Science & TechnologyS


Binoculars

Clever crows use designer tools to get bugs: Research

Subodh Varma
The Times of India
Tue, 08 Oct 2013 13:39 UTC
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© Wikimedia Commons New Caledonian Crow, Corvus moneduloides,
Only two species in nature have the ability to make hooks for use as tools - humans and the New Caledonian crows. But many thought that the crows' use of hooked twigs to take out insects from holes was just trial and error that they went through. But new research shows that's not the case. The crows pay close attention to the features of each tool, ensuring that the hooked end is oriented correctly for snagging prey.

In a paper to be published as part of a special issue of journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, scientists at the University of St Andrews discovered that New Caledonian crows do not rely on guesswork when deploying one of their most complicated tool types, hooked stick tools.

New Caledonian crows are one of the world's most proficient animal tool users. The species is restricted to the tropical islands of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, where it is known to use several different tool types to obtain beetle grubs and other concealed prey.

The study investigated hooked stick tools, which wild crows manufacture by using their bills to snip a forked stick out of a shrub. This stick is then 'crafted' by the careful removal of wood and bark, leaving a curved twig with a neat hook at the end. The crows use these tools to extract prey items such as insects from their hiding places in holes and crevices.
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Telescope

Russians discover another Near-Earth Object - Asteroid 2013 TB80 is one kilometer wide


RIA Novosti
Fri, 11 Oct 2013 11:32 UTC
Telescope SANTEL-400 AN in ISON-NM observatory
© Leonid EleninTelescope SANTEL-400 AN in ISON-NM observatory
A near-Earth asteroid about a fifth the size of the space rock thought to have killed the dinosaurs has been discovered by a Russian-operated observatory in New Mexico

The kilometer-wide asteroid, dubbed 2013 TB80, was first spotted on Wednesday by the remotely run ISON-NM observatory and was later confirmed by US and Japanese astronomers, the International Astronomical Union said in an online statement.

The asteroid, believed to be the 704th largest with an orbit that comes relatively near Earth, does not pose a danger of crashing into our planet, said the head of the observatory that made the discovery.

"It's a big asteroid, but it poses no danger for us," Leonid Elenin, who lives in the Moscow Region, told RIA Novosti on Friday.
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Einstein

Are humans inadvertently helping make animals more intelligent?

Rod Bastanmehr
AlterNet
Thu, 10 Oct 2013 02:06 UTC
intelligent animals
An increase in brain size was also detected in two species of shrews and bats
A new study shows that changes in the environment caused by people are helping animals to evolve bigger brains.

Well, chalk one up for homo-sapiens, sort of. While we've known for some time that humans have been affecting the enviroment on a global scale, one aspect of our evolutionary impact on other species might not be all bad.

In a recent study, University of Minnesota biologist Emilie C. Snell-Rood found evidence suggesting that our direct changes to the natural habitats of animals (through technologies advances, antibiotics and revised food pyramids) have caused some animals to evolve with bigger brains.

Dr. Snell-Rood studied dozens of individual animal skulls, some as old as a century, from ten different species including bats, gophers and mice. In two of the species, the white-footed mouse and the meadow role, the brains of the animals plucked from metropolitan areas or suburbs were about 6% bigger than those of the animals taken from farms or other rural areas. Dr. Snell-Rood's hypothesis after assessing the first wave of results was that brains become significantly bigger when they move to cities or bustling towns, where the animals must learn to find food in places that they're not biologically trained to encounter or expect.
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Magnify

Circular intronic RNAs defy junk DNA dogma

Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D.
Institute Creation Research
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 15:14 UTC
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A completely new category of circular RNAs has been discovered, adding another layer of amazing complexity to human genetics. These circular RNAs are formed from the intron regions inside a gene that were once thought to be nothing but junk DNA.1

Genes in plants and animals are copied (transcribed) into messenger RNA molecules (mRNAs) that are subsequently processed to remove segments that do not end up in the mature RNA transcript. The gene regions that remain in the final coding RNA transcript correspond to regions in the genetic code called exons while the regions that are spliced out correspond to gene regions called introns. When scientists first discovered large numbers of spliced-out intron fragments, they were baffled since they originally believed that they served no function and should have been degraded by the cell machinery.2

In these newly discovered circular intronic RNAs (ciRNA), the introns are excised from the initial gene transcript into smaller RNA molecules to form circles that enhance the gene's transcription. This was proven when the researchers were able to "perturb" the action of ciRNAs in cells by inhibiting their function and observing the effect on gene expression. The scientists also discovered that the ciRNAs promoted gene function by associating with the transcription machinery that copies DNA into RNA (RNA polymerase II). Interestingly, these ciRNAs were expressed specific to cell-type, further emphasizing that they were specifically controlled and highly functional.1

Comment: For more information on this topic, see On viral 'junk' DNA, a DNA-enhancing Ketogenic diet, and cometary kicks:
The greatest shock of genomic science was to find that the human genome contains more viral than "human" genes. That is, the human genome is made from thousands of viruses that infected our distant ancestors. They got there by infecting eggs or sperm, inserting their own DNA into ours.


