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Incredible shots of the exotic peacock spider

Pinar
My Modern Met
Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:00 UTC
Peacock Spider
© My Modern Met
On a walk around the bush in Australia, entomologist Jurgen Otto came across a tiny insect he'd never come in contact with before - the Peacock Spider. The scientist says, "When I came to Sydney I was a bit bored because there wasn't enough to photograph but now I don't want to live anywhere else. I think it's probably the most beautiful spider in the world." The arachnid, scientifically known as Maratus volans, is a mere 5mm in size and is capable of quickly escaping a scene and jumping erratically. Yet, what defines the spider best is perhaps its unusual likeness to peacocks.

Like male peacocks with their exuberant tail feathers, the male peacock spiders are equipped with beautifully colorful flaps that rise up like a fan, displaying an unbelievable radiance and richness in breathtaking patterns. The males of this species are the only gender with colorful flaps so as to attract the females. They put on a bit of a show to win them over. Otto manages to capture these stunning spiders up-close just as they partake in an elaborate mating ritual.

As can be observed through these collection of photos, the spider peacock's performance involves revealing its colorful extensions. Additionally, the spider raises two legs and vibrates while shifting from side to side, in an attempt to woo its female counterpart. Unfortunately, if the dance does not impress the female spider, the male could wind up becoming the female's prey. Be sure to check out Otto's video, below, displaying the exotic creature's incredible process.
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Question

'Flying Rods' discovered in Sabah


Daily Express, East Malaysia
Thu, 20 Dec 2012 03:10 UTC
Flying Rods
© Daily Express, East Malaysia
Kota Kinabalu: A mysterious insect-like creature that has been captured on film in several parts of the world but never physically and also not scientifically explained because of the tremendous speed at which it travels has also been found in Sabah.

Called, among others, "flying rods", "skyfish" and "solar entities", these creatures are invisible to the naked eye and can only be noticed on slow motion camera and resemble a flying centipede.

First made known to the world in 1994 in Roswell, New Mexico, by an Unidentified Flying Object enthusiast who was attempting to film an UFO - at the site of what is believed to be an UFO landing in 1947 - people in several parts of the world have since also claimed to have captured images of the creature and put them on the Internet.

They were, initially, dismissed as some super-flying insect specie unknown to man until technology made it possible to capture them using today's sophisticated cameras.

There are sceptics who still dismiss them as tricks of light or camera but other sceptics who have studied newer images of these so-called creatures have begun to acknowledge their existence although unable to pin them down as insects, a paranormal creation or even a possible alien life form.
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Galaxy

A bright spark in a nearby spiral galaxy


SpaceTelescope Org
Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:31 UTC
Messier99
© ESA/Hubble & NASA
This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a detailed view of the spiral arms on one side of the galaxy Messier 99. Messier 99 is a so-called grand design spiral, with long, large and clearly defined spiral arms - giving it a structure somewhat similar to the Milky Way.

Lying around 50 million light-years away, Messier 99 is one of over a thousand galaxies that make up the Virgo Cluster, the closest cluster of galaxies to us. Messier 99 itself is relatively bright and large, meaning it was one of the first galaxies to be discovered, way back in the 18th century. This earned it a place in Charles Messier's famous catalogue of astronomical objects.

In recent years, a number of unexplained phenomena in Messier 99 have been studied by astronomers. Among these is the nature of one of the brighter stars visible in this image. Catalogued as PTF 10fqs, and visible as a yellow-orange star in the top-left corner of this image, it was first spotted by the Palomar Transient Facility, which scans the skies for sudden changes in brightness (or transient phenomena, to use astronomers' jargon). These can be caused by different kinds of event, including variable stars and supernova explosions.
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Cheeseburger

Will your next burger be ground-up mealworms?

Charles Choi
LiveScience
Thu, 20 Dec 2012 08:21 UTC
Mealworms
© WikipediaGrossed out? Get used to it, mealworms may someday be a sustainable alternative to chicken and beef, scientists say.
The wriggly beetle larvae known as mealworms could one day dominate supermarket shelves as a more sustainable alternative to chicken, beef, pork and milk, researchers in the Netherlands say.

