In the news this month we’ve learned about a neotropical jumping spider discovered by Christopher Meehan of Villanova University in Mexico and Eric Olson of Brandeis in Costa Rica that is the only species of spider observed to subsist on a primarily vegetarian diet. Previously, spiders had not been known to consume any type of solid food, apart from occasional pollen fed to young in a single species of orb-weaver. The new species has been named Bagheera kiplingi.

And on the subject of vegetation, plant biologists at the University of Delaware and McMaster University in Canada conducted a study of more than 3,000 mustard seedlings and discovered that young plants are capable of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen explain why fresh eggs are more difficult to peel than older eggs. Bottom line: let your eggs sit for a few days before trying to make deviled eggs!

With the return of the sun and spring popping out all over, the season’s long list of open-air music festivals is prepared to launch in cities, towns, parks and fields somewhere near you. Obviously, human beings share a collective appreciation for music and aren’t shy of demonstrating that on a regular basis.

So it is probably not too surprising that biologists from the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany published research this week in the Journal Current Biology that scientifically establishes the well-known fact that music really is the “Universal Language.”

Language of music really is universal, study finds

Researchers wanted to find out if the expression of emotions in Western music would be appreciated by people who had no exposure to it. They chose as their test subjects the Mafa, an isolated ethnic group in the African nation of Cameroon. Predictably, the Mafa listeners did recognize emotional expressions made through the music, including happiness, sadness and fear. The scientists determined that the clues relied upon by the listeners to types of music they’d never heard were primarily tempo and mode, devices that musicians use to elicit certain emotions even in people who don’t know the language of a song.

Guitarists’ Brains Swing Together

Meanwhile, a different group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development used electroencephalograms [EEG] to record the brain activity of eight different pairs of guitarists playing a sort of jazz-fusion melody together. Reported lead researcher Ulman Lindenberger,

“Our findings show that interpersonally coordinated actions are preceded and accompanied by between-brain oscillatory couplings.”

That’s Sci-Speak for what most of the rest of humanity recognizes readily as “getting in the groove.”

So here’s hoping the weather is great for your neighborhood’s spring music fest, and that the groove goes on and on!

At the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science [AAAS] in Chicago on Friday the 13th, research was presented by a psychology professor at the University of Albany on the subject of kissing.

CNN reports in its coverage that the science of kissing is called “philematology.” Rutgers professor Helen Fisher says kissing is “a major escalation or de-escalation point in a powerful process of mate choice.” Kissing, says the study’s leader Gordon Gallup, Jr., transmits sensory information – smells, tastes, sound and tactile signals – that affect the couple’s perceptions of each other and whether they want to continue the relationship. In a survey of more than a thousand college students, Gallup and his colleagues found that 59% of men and 66% of women reported that after the first kiss their attraction ended.

The subconscious processing of the sensory information received in a kiss reveals some very interesting details about mate choices, too. The researchers found that women tend to be attracted to partners with a different immune system makeup than their own – information that is transmitted by the sense of smell. They also looked at increases and decreases in hormone levels before and after kissing, particularly oxytocin (the “love hormone”) and cortisol.

Kissing can quickly determine the success or failure of a potential mate choice, and that first kiss seems to be the most important in that respect. So all us fans of the Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore romantic comedy 50 First Dates get some scientific explanation for why we feel it’s so sweet that Barrymore’s brain-damaged character who forgets Sandler every night falls in love with him all over again every day at the first kiss.

Pucker up: Scientists study kissing

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the discoverers of the ‘green fluorescent protein’, known as GFP.

This remarkable protein was first observed in a species of jellyfish in 1962, and in the years since has become one of the most important biochemical tools. by attaching GFP to other proteins of interest, such as nerve cells and cancer cells, those proteins can be followed in their actions allowing scientists to map the activities of biological functions. And while that type of research may be fairly obscure for regular people to understand and follow, the GFP protein and some engineered brother proteins have been put to a commercial use most of us can relate to…

If you have an aquarium and pay attention to the very latest in cool tropical fish, you’ve no doubt heard about GloFish. These originally engineered zebrafish (that now pass their glow onto their offspring naturally) come in the standard ‘electric green’, but also in ‘starfire red’ and ‘sunburst orange’! Yes, they do faintly glow in the dark, but are best shown off under a fluorescent black light.

You could see these in your dentist or doctor’s office waiting room if you don’t have any already, so impress your care-giver by talking about the GFP protein and how the discoverers finally got their Nobel Prize! It probably won’t get you a discount on that filling or check-up, but it’ll give you something besides your sore knee or the increase in your insurance premium this year to talk about.

Links:
Green Fluorescent Protein Pioneers Share 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
GloFish: Experience the Glo!

Bird-watching is one of the most popular pastimes in the world, for people from all walks of life. Our fascination with birds in all their sizes, colors and habitats thus makes for a ready field of study in biology, where bird evolution used to maintain a fairly rigorous tree-of-life.

Not so much any longer, since researchers with the Early Bird Assembling the Tree-of-Life Project centered on the Field Museum examined DNA from all major living groups of birds and discovered that phylogenics had it all wrong!

Huge Genome Phylogenic Study of Birds Re-Writes Bird Evolution

As an indicator of just how wrong it was, DNA analysis has determined that falcons – those swift and trainable birds of prey – are NOT closely related to hawks and eagles. Whoa. Spokespersons for the project say the entire understanding of bird evolution will need to be re-written with this new information, and that information itself raises some further questions about concurrent and repeated evolution of certain traits at different times in different families.

“We now have a robust evolutionary tree from which to study the evolution of birds and all their interesting features that have fascinated so many scientists and amateurs for centuries,” Reddy said. “Birds exhibit substantial diversity (largest of the tetrapod groups), and using this ‘family tree’ wwe can begin to understand how this diversity originated as well as how different bird groups are interrelated.”

