Category: Biology

The Northern Clingfish Can Really Suck

By Anupum Pant

The Northern Clingfish, an ugly fish the size of your hand, is a relatively tiny creature which can lift really heavy weights. No wait, it doesn’t really lift weights.

This fish has fused pectoral and pelvic fins which form a complete disc like structure under it which enables it to stick to some of the most rough and most wet surfaces. Thanks vacuüm.

The suction cup under it doesn’t need any live muscles to work. Even a dead Northern Clingfish can suck as good as a live one. Look at how the suction cups under a 0.5 lb Northern Clingfish can hold a 6 lb rock for a couple of seconds…

Evolution of Eggs

By Anupum Pant

Eggs come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours. Birds, a major group of creatures that descended from reptiles have, for several years, continued to evolve the design of their eggs for millions of years now (not consciously, through natural selection).

Eggs could have been cube shaped. In that case they would have been very difficult to lay. Also, they would have been weakest at the centre points of a face of the cube. Hence, eggs didn’t end up being squarish.

While most eggs have evolved to, well, an egg-shape, some eggs like those of some owls are nearly spherical in shape. But oval and pointy eggs do have an advantage of sort.

Spherical eggs tend to roll easily, and if laid somewhere near a cliff, they’d roll away, never to be seen ever again. Oval eggs normally tend to roll in circles. Usually, they roll in big circles. Still dangerous for birds who perch on cliffs most of the time.

Of all the eggs, the egg of a common guillemot bird is probably the most incredible – in the sense that it has a design that doesn’t let it roll down cliffs very easily.

Common guillemots are sea birds and they normally like to perch on cliffs. To add to the danger of their precarious perching places, they usually perch on such cliffs with a huge group. Also, they don’t even make nests.

Had their eggs been shaped like those of owls, they would have easily gotten knocked by someone from that huge group of perching birds, perching on precarious cliffs. So, their eggs have evolved to survive these conditions.

This is how their eggs look like. They are very awkwardly shaped. But when it rolls, thanks to natural selection, it rolls in very small circles! They don’t fall off cliffs easily. Wonderful!

common guillemot egg

First seen at [io9]

One Tree, Forty Different Fruits

By Anupum Pant

Certain kinds of similar trees can be grafted onto each other into a single tree which produces all of the grafted fruits. For example oranges and lemons trees can be grafted onto each other, but not apple and oranges.

In fact there is a company I found on the internet that sells such trees. They call them the fruit salad trees. Usually such companies stop at a point where they have about 6-8 different fruits grafted on to a single tree.

However, one person, Sam Van Aken wanted to save a few varieties of fruits which could have otherwise been lost for ever. He grafted 40 of the stone fruit trees together. As a result, now there’s this one amazing tree that bears 40 kinds of stone fruits. It’s called the 40 fruit tree. It’s apricots, peaches, almonds, cherries etc all growing on a single tree!

Another interesting thing about it that it is a very normal looking tree until the spring, and when it blossoms, it turns into a tree full of crimson and pink colours. Here’s how it looks in the spring.

tree-of-40-fruit_612

Bizarre Starfish Wasting Syndrome

By Anupum Pant

Up in the Washington state a videographer and also a diver, Laura James noticed a couple of  dead Starfish on the coast one day. The dead bodies looked like something mysterious had happened. There were broken bodies and splats all over the place as if the fish had been zapped by a laser.

Laura videographed some of the tens of thousands of starfish bodies all over the north america’s pacific coast. No one was sure what was actually happening. And then there were reports of these mysterious starfish deaths from all over the west coast of North America.

For some time, only the sunflower starfish were thought to be affected by this. However, on further investigation, it was found that almost 12 different species of starfish were dying mysteriously all over the west coast (and some on the east coast too). When this was confirmed to be an epidemic of some sort, they started calling it the sea star wasting syndrome and notified the scientists.

Ben minor, a western Washington university professor of biology started collecting sea stars at the coast. They found a number of normal sea stars. Later when the search continued a pile of sea star arms and twisted parts of them were found at different places. Some of the live starfish were collected and were studied in the laboratory.

It was confirmed that the starfish which were affected by this epidemic experienced twisting arms and lesions first and then the arms crawled away in different directions, tearing the body of a starfish apart. All of it in under 24 hours. This bizarre disease then left a spill of inside parts of the fish and broken body parts all over the place.

No one knows for sure what causes this bizarre disease among the sea stars.

Seeing Your Own Eye Blood Vessels

By Anupum Pant

Blind spots are fine and I’ve known for years how to spot your own blind spot. You can make 2 spots on a paper separated by 4-5 inches, close your right eye and look at the right side spot with your left eye. If you do that and move forward or backward ( and rest at about 15 inches from the surface you drew on), you’d find a point where your left eye’s peripheral vision would not render the left side spot. You’d have found your blind spot.