Currently, livestock use about 70 percent of all farmland. In addition, the demand for animal protein continues to rise globally, and is expected to grow by up to 80 percent between 2012 and 2050.

The act of clearing land for livestock is one that damages the environments on which people and other life depend. For instance, it helps release global warming gases.

Conventional livestock take up so much in the way of environmental resources that some have long suggested that creatures lower down in the food chain - insects - might in theory provide just as much protein in a more environmentally friendly way. However, little data are available on the environmental impacts associated with insect production, said researcher Dennis Oonincx at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

To see if insects really might be a more sustainable food source than livestock, Oonincx and his colleagues analyzed what global warming gases insects might generate as a result of respiration, the production of their feed, distribution networks to stores where they would get sold, and emissions from the heating of climate-controlled rearing facilities.
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Telescope

A New Earth? Potentially habitable planet discovered orbiting nearby star similar to our sun


RT
Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:54 UTC
Tau Ceti
© J Pinfield/RoPACS network/University of HertfordshireArtist's impression: five planets orbit the star Tau Ceti, which is just 11.9 light-years from Earth.
Astronomers have discovered that the closest Sun-like star, Tau Ceti, is orbited by five planets, one of which is in the "habitable range". If its existence is confirmed, the planet could be the closest potentially life-harboring world to our own.

Tau Ceti, twelve light years away, belongs to the same G-type yellow main-sequence class as our sun, which is relatively rare - only one in 25 stars has the same properties.

Its planets were detected not by direct observation, but by calculating the slight gravitational tug these as-yet-unseen planets exert on the orbit of their star. Previously, these star 'wobbles' could not be clearly separated due to a multitude of other factors, but scientists at several universities in the UK and the US, say they have cleared the 'noise' with sophisticated new techniques and have found five planets.
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Roses

Plants smell fruit flies' funk

Tim Wall
Discovery News
Wed, 19 Dec 2012 04:19 UTC
The flowers we smell may be getting a whiff of us at the same time. No one knows if roses take time in life to stop and smell the humans, but some plants take action when they smell insect pests.

A study at Penn State found that when tall goldenrod plants sense the sex attractant released by male fruit flies, they produce their own chemical defenses. Those defenses make the plants less appealing to female fruit flies looking for a place to lay their eggs. Females puncture the plants and lay their eggs inside the stems. The attack isn't deadly, but plants serving as fruit fly nurseries tend to produce fewer and smaller seeds.

However, when goldenrod plants in the wild had been exposed to male fruit fly's amorous odor, the plants tended to harbor fewer egg-laying sites. What's more the plants also became more resistant to attacks by other insects.

The exact physiological means by which the plants smell the flies is still a mystery.

"Our understanding of plant olfaction in general remains quite limited," said Mark Mescher, an entomologist at Penn State, in a press release.

"It's become increasingly clear in recent years that plants are responsive to odors," said Mescher. "But previous examples of this are all plant-to-plant. For example, some plants have been shown to respond to the odor of insect-damaged neighbors by priming their own defenses. What's new about this is that it seems that plants may sometimes be able to smell the insects themselves."

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Heart

Genetically modified cells could replace pacemakers

Charles Q. Choi
TechNewsDaily
Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:18 UTC
Pacemaker
© khuruzero | Shutterstock
Scientists have successfully transformed guinea-pig heart-muscle cells into pacemaker cells, paving the way for a biological alternative to artificial pacemakers.

Pacemaker cells generate electrical activity that guides heart muscle into beating in an orderly, rhythmic manner. Of the heart's 10 billion cells, fewer than 10,000 are pacemaker cells, which are all clustered in the sinoatrial node of the heart's right upper chamber.

