her charge, within a living tomb, becoming what was known as an anchoress. For the next three decades, the two would receive all of their food, water, and contact with the outside world through a small window.
THE SCRIBE
As Jutta’s behavior became more and more fanatical, Hildegard prayed harder and studied more. She learned to read and write, and a sympathetic monk brought her books on botany and medicine and pushed them through the cell’s small window. Hildegard devoured them. Jutta continued to deteriorate and undertook long fasts that left her weakened. More noble families delivered their daughters to the cell inside the wall; like Hildegard’s parents, they considered it a duty to donate their daughters—along with substantial sums of money—to the church. Left with no alternative, Hildegard took them under her wing.
After Jutta’s death in 1136, Hildegard was named magistra (spiritual teacher) of the growing flock. She continued to read and develop her love of music and words. Then she began to make her own. A voice in a vision instructed her to “tell and write”—and so Hildegard did. She began composing sacred music.
She recorded her visions and the prophecies of her angelic visitors. She described and drew the plants she saw in the monastery courtyard and their medicinal properties. She illustrated religious texts with luminous images from her dreams. And she began to object to the corrupt monks who would imprison children for the sake of the dowries that came with them.
The universe. Image credit: The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
As Hildegard’s voice on the page grew stronger, so did the threat she presented to the monks who held her and her charges captive. Word of her healing and prophetic abilities had spread, bringing visitors, ailing supplicants, and devotees. But women weren’t supposed to write or publish books. They weren’t supposed to talk to God, or heal the sick, or write hymns. And they definitely weren’t supposed to criticize the church. On their own, each of these crimes looked bad. Viewed all at once, they looked a lot like heresy.
THE FIREBRAND
Hildegard was not oblivious to the risks of her nonconformity. She knew the best way to protect herself would be to obtain the blessing of higher church authorities, and so in 1147 she wrote to the supportive abbot Bernard of Clairvaux for aid. Clairvaux in turn interceded on her behalf with Pope Eugenius III, who endorsed and encouraged her. Hildegard responded with her thanks—and an exhortation for him to try harder to reform his church.
By this time, Hildegard had become unpopular in the Disibodenberg monastery. And the place became more hostile than ever after her conversation with the Pope. So when a holy voice told her to take her charges and escape to a ruined monastery near Bingen, she did not argue. Monastery leaders attempted to stop her, but Hildegard fell suddenly and violently ill—a sign, some said, that God was angry the monks had interfered. Hildegard recovered and told her flock to prepare for their journey.
THE ABBESS
The magistra and her new religious order reached their new home at Bingen around 1150. A new vision inspired Hildegard to dress her brides of heaven not in Jutta’s self-congratulatory rags, but in fine cloth and tiaras.
Over the next two decades, she would tour the country to preach. She would publish treatises on the natural world, including plants, animals, and stones. She would write a handbook of diseases and their cures. She would invent languages and words and imaginary lands. All this her detractors begrudgingly allowed.
But the final straw came in 1178 when Hildegard and her nuns respectfully and knowingly buried a man who had been excommunicated from the church before his death. The convent was stripped of its rights. There could be no Mass, no sacraments, and no music.
Hildegard fought and argued and pled. Finally, in March of 1179, the interdict was lifted.
THE LEGEND
Her legacy secure, Hildegard could, at last, rest. She died in September 1179 at the age of 81, leaving behind a wealth of sacred music, writings, and teachings that are still widely read and enjoyed today. Her work has enjoyed particular popularity since the late 20th century, when her mysticism and the feminist elements of her life and work gained new attention in part from a burgeoning New Age movement.
She was canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI, who called her “perennially relevant” and “an authentic teacher of theology and a profound scholar.”
Scientists say pregnancy creates lasting changes in women’s brains that may help prepare them for motherhood. They published their findings in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
“Pregnancy involves radical hormone surges and biological adaptations,” the authors write. “However, the effects of pregnancy on the human brain are virtually unknown.”
To investigate these effects, neuroscientists recruited couples who were trying to conceive for the first time and gave them brain scans. Some of the couples became parents and some did not, which created a sort of built-in control group. Once the babies were born, the researchers scanned participants’ brains; two years later, they did it again.
The scans revealed a clear difference between the two groups. New moms’ brains were missing something: a substantial amount of gray matter in the region associated with socialization. The disparity between the two groups’ brains were so significant that the researchers could spot which women had been pregnant just by looking at their scans.