But there is something more interesting, I never knew. You can actually see the blood vessels of your eye, with your own eye. Here’s how…

Take a sheet of paper (or card), and poke a pin hole in it. Then close one eye and holding paper close to your eye, jerk around the paper in little circles. At the same time, make sure you are looking at a bright white area through that hole. You could open up MS paint, make the whole canvas white and stare at it through the hole. Try to focus on the white screen and not the paper (or card)…

The video probably explains it better.

A 2-Minute Exercise to Do Better in Interviews

By Anupum Pant

Is there a job interview or a public speaking gig coming up for you? Well, you don’t have to worry as much as you are doing right now because Amy Cuddy is here to save you.

Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, talks about a power pose – a 2-minute pose – you could strike before going into an interview which has been proven to have a significant difference in your performance at anything that requires confidence (like an interview).

She introduces this concept in the a very convincing TED talk that I’ve attached below. If you do not need much convincing, you could skip watching the talk and just do this before you go into an interview or go to the stage for something.

  • Find a quiet place where no one will see you and make fun of you.
  • Strike a superhero pose. If you don’t know what that means, stand like this. For 2 minutes. Done! Otherwise, here is a nice infographic based on Cuddy’s research. [Link]
  • If you don’t, at least do not stoop and close your shoulders while waiting in the lobby because it certainly affects you negatively.

Apparently, according to an experiment by Amy Cuddy and Dana Carney of Berkeley, 86% of those who posed in the high-power position (the superhero pose) opted to gamble, while only 60% of the low-power posers (closed poses) felt comfortable taking a roll of the dice.

Moreover, a significant difference was found in the saliva samples of both the high-power pose people and the low-power pose people. Who’d have thought that a simple 2 minute pose could make chemical differences in your body!

On an average, the high-pose people saliva showed an 8% increase in the testosterone level, while the ones who did the low-power pose had a 10% decrease of the same. That is phenomenal, if you ask me.

Also, the hormone related to stress, Cortisol decreased by 25% among high-power posers and increased 15% among low power posers. (A decrease in cortisol levels is better for activities like interviews)

The Giant Japanese Hornet is an Intense Killer Machine

By Anupum Pant

For the sake of knowing, scientists have given the Japanese Giant hornet a name – Vespa mandarinia japonica – a name normally you need not remember. However, there is a thing you should always remember about them. See the picture of this insect below and remember what it looks like. And if you see it coming towards you while you are holidaying in Japan, just run for for your life. This is the Japanese Giant Hornet:

giant hornet

Yes, this giant hornet is a deadly killer machine. You should fear it because…

Well, first of all they are large and fearsome and have stingers that are more than 6 mm long. They use these to inject a relatively large amount of venom into the target – A kind of venom which attacks the nervous system and damages tissues. The venom is also known to destroy red blood cells, which can result in kidney failure and even death in some cases.

Secondly, just read what Wikipedia says about it…

Thirty to forty people die in Japan every year after having been stung, which makes the Japanese giant hornet the second most lethal animal in Japan after humans (bears kill zero to five people and venomous snakes kill five to ten people each year).

Thirdly, these hornets are known to move around in small groups of 20-30 individuals who manage to kill tens of thousands of bees in their own beehive, and then they steal their young ones. About 30 of these giant hornets can kill 30,000 bees in a single attack. They don’t just kill, they rip the bees apart mercilessly. Watch a video of them ravaging a beehive…

Also remember that it won’t come searching for you to sting you to death, until it senses threat.

The Amusing Kiwi Beaks

By Anupum Pant

Kiwis have a fairly long beaks, but technically they have the shortest beaks of all birds. There’s a very funny reason for that.

Kiwis can’t see too well. However they have an exceptionally good sense of smell, thanks to their nostrils which are at the tip of their beaks.

According to another research done recently, Kiwi beaks have specialized sensors at the tip which help them to sense tiny vibrations. Combining both the exceptionally good sense of smell and the ability to detect minute vibrations using their beaks, kiwis are able to find creepy crawlies moving under a layer of mud.

Now, they have long thin beaks, physically. And at the end of the beak there are nostrils.

Officially the convention to measure the beak of a bird dictates that the measurement be done from the end of the tip to the nostril. And since Kiwis have nostrils at the tip, the distance from the tip of their beaks to their nostrils is very less (negligible). That distance is also, technically, according to the convention, the length of their beaks.

So, Kiwis officially have the shortest beaks among all birds, even if they physically have fairly long beaks.

A Mean Creature from the Sea

By Anupum Pant

Stone fish is a bizarre looking creature, 15-20 inch sized, weighing about 5 pounds, is covered in dark patches and has ugly pimple like things all over its body. It’s found in the coastal regions of the Indian ocean and the Pacific ocean and likes to sit in between coral reefs and stones most of the time. The fish can survive outside of water for a whole day.

