Quirks and Quarks

Blood drinking bats can suck energy out of their protein-rich mealsVampire bats are famous for exclusively drinking blood, but they’re also surprisingly good runners. And part of why that’s surprising is that blood contains very little carbohydrates or fat, which most other mammals rely on for fuel. So Kenneth Welch and Giulia Rossi at University of Toronto Scarborough ran bats on a specially-designed treadmill to find out more. They discovered that the bats can almost instantly convert the amino acids in their blood meals into usable energy. The research was published in the journal Biology Letters.Canada’s most prestigious science prize goes to garbage scienceDr. Kerry Rowe of Queen’s University’s Civil Engineering Department has been awarded this year’s Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering for his critical work in designing landfills that have to contain our waste and pollutants for generations.UK sugar rationing in the 1950s led to lower risks of illness late in lifeSugar was rationed in the UK from 1940 to 1953 due to the war and postwar austerity, and so was consumed at about the level nutritionists now recommend. Dr. Claire Boone from McGill University was part of a new study published in the journal Science which found that the limited sugar intake by people in the UK during pregnancy and the first couple of years of life resulted in significant decreases in diabetes and hypertension.Reinventing the wheel to understand how the wheel was first inventedThe invention of the wheel is a milestone in human technological evolution, but it’s not clear how it happened. A new study combines design science and computational mechanics to virtually re-invent the wheel and understand the developments that could have led to the creation of the first wheel-and-axle system. The research, led by Kai James from Georgia Institute of Technology, adds support to the theory that the wheel was likely first invented by Neolithic copper miners in around 3900 BC. The research was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.Can high tech fishing gear limit losses of endangered whales?The endangered North Atlantic Right Whale has had a long and rocky road to recovery after the depredations of commercial whaling. One of the major threats to the species today is fishing line entanglements. In a documentary, producer Sonya Buyting explores how researchers, like Sean Brillant from the Canadian Wildlife Federation, and fishers, like Greg Beckerton in New Brunswick, are trialing high-tech ropeless fishing gear to save the whales while still preserving the fishers’ livelihoods.

There’s no time like this time for Standard TimeIn most of Canada and the US, our clocks are “falling back” an hour as we switch to Standard time for the winter and as usual we’re hearing mutterings about abandoning the time change.. Chronobiologists like Malcolm von Schantz, who study our internal circadian rhythms, are saying that if we do ditch the practice, we should revert to standard time instead of having permanent daylight time, because morning light is very important to regulating our circadian rhythms, as is having darkness in the evening time. Von Schantz recently co-authored a letter with the British Sleep Society, published in the Journal of Sleep Research, calling for the UK government to end to the practice.Sorry beavers and Polar bears – the unique Canadian animals are not what you thinkBiologists have investigated which animals, by range and evolutionary history, are most unique in Canada as part of an attempt to get a more accurate picture of Canadian biodiversity. The research, led by Arne Mooers from Simon Fraser University, highlights animals such as the mudpuppy, the osprey, the virginia opossum, and the two-tailed frog. At the top of the list is the spiny softshell turtle, which branched away from its family tree 180 million years ago. The research was published in the journal The Canadian Field-Naturalist. A corpse in a well makes a macabre myth realA story recorded in a 12th century Norse saga of a violent attack on a castle has been validated with the discovery and identification of human remains. The story goes that the invaders dropped a dead man into the castle well in order to poison its water supply before departing. That man’s remains have now been found. Dr. Anna Petersén, an archeologist at the Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage Research, worked with a team to identify and date the remains of this 800 year old skeleton. Their study, published in the journal iScience, revealed he was between 30 - 40 years old, and had blonde hair and blue eyes.A wide range of animals take a tippleIndulgence in alcohol is seen as a largely human vice, but biologists have collected evidence that a much wider range of animals from insects to apes will seek out ethanol, often in fermented fruit, and will, on occasion, overindulge. Dr. Matthew Carrigan, an associate professor of biology at the College of Central Florida says that some birds that fly into windows have been found to have high levels of ethanol, and intoxicated fruit flies will make poor mating choices. The study was published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.Tapping into science for a greater appreciation of artistic masterpiecesRecent studies of two of the world’s most famous paintings by Dutch artists have provided surprising insights into the depths of their art. A new analysis of the entire sky in Vincent van Gogh’s painting, The Starry Night, which includes 14 swirling eddies shows how the artist intuitively understood the nature of turbulence, an incredibly complex phenomenon of fluid dynamics. Francois Schmitt, an oceanographer and research director at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and his team published their research in the journal Physics of Fluids. To figure out what it was about Johannes Vermeer’s painting, Girl with the Pearl Earring, that viewers find so captivating, the Mauritshuis museum where the artwork hangs in The Hague commissioned a neuroscientific study. Andries van der Leij, the research director of Neurensics — a consumer neuroscience company — and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, said they found that people’s eyes were automatically drawn to the girl’s eyes, mouth and pearl earring in a way that drew them in for an emotional experience.