But far from being a problem, the researchers say, this reduction in gray matter may actually be the brain’s way of paving the way for a strong mother-child relationship. The researchers found no memory loss or other cognitive problems. In other words, the gray matter loss isn’t brain damage. It’s tidying up in preparation for the challenging new cognitive work of motherhood.
To confirm this idea, the scientists gave the new moms another round of brain scans, this time while the women looked at pictures of their babies and babies they’d never seen before. Sure enough, the tidied-up portions of the women’s brains were especially active as they gazed on their own offspring. The more gray matter lost, the stronger the connection.
Two years after giving birth, new moms’ brains were still lighter on gray matter in that region than they had been before they became pregnant.
Co-author Oscar Vilarroya is a neuroscientist at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain. “The findings point to an adaptive process related to the benefits of better detecting the needs of the child, such as identifying the newborn’s emotional state,” he said in a statement. “Moreover, they provide primary clues regarding the neural basis of motherhood, perinatal mental health and brain plasticity in general.”
Modern Christmas lore is expansive enough to fill an encyclopedia. We’ve got songs about reindeer and snowmen, weird elf traditions, and letters to Santa. But how much do we really know about Mrs. Claus?
Marriage is a relatively new gig for Santa Claus. There’s no record of his original incarnation, Bishop of Myra St. Nicholas, having a wife. Although it’s not impossible for a fourth century Turkish bishop to have had a wife, the figure would expand and morph until, by the end of the 18th century, the bishop had transitioned into a full-time behavior monitor, jolly-maker, and bringer of toys.
But even mythological love affairs don’t just pop up overnight. It would be years and years before Santa found his lady. The first mention of Mrs. Claus appears in the 1849 short story “A Christmas Legend” by missionary James Rees, in which a couple disguise themselves, angel-like, as travelers, and seek shelter with a family. As it turns out, the two strangers are not the Clauses at all, but long-lost family members in double disguise. Still, real or not real, Rees had created a legend.
Over the next few decades, the legend took shape. Mentions of Mrs. Claus appeared in short stories, poems, and songs. She also began accompanying her husband to Christmas parties. Some reported that she dressed in red; others, like the architect/narrator in E.C. Gardner’s 1887 fanciful essay “A Hickory Back-Log,” decked her out in green and plaid while simultaneously debating himself about her existence:
… if there is a patron saint who presides over this day which the nation devotes to feasting and giving thanks, as Santa Claus presides over the Christmas holidays, and if he has a wife, which of course he must have or he can’t be much of a saint, then this was the person who stood before me.
That person, “keen and nervous, but benignant,” has come to the narrator with a list of complaints about the hazards of contemporary kitchen design, and she intends to get through the entire thing. Several times the architect attempts to speak; each time, Mrs. Claus smacks him down. “Don’t interrupt me,” she says.
Perhaps as a foil for Santa’s benevolence and cheer, Mrs. Claus continued to develop a blunt, take-charge attitude. While often sweet and helpful, she was also feisty. The Mrs. Claus of “America the Beautiful” writer Katharine Lee Bates’s 1889 poem “Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride” demands to accompany her husband on his rounds and wants to deliver the toys herself.
Home to womankind is suited? Nonsense, Goodman! Let our fruited
Orchards answer for the value of a woman out-of-doors.
Why then bid me chase the thunder, while the roof you’re safely under,
All to fashion fire-crackers with the lighting in their cores?
See! I’ve fetched my snow-flake bonnet, with the sunrise ribbons on it;
I’ve not worn it since we fled from Fairyland our wedding day;
How we sped through iceberg porches with the Northern Lights for torches!
You were young and slender, Santa, and we had this very sleigh.
Jump in quick then? That’s my bonny. Hey down derry! Nonny nonny!
While I tie your fur cap closer, I will kiss your ruddy chin.
I’m so pleased I fall to singing, just as sleigh-bells take to ringing!
Are the cloud-spun lap-robes ready? Tirra-lirra! Tuck me in.
(He did.)
Over the last hundred-plus years, Mrs. Claus seems to have mellowed. These days she’s often depicted as a plump, cheerful helpmeet, filling Santa’s Thermos with cocoa and waving goodbye as his sleigh ascends. But no marriage is that simple. Mrs. Claus was a fireball once, and we like to think that, deep down, she still is.
