Rachel Kaufman, freelance reporter » Science

Comet Seen Vaporizing in Sun’s Atmosphere—A First

Rachel — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:27:46 +0000

For the first time, a death-diving comet has been observed as it vaporized in the sun’s atmosphere, thanks to new data from a NASA satellite.

More than a thousand known comets are so-called Kreutz sungrazers, a family of icy bodies that pass very near to the sun’s surface on their orbits through the solar system.

Using NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), astronomers are able to spot many of these sungrazers as they get close to our star.

That’s because SOHO carries a key instrument that has an occulting disk, a circle that blocks out the glare of the sun’s main body so scientists can study the star’s faint upper atmosphere, or corona.

So far, most of SOHO’s documented sungrazer deaths involved comets breaking up at a distance or simply vanishing behind the occulting disk.

“Some of them made it behind the disk, and none of them came out on the other side,” said solar physicist Karel Schrijver, a fellow at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California.

But this comet was different. Here’s why.

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Sharks Eating Songbirds in Gulf of Mexico

Rachel — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:33:10 +0000

What’s a songbird doing in the belly of a tiger shark?

The predators are eating land birds affected by offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico (map), according to new research.

Marcus Drymon, of Dauphin Island Sea Lab, has been studying fish off the Alabama coast since 2006. During a routine sampling in 2009, he pulled a tiger shark onto the deck of his boat to tag and release it.

“He coughed up some feathers,” Drymon said.

That in itself wasn’t unusual, he said. Tiger sharks in other parts of the world are known to eat marine birds. But once Drymon analyzed the feathers in the lab, he was fairly sure they had come from a terrestrial bird.

So Drymon and his team launched a project to study the sharks’ diets. Over two years the team caught 50 tiger sharks—mostly within 5 to 10 miles (8 to 16 kilometers) offshore—and dissected their stomachs.

In about half of the sharks, Drymon found “feathers, or beaks, or bird feet, or some kind of bird part.”

All the parts were later found to originate from land birds such as woodpeckers, tanagers, and meadowlarks.

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Small Spiders Have Big Brains That Spill Into Their Legs

Rachel — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:14:37 +0000

They’re not fat, they’re just big-brained: Tiny spiders have such huge brains for their body sizes that the organs can spill into the animals’ body cavities, a new study shows.

Such big brains may explain why very small spiders—some less than a millimeter across—are just as good at spinning webs as bigger arachnids.

For the study, a team led by Bill Eberhard, a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and a professor at the University of Costa Rica, examined nine spider species from six web-weaving families.

The researchers found that the smaller the spider, the bigger its brain relative to its body size.

In some spiders, the central nervous system took up nearly 80 percent of the space in their bodies, sometimes even spilling into their legs.

(Read more here.)

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It Doesn’t Add Up

Rachel — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:50:04 +0000

Much attention has been given to the gap in performance between boys and girls in mathematics skills. In a new study published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematical and computer science at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, and Janet Mertz, a professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, examine this gender gap and test several popular explanations. Their cross-cultural analysis seems to rule out several causal candidates, including coeducational schools, low standards of living, and innate variability among boys — a proposal made famous in a 2005 speech by Lawrence H. Summers, who was Harvard University’s president at the time. “We have pretty clear data debunking the greater male variability hypothesis,” Mertz says.
What, then, is the cause of the gender gap? Like the gap itself, the cause varies, the authors conclude. Mertz and Kane, who are married, don’t rule out the existence of very small biological difference, but, by comparing test scores across cultures, they indict local social factors as the likely primary culprit. Gender gaps vary from place to place, showing that cultural factors swamp biological ones.
Read more….

Photo on this page is from Jimmiehomeschoolmom on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

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Can Russia’s Stuck Mars Spacecraft Be Saved?

Rachel — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:22:25 +0000

Russia’s latest shot at Mars suffered a setback shortly after launch yesterday when its upper-stage thrusters failed to fire, leaving the Phobos-Grunt probe stuck in orbit around Earth instead of on its way into deep space.

Details are still hazy about what went wrong, but the problem appears to lie with an instrument called a star sensor.

The spacecraft should have “known” when to fire its engines after using the sensor to orient itself to the stars, thereby setting its course for Mars. Either a software problem stopped the star sensor from working, or the sensor itself failed.