If pacemaker cells go awry due to disease or age, the heart pumps irregularly, at best. Patients whose pacemaker cells have failed, but who still remain healthy enough to undergo surgery often rely on electronic pacemakers to survive. However, such methods face problems because "electronic devices are limited to their finite battery life," said researcher Hee-Cheol Cho, a cell biologist at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles.

Other complications may occur with the devices, including accidental movement away from where the pacemaker was implanted, breakage and entanglement of the electrical wires that are screwed into the heart muscle. Such problems "are not uncommon and could be catastrophic," Cho told TechNewsDaily.

In addition, the devices generally cannot adjust when patients need to change their heart rates to walk faster or run. Moreover, cases of bacterial infection in these devices are rising. "All these problems could be solved by a biological pacemaker that is microscopic in scale and free from all hardware," Cho said.
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Attention

Faults under Japan's nuclear power: A second nuclear plant in Japan sits atop a possibly active seismic fault

Christina Reed
Discovery News
Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:23 UTC
A second nuclear plant in Japan sits atop a possibly active seismic fault, government-appointed experts said Friday, days after the first facility was said to be at risk. A panel appointed by the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) said fractured strips of earth beneath the Higashidori plant's compound in northern Japan may be active faults, meaning it would likely have to be scrapped.

On Monday, geologists said it was probable that the Tsuruga nuclear plant in the center of the country was sitting on faults that showed signs of geologically recent movement. Active faults are those that, amongst other things, have moved within the past 120,000-130,000 years. Under government guidelines atomic installations cannot be sited on a fault if it is still classed as active.

NRA acting head Kunihiko Shimazaki said some of the fractures under the Higashidori plant compound may have resulted from tectonic movement in the past 100,000 years.
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Comet 2

New comet: C/2012 X1 (LINEAR)


"G.V.Schiaparelli" Astronomical Observatory
Sat, 15 Dec 2012 13:42 UTC
C/2012 X1 (LINEAR) was discovered by the LINEAR survey using a 1.0-m f/2.15 reflector from Socorro, NM, USA, on Dec. 08.38. Their automatic routines do not require human intervention, so it was reported as asteroidal and posted in the NEO Confirmation Page under the temporary designation CE63887.

I was able to image it the following night with a 0.38-m f/6.8 reflector. Visually (i.e. on the screen) it appeared slightly diffuse respect to stars, and the analysis with the "FWHM method" clearly revealed its nature: profile 30% larger than stars nearby, and a coma 8″ wide.

This is again a demonstration of how good is the FWHM method (used largely in our T3 project) in discerning comets among asteroids.
Many other observatories detected it, and results were published in CBET 3340 (subscription required) and astrometry, together with preliminary parabolic orbital elements, in MPEC 2012-X70.

204 image (and FWHM boxes):
Comet C/2012 X1
© "G.V.Schiaparelli" Astronomical Observatory
Comet C/2012 X1_1
© "G.V.Schiaparelli" Astronomical Observatory
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Info

Deep-Earth microbe from South Africa appears in California

Douglas M. Main
OurAmazingPlanet
Fri, 14 Dec 2012 14:15 UTC
Microbes
© Duane P. Moser, Desert Research InstituteThe dark shaft of the Mponeng mine in South Africa where microbes were found flourishing in rocks up to several miles below the Earth's surface.
"I wish they all could be California microbes," is not something that the Beach Boys sang. But perhaps they should have.

A shadowy microbe first found 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) beneath South African soil has turned up in California, on the other side of the planet, as reported by The New Scientist.

The microbe, known as Desulforudis audaxviator, was originally detected in water deep within a South African gold mine. It was the only organism found in the area, leading some to label its home as an "ecosystem of one."

Studies found that it relies only on hydrogen and sulfide for food, derived from the breakdown of uranium and other radioactive elements. It has somehow evolved to do without the sun or oxygen.

Now, a project to map Earth's deep biosphere called the Census of Deep Life has found DNA 99 per cent identical to that of D. audaxviator, according to The New Scientist. It was detected in bore holes 2,950 feet (900 meters) beneath the surface of California's Death Valley.
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