The fish is well-known as the most venomous fish. The most surprising thing about it is that it can be held in bare hands and you still won’t get poisoned.

However, a part of this fish can leave you dead in minutes. The fish has very sharp needle like things inside of skin sacks on its back, which when stepped on, are designed to inject an extremely powerful toxin into your body. The toxin is known to cause severe pain, paralysis and tissue necrosis. These venom spines can refill in about a week. Watch spines go in the video I’ve attached below…

A Man-Made Leaf

By Anupum Pant

Julian Melchiorri, a graduate student from Royal College of art, claims to have fabricated the first ever man-made biological leaf which absorbs water & carbon dioxide, just like a leaf does, and produces oxygen.

It looks like a promising first step towards enabling longer distance space travel – in a way that the artificial leaf made by him could be used to supply oxygen in micro-gravity, in which terrestrial plants have a hard time growing.

The artificial leaf he made for his project involves extracted chloroplasts from plant cells laid on a matrix of silk protein.

The “first man-made biological leaf” could enable humans to colonise space from Dezeen on Vimeo.

[Video] Your Body vs. The World

By Anupum Pant

Like 9gag, sometimes BuzzFeed can be informative too. So, for the time I stay away for a weekend trip, here’s an interesting video I came across.

Just for the record: The surface of your skin has more bacteria than there are people on Earth.

Tickling Yourself

By Anupum Pant

In most cases tickling yourself is tough. That is because whenever you try to tickle yourself, at the back of your head (yes, really at the back, in a part of the brain called the cerebellum) you know that the sensation was caused as a result of your own movement. That way, the brain is able to predict the sensation and is able to nullify it.

When someone else tries it on you, the brain fails to predict the movement and the somatosensory cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex fire up to make you feel the tickle.

But have you ever tried tickling yourself with a fake hand? It still doesn’t work! Even when you don’t use your direct body part, your brain knows and can predict movement. Unless of course, the fake hand is being used by someone else. It’s interesting but believable that tickling yourself with a fake rubber hand doesn’t fool the brain. But there’s more.

In fact, if you had a tickling robot which could be controlled with a remote control, you still won’t be able to use the remote to operate it and make yourself tickle. While, if some one else had the control and they tried to control the robot to tickle you, you’d feel more ticklish. Unless, there’s a delay. It blows my mind to think about that!

What if, there was a robot which could control the remote control of a tickling robot, and you could control the first one with another remote control. Would you be able to tickle yourself using this contraption? I’m saying no, you still won’t be able to tickle yourself if there was no delay in between. What do you say?

Yes, delay is crucial here. Suppose you had a long contraption which would make movements after a few seconds of delay with respect to the control (which you have in your hand), you’d feel more ticklish, if you tried. Studies say, more the delay, the more ticklish it is.

Note: People with schizophrenia can tickle themselves, using their own hands, fake hand or something else.

Remember, I started the article with “most cases”. That is because there are a couple of ways to tickle yourself successfully. Try making little circles with a soft touch behind your knee for instance. Or use a feather on the sole of your foot. Or, try making circles with your tongue on the roof of your mouth where there’s a ribbed texture…

Weather Reporting Leeches

By Anupum Pant

Of all the creatures in the whole wide world, you’ll be surprised to know that leeches have played a fairly important role in the history of weather forecasting. An incredibly bizarre device invented by Dr. George merry weather, in the 19th century, called the tempest prognosticator, was basically a barometer powered by leeches.

Dr. George Merryweather, aptly named, was a surgeon by profession who was a lot into leeches. Since barometers were already being used for a long time then, to indicate approaching storms, he knew that air pressure was crucial in determining weather. However, Dr. Merryweather, an ingenious man, hell-bent on doing things the different way, had a different plan in his mind.

In his profession, he came across medicinal leeches all the time. In course of time, with a keen ability to notice details, he noticed that leeches were sensitive to electrical variations in the atmosphere.
He noticed a peculiar behaviour among these creatures. He observed that the leeches often started squirming around in a chaotic manner before a storm arrived.

Putting this practical knowledge to use, and experimenting with a number of designs, Dr. Merryweather devised a contraption. It consisted of 12 pint-sized bottles arranged in a circle. Each of which contained a leech in one-and-half-inch deep rain water. The top of every bottle had a tube into which the leech could crawl and disturb a mechanism, which in turn would activate a hammer to hit a bell – indicating that a storm is coming.

When a storm would come, the leeches were expected to crawl up the bottle, into the little pipe and activate a Heath-Robinson like mechanism which would make a hammer hit the bell. When the leech had completed its job it would fall down into the water and the hammer would go back to its place.

However, a number of times the leeches would give a false alarm. That was the reason he decided to use a jury of 12 leeches. And said,

The more of them that rang the bell, the more likely it was that a storm would be on its way.