Justin Kern via Flickr Creative Commons // CC BY-ND 2.0
Chicagoans preparing for holiday feasts this week are in luck: Any food that doesn’t fit in the freezer can just be left outside. The Windy City has been sustaining temperatures colder than most parts of Earth—and, as DNAInfo reports, all of Mars.
The record for lowest temperature in Chicago was set on December 19, 1983, at a blistering -14 degrees Fahrenheit. But 33 years later to the day, that record was nearly broken, as the frozen city reached -13°F overnight. With wind chill, that number dropped to -30°F. By comparison, the surface of Mars looked positively toasty at a comfortable -2°F.
Today’s forecast high temps across much of Canada and the upper midwest are colder than the last reported high from Mars by @MarsCuriositypic.twitter.com/bGYWG3yIOa
The brutal cold in Chicago has prompted the closing of more than 300 area schools and the cancellation of dozens of flights, and has slowed local trains. There are a few places on the planet that are colder—the North Pole, for example—but most of them are sparsely populated, if anyone lives there at all.
Temperatures began to thaw by Tuesday, December 20, but if Monday’s freeze was any indication, Chicago residents are going to be in for one heck of a winter.
The sooner we can get over this whole “healthy = expensive” thing, the better off we’ll be. Researchers say not only are we more likely to believe that expensive food is good for us, but we also assume health claims on expensive foods are more trustworthy and important. Their report is forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Marketing experts designed a series of online experiments to understand how our beliefs about the cost of food affect our thoughts and behavior. Each experiment addressed one of five primary questions:
1. Do we actually believe that expensive food is healthier?
2. Do we believe the reverse is true (that healthy food is more expensive)?
3. Does a desire to eat healthier make us more likely to choose more expensive options?
4. Do health claims on more expensive foods increase our concern about the issue in question?
5. Does the cost of a product influence how likely we are to trust its health claims?
You can probably guess the answers to the first two questions: yes and also yes. Participants were shown two hypothetical brands of granola and told to select which one they thought was healthier. In the absence of any other information, people were far more likely to select the more expensive brand. And when participants in the second experiment were told one brand was healthier, they were more likely to assume it was also more expensive.
In the third experiment, participants were told to imagine that a coworker had asked them to order her a healthy lunch. They were then given the choice between a “Roasted Chicken Wrap” and a “Balsamic Chicken Wrap.” One was priced at $6.95, the other at $8.95. Regardless of the wrap’s ingredients, study participants consistently selected whichever was more expensive. The authors say this shows that people concerned with eating well are more likely to spend more money on their food even when they have no evidence it’ll buy them the healthiest option.
Participants in the fourth experiment were shown four types of trail mix, some of which claimed to help prevent a relatively obscure vision problem called age-related macular degeneration. Some trail mix types claimed that a familiar ingredient (vitamin A) supported eye health, while others touted a lesser known ingredient (DHA) that also supported eye health. The participants were then asked to guess how much each type of trail mix would cost, and how important they considered vitamin A or DHA.
The less familiar the participants were with the ingredient, the more likely they were to assume it would be expensive—and important. The people who were shown an expensive trail mix containing DHA were also more likely to say they’d be interested in starting to take a DHA supplement, especially if they’d never heard of DHA before.
For the final experiment, participants were asked to rate a new (imaginary) snack claiming to be the “healthiest protein bar on the planet.” They were told that the average cost of a protein bar was $2. Some people were told the new product cost $0.99, while others were told it cost $4. Then everyone was given the opportunity to fact-check the bar’s health claims by reading other product reviews.
Participants with the $0.99 bar did some research, reading an average of three reviews before making a decision. Those with the $4 bar read only two. “People just couldn’t believe that the ‘healthiest protein bar on the planet’ would cost less than the average bar,” study co-author Rebecca Reczek of the Ohio State University said in a statement. “They had to read more to convince themselves this was true. They were much more willing to accept that the healthy bar would cost twice as much as average.”
It is true that some healthy foods really are more expensive than their less-nutritious counterparts. Processed food is often cheaper than fresh produce or individual ingredients. But this is hardly a universal truth—and just because something claims to be “healthy” doesn’t mean that it is.
A caveat: Four out of five of these experiments were conducted on college students. The study size averaged about 176 people, which is not huge. More research will be needed to confirm these results.