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Info

Elephants instinctively get human pointing

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Thu, 10 Oct 2013 11:00 UTC
Elephant
© Anna F. Smet and Richard W. ByrneElephants can follow a point to a tasty morsel of food without training.
Elephants require zero instruction to understand human pointing, according to a new study that demonstrates just how smart these large mammals are.

To put this into perspective, many great apes fail to understand human pointing, and they are genetically closer to us.

The study, published in the latest Current Biology, not only demonstrates how smart elephants are, but it also indicates that pointing is in their visual "vocabulary" too.
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Comet

Doomed sun-diving comet


SPACE.com
Thu, 10 Oct 2013 12:52 UTC

NASA's SOHO spacecraft's cameras have been following a ~32-foot wide Kreutz family comet on its way to its fiery demise on October 10th, 2013. A comet of this size has a small chance of survival.
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Cell Phone

No card required: New app will let you get cash from an ATM by phone

Alexandra Klausner
The Daily Mail,UK
Thu, 10 Oct 2013 11:33 UTC
  • Using your phone to make an ATM withdrawal is faster than using a debit card
  • Mobile ATM transactions are more secure than traditional debit card withdrawal
  • Soon you will be able to use your phone to pay at restaurants and other participating establishments

Banks are revolutionizing the way you withdraw money. Instead of using a traditional debit or credit card at an ATM, you will be able to log into a banking app on your cell phone and order cash up to 24 hours before a transaction.

Financial Services giant FIS announced the innovative mobile banking technology at the Money2020 conference in Las Vegas this week. Three banks have already begun testing the app and hope to launch the services in their ATMs by the end of 2014.

The three participating banks thus far are Wintrust in Illinois, BMO Harris in Chicago, and City National in Los Angeles. FIS announced this week that they have been gaining attention from a number of other large banks as well as smaller institutions about the mobile banking app.
Mary Monahan, of Javelin Strategy & Research, believes that using a cell phone to make cash withdrawals is much safer than using a debit card.

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A receipt will be automatically saved on your phone making it easier to keep track of your transactions
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Info

Mystery of bizarre Icelandic lava pillars solved

Tia Ghose
LIveScience
Thu, 10 Oct 2013 08:06 UTC
Lava Pillar
© Tracy GreggSome pillars have moss growing on them, making them look much like hollow tree stumps.
The mystery of a series of strange, knobby pillars of rock that formed in Iceland has been solved.

A creeping lava flow and a stream of water mixed to create hollow, rough pillars that dot the Skaelinger Valley in Iceland. The surprise is that these towers could form at all on land. Until now, researchers thought that whenever water and lava met on land, either explosive steam or pillow-shaped lava formed.

"These had never been observed or described before as features seen on land. They've been described at mid-ocean ridges 2 miles [3 km] under water," said study co-author Tracy Gregg, a geologist at the University at Buffalo in New York.
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Meteor

Chelyabinsk meteorite is 'as old as the solar system', say Russian scientists


The Siberian Times
Mon, 07 Oct 2013 14:45 UTC
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© Marat Akhmetaleyev'The speed of a meteorite's vertical drift is typical of surface nuclear explosions, which makes appropriate the comparison with a nuclear explosion'.
Scientists conclude that the asteroid explosion over the Ural Mountains in the early morning of 15 February - which injured 1,500 people - had the force of a nuclear bomb. They have also dated the meteorite to be as old as time itself.

'An analysis of Chelyabinsk meteorite fragments shows that its age practically coincides with that of the solar system, 4.56 billion years,' said Mikhail Marov, deputy head of the planetary research and space chemistry department of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Geo-Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry. 'In fact, we possess a rock from the time of genesis'.

The explosion was recorded in dramatic photographs by observers, a fact which has aided scientists in understanding the phenomenon. Marov also confirmed earlier speculation that the rock may have had an earlier collision some 290 million years ago as it sped around the universe.

'This is just a theory, we cannot say for certain yet that this event has actually taken place,' he said.
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Airplane

Airport noise linked to higher cardiovascular disease and stroke risk

Brett Smith
RedOrbit
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 17:51 UTC
Airport Noise
© Thinkstock
A pair of new studies in the British Medical Journal indicate that individuals who live near a major airport run a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke. In one study, scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health discovered that American zip codes with 10-decibel higher aircraft noise averaged a 3.5-percent higher cardiovascular hospital admission rate for adults aged 65 and older.

In the other study, a team of British scientists looked at the effects of aircraft noise around London's Heathrow airport and found that risks of hospital admissions and deaths due to stroke, heart and circulatory disease were approximately 10 to 20 percent higher in areas with the highest levels of airplane noise compared with the quietest areas.

Previous studies have found a connection between living in a loud environment and risk of high blood pressure, but not many have looked specifically at the risk of cardiovascular disease.

"These findings suggest a possible link between high levels of aircraft noise and risk of heart disease and stroke," said Anna Hansell, lead author of the UK study and a researcher at Imperial College London's School of Public Health.

"The exact role that noise exposure may play in ill health is not well established. However, it is plausible that it might be contributing, for example by raising blood pressure or by disturbing people's sleep," she added.

"The relative importance of daytime and night-time noise also needs to be investigated further."
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