[Photo Credit: Zina Deretsky, NSF]

Scientists at Indiana University Bloomington and Harvard published a report in Science June 20 describing a protein “clutch” that disengages the bacterial tail from the “tiny but powerful engine” that powers its rotation. The flagellum is the means that many bacterial cells – including Bacillus subtilis used in this research – use to ‘swim’ in liquid environments where they live.

Microscopic ‘Clutch’ Puts Flagellum in Neutral

The clutch mechanism was discovered by accident when the researchers were studying the formation of bacterial “biofilm,” where the cells accumulate and become stationary, biofilms are involved in bacterial infections. It is hoped that the discovery will give nanotechnologists some ideas about how to regulate tiny engines they create in the lab.

“We think it’s pretty cool that evolving bacteria and human engineers arrived at a similar solution to the same problem,” says IU biologist Daniel Kearns, leader of the project.

Science Daily reported over the weekend that Keio University research has demonstrated that pigeons show superior self-recognition abilities to three year old humans.

Professor Shigeru Watanabe and graduate student Kohji Toda managed to train pigeons to recognize themselves in real-time using mirrors and videotape, then found that their pigeons can recognize themselves in video images with a 5 to 7 second delay. Human 3-year olds typically have trouble recognizing themselves with just a 2 second delay.

Thus pigeons now join chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins and elephants in having the ability to recognize themselves, which means that particularly large brains aren’t necessary to the ability. It seems that we are learning that the other forms of life we share our planet with are quite a bit smarter than we’ve traditionally given them credit for!

• Nearly 50% of the bacteria in your body (and humans harbor 3 times more bacterial cells than human cells) live on the surface of your tongue, which (by the way) is the strongest muscle in your body. Probably a good reason why Mommy-Kisses work better than Mommy-Licks on boo-boos.

• The incidence of immune system diseases has increased more than 200% in the last five years. Yikes! Is that environmental?

• By the time a person is 35 years old, s/he begins losing about 7,000 brain cells a day which are never replaced. Whoa. I’d say something profound about that, but I forgot what the subject was…

• A moderate sunburn damages blood vessels in the skin so seriously that it takes between four and fifteen months for them to heal. The reason I keep SPF 50 on hand all summer.

• Right-handed people live an average of nine years longer than left-handed people. Need I remind readers that correlation does NOT equal causation?

Go on over to One Big Health Nut and read the rest for yourself!

That great practical joke that life’s designer [be it blind nature or purposeful god] played is still with us to confound orderly notions of biological evolution. The genome of Australia’s duck-billed platypus has been sequenced by an international group of scientists led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The venomous, egg-laying, duck-billed, web-footed, beaver-tailed mammal is one of the earliest offshoots of the mammalian lineage from when it split off from primitive ancestors some 166 million years ago. The genome confirms the chimeric status of this odd animal which displays traits of reptiles, birds and mammals.

As part of their analysis, researchers compared the platypus genome with human, mouse, dog, opossum and chicken genomes. Chicken genome was chosen because it represents a group of egg-laying animals that includes extinct reptiles that passed on much of their DNA to mammals over the course of evolution. When analyzed, the genetic sequences for venom production in the male platypus was found to have arisen from duplications in a group of genes evolved from ancestral reptilian genomes. They hypothesize that duplications in those very same genes led to the evolution of venom independently in modern reptiles.

The project involved sequencing about 2.2 billion base pairs and 18,500 genes. The Platypus has 52 chromosomes and an unusual 10 sex chromosomes. The platypus X chromosome also bears a striking similarity to the sex chromosome of birds.

Final conclusion? The duck-billed platypus is just as bizarre a mix-and-match critter genetically as it appeared to be when the first specimens were shown to the scientific community some 200 years ago. Skeptics then believed the animal was someone’s idea of a practical joke hoax. Turns out it really is a genetic practical joke, but it comes as-is in nature.

Links:

Platypus Genome Explains Animal’s Peculiar Features
Daily Mail: It’s a bird, it’s a beaver…

Michael Kramer, a professor of pediatrics at McGill University reported this week that breastfeeding raises children’s IQ and improves their academic performance later in childhood.

Their study evaluated children in 31 Belarusian hospitals and clinics. Half of the women were directly encouraged to breastfeed exclusively, the other half did things the ‘normal’ way (for Belorussia). Six and a half years later the children’s IQs were tested and their teachers submitted academic performance ratings. Scores on both were significantly higher for the children of women encouraged to breastfeed, though there is no indication that the researchers confirmed how many of those mothers actually did breastfeed or for how long.

“Our study provides the strongest evidence to date that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding makes kids smarter,” Kramer said.

While it is generally accepted these days that it is far better for a baby to be breastfed than raised on infant formula or cow’s milk – for a number of excellent reasons including immunities and strengthened immune systems – the reporting of this particular study makes a fairly standard assertion that association of factors (correlation) must equate to cause. Another study reported this week holds that early consumption of cow’s milk increases risk of Type-1 diabetes.

Still, given the infant deaths attributed to the marketing and distribution of soy-based infant formula to mothers in third world countries (where the water is nasty), any encouragement of the idea that human babies should drink human milk is welcomed. Here in the first world, virtually all women of childbearing age carry burdens of chemicals and heavy metals that are measurable in their breast milk, but generally at a lower level than the water in third world countries contains.

If women – and their doctors – can be persuaded that breastfeeding makes children healthier and smarter, only good can come of it. Someday we might even find ourselves living in a modern first world society that actually views mothers breastfeeding babies as normal and endearing rather than a blatant abuse of sexual organs! That would be a refreshing development.