Quirks and Quarks

Energy with a grain of salt

Researchers have developed a new sodium metal powered fuel cell with up to triple the output for its weight of a lithium-ion battery. The team from  MIT, including Yet-Ming Chiang, think these fuel cells could have enormous potential for electric vehicles — including flight. They say sodium can be electrically produced from salt on a large scale to facilitate this technology. The research was publish...

Mutant super-powers give Korean sea women diving abilities

The Haenyeo, or sea women, of the Korean island of Jeju have been celebrated historically for their remarkable diving abilities. For hour after hour they dive in frigid waters harvesting sea-life, through pregnancy and into old age. A new study has shown they are able to do this because of specific genetic adaptations that appeared in their ancestors more than a thousand yea...

Chimpanzees lay down mad beats to communicate

Apart from their rich vocal palette, chimpanzees drum on trees to communicate over long distances. A new interdisciplinary study, led in part by PhD student Vesta Eleuteri and primatologist Cat Hobaiter from the University of St. Andrews, has explored the details of the rhythms they used, and found that different populations drum with rhythms which are similar to the beats in human music...

Chimpanzees use medicinal plants for first aid and hygiene

Researchers have observed wild chimpanzees seeking out particular plants, including ones known to have medicinal value, and using them to treat wounds on themselves and others. They also used plants to clean themselves after sex and defecation. Elodie Freymann from Oxford University lived with the chimpanzees in Uganda over eight months and published this research in the jou...

The beginnings of our end — where the anus came from 

Our distant evolutionary ancestors had no anuses. Their waste was excreted from the same orifice they used to ingest food, much like jellyfish do today. Now a new study on bioRxiv that has yet to be peer-reviewed, scientists think they’ve found the evolutionary link in a worm with only a single digestive hole. Andreas Hejnol, from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, said he ...

The ‘bone collector’ caterpillar covers itself with body parts

It’s like something from a horror movie. A creeping, carnivorous creature that in a macabre attempt at disguise and protection, covers itself with the dismembered remains of dead insects. This super-rare caterpillar is one of the strangest insects in the world. It lives on spider webs inside of trees and rock crevices in a 15 square kilometre radius on the Hawaiian islan...

All the colours of the rainbow, plus one

Researchers have fired lasers directly into the eye to stimulate photoreceptors, and produce the perception of a colour that does not exist in nature. They describe it as a “supersaturated teal,” and hope the technique will allow them to better understand colour vision and perhaps lead to treatments for vision problems. Austin Roorda has been developing this technology using mirrors, lasers a...

How a helpless baby bird protects itself from hungry hunters

There’s not a more vulnerable creature in nature than a baby bird. Tiny and immobile, they’re easy pickings for predators. But the chicks of the white-necked jacobin hummingbird have evolved a unique defence. They disguise themselves as poisonous caterpillars to discourage those that might eat them. Jay Falk, an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado and Sco...

A tree has evolved to attract lightning strikes — to eliminate the competition

Scientists working in Panama noticed that a particular tropical tree species was frequently struck by lightning, but was infrequently killed by the strikes. Forest ecologist Evan Gora found that Dipteryx oleifera trees were often the last ones standing after a lightning strike, which can kill over 100 trees with a single bolt. His team discovered the gian...

An attractive new strategy for brain surgery

A Canadian team is developing minimally-invasive micro-tools for brain surgery that can be operated by magnetic fields from outside of the skull. The tools, including scalpels and forceps, will enter the cranium through small incisions, and then be controlled by focused and precise magnetic fields. Eric Diller is associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the Universi...

One whale’s waste is an ocean organism’s treasure

The nutrients in the ocean are not evenly distributed. Resources tend to be rich around coastlines and near the poles, and are often poorer in the open ocean and the tropics. A new study has explored how urine from migrating baleen whales is a significant way that nitrogen and other nutrients are circulated in the oceans. Joe Roman is a conservation biologist at the University of Ver...

Is our universe inside a black hole? New evidence from JWST galaxy images

New images from the James Webb Space Telescope of distant galaxies could support a mind-bending idea: that our universe was born in a black hole. The images show more of these galaxies spin clockwise, than counterclockwise. Lior Shamir, a computational astrophysicist from Kansas State University, says that may mean our universe inherited the spin of the black ...

Watching polar bear mums and cubs emerge from their winter dens

Polar Bear mothers spend the winter in warm and cozy dens, gestating and then birthing their cubs, and right about now the baby bears are taking their first steps out of the dens and beginning to explore the real world. Using satellite collars and remote camera technology, researchers from Polar Bears International, the Norwegian Polar Institute, and the San Diego Wildl...

Big birds with bitty brains are still kind of bright

We’ve learned a lot about the remarkable intelligence of birds like crows and parrots, but not much work has been done on large flightless birds. A new study that explored the problem-solving abilities of emus, ostriches and rheas suggests that some of these birdy behemoths have impressive cognition too. In a first-of-its-kind study, a team led by University of Bristol’s Fay Clark...

Scientists are recruiting elephant seals to learn more about the oceans’ twilight zone

Below about 200 metres there’s still a lot going on in the ocean, but it’s tremendously hard to observe and understand even with modern technology. Scientists from the University of California, Santa Cruz have maintained a long-term monitoring study of elephant seals. The team, including PhD candidate Allison Payne, has discovered they can use the...

As soon as the last ice age glaciers melted, Indigenous people occupied this site

A recently discovered archaeological site in Saskatchewan, dated to just less than 11,000 years ago is the oldest settlement in the region by about 1,500 years. It also is evidence that Indigenous people settled there as soon as the environment could support them after the glaciers disappeared. Glenn Stuart, from the University of Saskatchewan, is one ...

A little bit of scratching can do some good, but too much can hurt

Scratching an itch can feel great, so scientists decided to dig into why that is the case since we know too much scratching isn’t good for us. Dr. Dan Kaplan, a professor of dermatology and immunology at the University of Pittsburgh, said they found that scratching drives inflammation to the skin, which, in light moderation, helps to fight bacterial skin infections. ...

Bits of Bennu have building blocks of life

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission took six years to travel to the asteroid Bennu and return samples to Earth. Now, the first results from the analysis of these rocks are being released. Researchers found evidence of salty water, as well as the elements necessary for life, such as amino acids and the building blocks for RNA and DNA. We spoke with Kim Tait, senior curator of mineralogy at the Royal O...

Reintroducing Hawaii’s sacred crow to the wild

The world’s most endangered crow, the Hawaiian crow or or ʻalalā, is making tentative steps towards a comeback. After going extinct in the wild, only 120 birds remain in captivity, in two facilities operated by the San Diego Zoo. Over the years, researchers have attempted reintroductions in the bird's native habitat on the Big Island of Hawaii, but those efforts have all been unsuccessf...