The craft is scheduled to pass over Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan shortly, and technicians there will attempt to communicate with Phobos-Grunt to determine whether the failure is fixable.

The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, originally said they had three days to get the stranded craft working, but mission managers have since changed that estimate to two weeks, giving them more time to fix the problem.

Read more, but know that in early January 2012, the craft plunged into the Pacific ocean. Bummer.

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Male Spiders Give “Back Rubs” to Seduce Their Mates

Rachel — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:32:29 +0000

When a male golden orb-weaver spider Nephila pilipes wants to get busy, he pulls out a special trick: He gives his mate a “back rub,” new research shows.

For many spiders, females of the species are much bigger than the males—N. pilipes females are up to ten times larger—so mating is always a risky proposition. An unlucky suitor might get interrupted in his carnal embrace when a female kicks him off and eats him.

(So then what?)

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My 2 Suns: Bounty of New Exoplanet Discoveries Includes a World Orbiting a Binary Star

Rachel — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:36:16 +0000

The hundreds of distant worlds, some large and some small, that are known to dot the galaxy provide plenty of intrigue for the scientists who hunt them. But the catalogued planetary population has just gotten a lot larger and more diverse, thanks to word this week of a newly identified planet orbiting two suns, more than a dozen newfound “super-Earths,” and strong indications that the Milky Way Galaxy is home to an almost unfathomable number of planets awaiting discovery.

The most exotic of the latest batch of exoplanets is the world with two suns, like Tatooine of Star Wars or Dr. Who’s Gallifrey. The planet, named Kepler 16 b for the NASA Kepler spacecraft that spotted it, revolves around two stars locked in a tight binary pairing; the planet’s wide, nearly circular orbit keeps it well outside the stars’ orbital dance. The trio is not the only so-called circumbinary system known, but it is the first for which researchers have been able to measure the properties of both stars and the planet so precisely, and the first system where the planet has been directly detected, rather than inferred.

(So?

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Snails Survive Being Eaten by Birds—A Mystery

Rachel — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 17:30:49 +0000

Tiny snails can survive being eaten by birds—and the gastropods come out the other end perfectly healthy, a recent study says.

Researchers studying feces of wild Japanese white-eye birds had noticed a surprising number of intact snail shells, especially of Tornatellides boeningi. This 0.1-inch (0.25-centimeter) snail is common to Hahajima Island (see map), about 620 miles (a thousand kilometers) south of Tokyo.

So Shinichiro Wada, a graduate student at Tohoku University in Japan, and colleagues fed more than a hundred snails to captive white-eyes and 55 to captive brown-eared bulbuls, another bird known to eat T. boeningi.

(And then?)

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Bug With “Singing” Penis Among World’s Loudest Animals

Rachel — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:25:34 +0000

Although not the loudest animal in terms of sheer decibels, the 0.07-inch (2-millimeter) water boatman species Micronecta scholtzi, pictured, does make the loudest sounds relative to its body size, scientists announced in June in the journal PLoS ONE.

Engineers and evolutionary biologists in Scotland and France recorded the boatman—which is roughly the size of a grain of rice—”singing” in a tank. The aquatic insect’s songs peaked at 105 decibels, roughly equivalent to the volume of a pounding jackhammer within arm’s reach.

The chirps are loud enough that humans can hear the sounds while standing at the edge of a boatman’s pond. Fortunately for nature lovers, though, nearly all the sound is lost when the noises cross from water to air.

Remarkably, the boatman creates his songs by rubbing his penis against his belly, in a process similar to how crickets chirp. Sound-producing genitalia are relatively rare within the animal kingdom, but animals have evolved hundreds of other ways to boost their hoots, howls, and snaps.

Read the rest at NationalGeographic.com

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3-D printers launch small businesses

Rachel — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:28:20 +0000

They are machines straight out of ”Star Trek” or ”The Jetsons.”

It’s now possible for anyone with an idea to create tangible items — flowerpots, cell phone cases, jewelry, or nearly anything — from 3-D printers. All the person has to do is send a design for a product to a 3-D printer and out pops a real 3-D object.

Most 3-D printer owners are big businesses or tinkerers, because the machines are so expensive. But some innovators are using this technology to start new businesses and earn money.

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