science review for january 2010
Running a little late here because I spent this week in the humid warmth of McAllen, TX, and I probably miss a few cool things.. but anyway:
in chemistry news, An isomer of
in physics, the 80-year old bizarre prediction of Dirac’s relativistic QM theory called “Zitterbewegung” was tentatively confirmed by a no less bizarre technique called ‘quantum simulation’, where hitting trapped ions with fine-tuned lasers makes them behave as free particles moving at fast speeds or as other types of quantum systems that are being simulated.
Speaking of the bizarre, biology was rich in that last month (when isn’t it?). Researchers attempted to tag some tree frogs with radio transmitters and learned something really weird: Tree frogs are apparently able to move into the bladder and urinate anything that was lodged in their body cavities: thorns, insects, radio transmitters. Also, a parasite was found, appropriately named Endaphis fugitiva, which jumps out of the banana aphid in which it lives when it realizes the aphid is in the jaws of a predator.
In promiscuous (but not in monogamous) mouse species, sperm cells can recognize and team up with sperm cells of the same male or, in a lesser extent, sperm of a brother. They form packs that swim faster than a single sperm cell. Also a couple researchers from Cincinnati decided to circumsize fruit fly males with lasers to see if their penis ornaments help them in mating.. Obviously, they do.
Speaking of sex, early last month a group from London made CNN news when they claimed that there is no G-spot in human females, simply by asking a whole lot of twins if they think they have any, arguing against an earlier italian study where G-spot was actually located with ultrasound.
And of course as everyone knows, paleontology had two major discoveries to hit the news: A polish group found well tetrapod tracks in Middle Devonian, showing that tetrapods coexisted with elpistostegids (such as Tiktaalik) for over 10 million years in different niches. Some chinese paleontologists found melanosomes in fossil dinosaur feathers, suggesting that dino’s plumage was striped russet-orange and white, overturning the idea that the color of prehistoric animals would never be known. How if they could find fossilized voice…
Something cool about humans: Ever seen movies where cowboys duel, the bad guy draws and the good guy reacts and draws faster? There’s truth to that: human brain reacts faster than acts (by a small margin, and with more mistakes, but faster). Another curous find about us: barefoot running subjects humans to four times less stress than shod running. Shoes make it easy to pick up the bad habit of landing on the heel.
And finally the poor little Mars explorer Spirit, stuck in a sand pit with two broken wheels since November, was finally declared a “stationary research station” (also covered by xkcd).
Crossposted from Livejournal