If you ever go to Devon, you must take some time out to visit the Barometer World Museum to check out a full-scale working model of this device. Or you could go to the Whitby Museum in North Yorkshire to see the other working model.

Ants and Their Friends

By Anupum Pant

Background

If you consider the habits, social organization, communities, network of roadways, possession of domestic animals, and counting skills of ants, they are not very different from humans. Yes, ants even domesticate animals. And we’ve talked about their counting skills in the past. Then, I came across a very interesting experiment sir John Lubbock decided to do on ants.

Experiment

He had in his captivity a number of varieties of ants living in different colonies. One day he saw a group of ants feeding on honey together. He picked twenty five of them and managed to intoxicate them by some method, others were left there, feeding on honey.

Next, he picked twenty five other ants of the same species, from a different colony and intoxicated them too. He then placed all of these 50 intoxicated ants near the honey, in the path which the ants were using to move to and fro from the honey.

He watched them for hours and it was an amazing thing he found. The twenty five ants which belonged to the same colony of ants that were feeding on honey were treated much differently by them, than the other 25 ants of the same species that belonged to a different nest! Somehow they were able to identify the ants of their own nest – differentiate friends from strangers.

Twenty out of the twenty five friend ants (which belonged the same nest) were carried by the honey feeding ants to their home. While about 18 of the other intoxicated stranger ants were picked up and thrown into water.
There were just 5 friend ants which were thrown into water (probably accidentally) and 6 stranger ants which were carried back to home (probably accidentally, again)

Nevertheless, most ants were correctly identified as friends and strangers. Moreover, I think their reaction to drunk friends and drunk strangers was so much like what human beings would do!

Next Experiments

In an experiment which he did later, the researcher tried separating friend ants (of the same nest) for about 4 months. And when they met after 4 months they were able to clearly identify each other. They caressed each other with their antennae.

In other experiments when he introduced a stranger ants in a nest, the strangers were evicted immediately and sometimes even killed.

There are a couple of other interesting experiments he has mentioned in his article here. Do read it whenever you find time. [link]

This Tiny Sponge is Probably Set to Change The World

By Anupum Pant

Background

Things absorbing water from the air is nothing new. Hygroscopic substances – or substances which have ability to attract and hold water molecules from the surrounding environment – have always been around. Coffee powder for instance is one great example – leave the dry coffee powder in the open and it will turn into a mushy matter within hours. Thanks to the moisture present in the air that it absorbs.

Hygroscopy in Nature

In the nature too, hygroscopy – the ability to extract water from thin air – has some peculiar functions. One fantastic example is the seed of the needle-and-Thread grass. This seed, with the help of a hygroscopic awn attached to it, can twist and untwist the screw like structure by releasing and absorbing moisture from the air. This way, it is able to dig its way into the ground. But that’s just one of the many examples of how hygroscopy is all around us. Here’s another one…

Thorny devil – an Australian lizard – lives in the arid scrubland and desert that covers most of central Australia. It has a hard time finding water in this dry place. So, blessed by the evolutionary forces of nature, the lizard has developed tiny hygroscopic channels between the spines on its back. These channels, working in tandem with a capillary action mechanism, are able to draw water from the air. Then their precise design makes the water move into the mouth of the lizard. Fascinating!

Other Ways

Although not exactly using hygroscopy, the Namib desert beetle, also does something similar – drawing water from thin air. Unlike the hygroscopic grooves of the thorny devil’s back, the desert dwelling beetle has developed some patterns on its hard wings which help it in drawing water from the air. These patterns include an array of  hydrophobic and hydrophilic materials which are able to trap water from the foggy morning air and are able to channel it to the beetle’s mouth.

The Nanotube Sponge Mat

This particular beetle’s hard wings with magical patterns on it, intrigued a couple of researchers. They took cue from this natural material and were able to create an artificial mat which could absorb water from the air.

nanotube sponge

Although we do have commercial Atmospheric Water Generators (AWG) which can harvest water from the air and supply drinking water, the sad thing is that these things run on electricity. This new mat that was fabricated recently, using an array of carbon nano tubes sandwiched between hydrophilic and hydrophobic layers, doesn’t need any electricity to extract water.

This mat they’ve fabricated is smaller than your thumbnail, but it still works, and is able to extract about 1/4th of it’s weigh in water within a few hours. The researchers are working on it to make it more efficient. [more information] [Original Paper]

A couple of years back a US based startup, NBD Nano, was inclined on developing a water bottle based on the same Namib desert beetle principle. The much touted water bottle, they said, would be able to fill itself! I’m not sure where their project is headed today, but an auto-filling water bottle sure would be a product just too cool to not own by every kid at school!

Needless to say, it would probably make a huge difference by lowering greatly the number of people who don’t find clean drinking water every day – Just for the record, about 1/7th of the world population didn’t have access to clean water today.