Still, “anyone trying to manage their food budgets and feel good about the healthiness of their family meals may well pay too much for their nutrition,” say the authors. “This can occur despite ready availability of both pricing and nutritional information, due to the busy and often hurried consumer sacrificing health while attempting to balance budgets.”
Scientists have discovered that sea star larvae swirl the water around their bodies to suck in pieces of food and propel themselves through the water. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Physics.
Baby sea stars bear almost no resemblance to their slow-moving, stelliform parents. Each lumpy little larva is smaller than a grain of rice and spends its days paddling across the open ocean, trying to gobble up enough energy to morph into its next form. It’s a tightrope act: The larvae have to paddle far and fast enough to find food, but not so far and fast that they use up all the energy they currently have.
Researchers at Stanford University’s Prakash Lab were fascinated by the young sea stars’ predicament. They wondered how the larva got its shape and why it moved the way it did. To find out, they brought lots of larvae into the lab and let them loose under microscopes hooked up to video cameras. The researchers tracked the movement of three distinct elements: the sea stars themselves, the water around them, and particles of algae suspended in the water.
They soon realized that they were looking at very accomplished water-benders. The movements of cilia (tiny hairs) on the sea stars’ bodies were creating swirling vortices in the water. All that wiggling seemed like a lot of work. So why were they doing it?
Upon closer inspection, the researchers realized that wiggling allowed the larvae to do less work in the long run. Some of the vortices caught particles of algae and spun it closer to the sea stars’ waiting mouths. Others helped push them forward through the water. The larvae, in other words, had created a life hack, making the water do the work for them.
“Evolution seeks to satisfy basic constraints,” first author William Gilpin said in a statement. “The first solution that works very often wins.”
Somebody has to terrify America’s children. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that person was Walter McDougall. As part of a series of stories for children, McDougall filled American newspapers with clever but alarming visions of child-eating monsters.
McDougall began his newspaper career in the 1870s, working as a political cartoonist at the New York Graphic. From there he began selling cartoons to Harper’s Weekly and Puck magazine. His career really took off on May 21, 1893, when one of his drawings became the first color cartoon printed in an American newspaper. One year later, his cheerful story “The Unfortunate Fate of a Well-Intended Dog” became the country’s first color comic strip. His illustrations for a weekly American Press Association editorial column also made him the nation’s first syndicated newspaper artist.
As his career progressed, his fame grew. In his heyday, McDougall was producing dozens of cartoons every week for regional and national newspapers and magazines.
McDougall’s monsters found a regular home in the humbly named cartoon series “McDougall’s Good Stories for Children.” His stories married obscure vocabulary, bizarre creatures, and child endangerment. Needless to say, they were a big success.
By 1904, word of his weird drawings had reached L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Baum was about to release a second book and wanted to promote it with a weekly comic strip. The two put their rather strange heads together and came up with “Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz,” which ran from 1904 to 1905.
McDougall worked into his sixties, amassing a portfolio of hundreds and hundreds of comics. There would be no happy ending for his story, however; after retirement, he withdrew into seclusion for years, then committed suicide at the age of 80. You can remember him by seeing more of his monster images on the Monster Brains blog, or viewing his political cartoons at the Ohio State University Libraries.
All images are courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Is it possible that murderous crustaceans have a softer side? A new video shows cannibalistic deep-sea crabs grooming one another the same way chimpanzees do.
Austinograea williamsi is not generally a snuggly critter. This pale, eyeless crab makes its home in the darkness near hydrothermal vents thousands of meters below the ocean’s surface. Its previous appearances on camera have all been a lot less aww-inspiring and a lot grislier, featuring feeding frenzies in which everyone eats everyone else’s legs.
But family members aren’t A. williamsi’s only food source. It also eats snails, anemones, and algae. Given the opportunity, it may also eat bacteria scraped off undersea surfaces. Researchers aboard the R/V Falkor believe that that may be what’s going on in this video they captured at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean thanks to a robotic submarine:
“He was literally grooming this smaller shell, just in the same way that you would see chimpanzees for instance picking bugs off of the hair of a mate,” Falkor biologist Amanda Bates toldNew Scientist.
Bates and her colleagues can’t say for sure why the crabs are doing it. Grooming may be a lazy way to score a snack, or it may be as much a social activity for crabs as it is for primates. Either way, Bates said, “it’s incredible to see that same type of behaviour in crabs that are 3,500 metres under the sea.”