A Zombie star’s outburst could soon be appearing in the night skyIn 1946 a stellar explosion brightened the night sky as the result of a zombie star going nova 3,000 light-years away reached Earth. The nova soon dimmed, but scientists are expecting a repeat performance any day now. NASA astrophysicist Elizabeth Hayes, the project scientist of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, described it as a white dwarf star devouring so much of its companion star that it reaches a critical threshold resulting in a thermonuclear explosion on its surface. When that happens, they expect we’ll be able to see it above the western horizon when it temporarily becomes as bright as any star in the Big Dipper. A tiny dinosaur used wings to run fast, and possibly to fly106 million years ago, in what is now South Korea, a bird-like dinosaur with wings ran across a muddy flat and left behind tiny footprints. By reconstructing its stride from these prints, paleontologists have found that it ran faster than could be explained if it weren’t using its wings to push it along. Dr. Hans Larsson of McGill university says this discovery gives new insight into the evolution of flight in dinosaurs. This study was published in the journal PNAS.A climate-change disaster scenario could be closer than we thinkThis week, a group of 44 researchers from 15 countries presented an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers, to shed light on the potential collapse of a key ocean current system. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC, is a network of currents that brings warm water from equatorial regions North, and recirculates cool water South, and recent studies indicate it is slowing down because of climate change. A new study, from a team at the University of Oregon led by Christo Buizert, analyzed ice cores to look at what exactly happened when the AMOC had collapsed last, during the last ice age. Their results suggest that an ice sheet would have spread as far down as the South of France, or New York City, which would devastate ecosystems and plunge Europe into a deep freeze while disrupting rainfall distribution across Asia. The research was published in the journal PNAS.Cloudy with a chance of great whitesA group of researchers in California is using drone footage along with artificial intelligence to develop a shark forecasting system. The team, led by Douglas McCauley from the University of California Santa Barbara, have been flying drones over the waters of Padaro beach in California to get daily shark counts, and compare that to oceanological details to determine what conditions make the water more or less “sharky.” While they spotted up to 15 sharks a day near unsuspecting surfers, this beach has very few interactions between humans and sharks in any given year. The results of the drone study have been published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.This biologist wants to change your mind about scary spidersSpiders. For some they’re just a bit creepy. For others they’re nightmare fuel. But for a select few, they’re one of the most fascinating and intriguing creatures on our planet. Behavioural Ecologist James O’Hanlon is one of those people and he thinks we should trade in our arachnophobia for arachnophilia. He pleads his case in a new book, Eight-Legged Wonders The Surprising Lives of Spiders.

Canaries in the coal mine — a report on Canada’s bird life is an environmental report cardUsing millions of observations, collected over 50 years, from bird watchers across the country, the conservation group Birds Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada have released a report called The State of Canada’s Birds. The big takeaways are that many bird species, such as grassland birds and arctic birds, are in trouble because of climate change, damage to habitat and other causes. The good news is that where we’ve made efforts at conservation, such as with birds of prey and waterfowl, it’s working.Ants farm fungus, and have been doing it since the dinosaurs diedMany species of ant grow fungus for food in their colonies, feeding it on plant matter and carefully cultivating it to protect it from disease. And a new study, led by Smithsonian researcher Ted Schulz, has determined that this has been going on for at least 66 million years, and probably evolved as a strategy to survive the environmental catastrophe that followed the asteroid impact that annihilated the dinosaurs. The research was published in the journal Science.A Canadian group is exploring how to filter and destroy forever chemicals in our waterPFAS, a group of 15,000 synthetic chemicals that are also known as forever chemicals, are a tricky problem because they’ve spread everywhere and are hard to destroy. But a group from the University of British Columbia, led by chemical engineer Johan Foster, has found a way to efficiently capture the chemicals from water and break them down into harmless components. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications Engineering.It’s two, two, two animals in one. Comb jellies can join their bodies togetherScientists studying a jellyfish-like animal called a ctenophore, or comb jelly, were shocked to discover that, when injured, two individual animals could fuse together. University of Colorado biologist Mariana Rodriguez-Santiago and her team found that the animals melded their nervous systems, and even their guts, while retaining individual features. The research was published in the journal Current Biology.Using the sea to soak up our excess carbon dioxideWe’ve released 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. We may slow our emissions, but the CO2 we’ve already released will warm our planet for thousands of years. Which is why scientists are now trying to understand how we might safely attempt to remove it on a vast scale. Journalist Moira Donovan explores research into marine carbon dioxide removal, and how scientists are trying to understand if we can fix a problem they’d hoped we’d never face. Moira speaks with: Will Burt – Chief Ocean Scientist Planetary TechnologiesKatja Fennel – Department of Oceanography, Dalhousie University, HalifaxKai Schulz – Biological Oceanographer, School of Environment, Science and Engineering, Southern Cross University, Australia Ruth Musgrave – Department of Oceanography, Dalhousie University, Halifax