Now i know that every last news source online has done this story already, hell it’s on the Drudgereport frontpage as i write this, but if for some reason you refuse to read anything but our humble blog here’s the story (plus it’s hard to not write a headline about watermelon viagra).

Without really going into much details (which would be hard too seeing as how this is more biology/medicine and I’m a physics student), they have found out that watermelons contain large quantities of a substance called citrulline, which has the benefit of increasing blood flow in your body, which is of course the same thing that Viagra does. It’s however not the exact same, as Viagra is organ specific, while watermelons would target the entire vascular system. The basic message is: fruit is good for you!

This is of course also a perfect time to bring in one of the most controversial XKCD comics ever made, the infamous fruit chart.

As you can plainly see, the watermelon is not a top contender in the fruit wars (in fact i’d have it even lower on the tasty bar, it’s bland as hell!). If for some miracle you don’t know XKCD, i can HIGHLY recommend reading it. It’s a comic with a bunch of nerdy humor and science jokes, but also bunches of quirky stuff, easily one of my top3 favorite places online.

P.S. Some practical advice to everyone, don’t get drunk the day before you have to move out of an apartment, spending a day hung over in cleaning supply fumes is far from optimal.

Scientists from Penn State claim to have found a new living bacterial species a couple of miles into the Greenland ice sheet. They estimate that the bacteria have been trapped there for about 120,000 years, and have apparently survived in the extreme conditions so far under ice. This is a pretty cool discovery in several aspects, and the news piece on Penn State Live explains it very well:

The microorganism’s ability to persist in this low-temperature, high-pressure, reduced-oxygen and nutrient-poor habitat makes it particularly useful for studying how life, in general, can survive in a variety of extreme environments on Earth and possibly elsewhere in the solar system.

In my recent article on the dinosaur asteroid impact, I mention that scientists believe that could have spread micro-organisms from Earth into space, and with the newfound persistent form of bacteria life, they might be able to survive this kind of event and settle on another celestial body, even if it’s colder and icier than Earth.

Another thing worth mentioning about this discovery is the method they used to dig up the bacteria from these seemingly unreachable depths. Ice core drilling is used in a lot of scientific areas, like research in prehistoric biology like this, but even more in climate research, where ice cores act like a recorder of a lot of useful climatic states and events. From the Wikipedia article on ice cores:

The variety of climatic proxies is greater than in any other natural recorder of climate, such as tree rings or sediment layers. These include (proxies for) temperature, ocean volume, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity, desert extent and forest fires.

A lot of research is being done on ice cores right now, and it is of particular interest in our times of climate changes and debates on the issue. With the added probability of finding exotic life forms in these extreme conditions, we should encourage the research even more. There is really a lot of things to learn down there.

So first post in a month or so from me due to traveling, but luckily Kári has done a nice job in the meantime. This will also be the reason why I am writing about some pretty old news once i a while, but hey, nobody said this is a news site, right?

Well enough with the excuses. One thing that caught my eye from the last month of scientific news is this press release about how the extinction of the dinosaurs might have been indirectly caused by the our movement in the Galaxy. You see we are actually not just making our way around the Galaxy every 220 million years in the normal circular way, but we are also bouncing up and down through the galactic plane every 36 million years. With the increased density in the galactic plane, the Solar System is subject to more gravitational disturbances when passing through it, and comets and asteroids from the outer parts of the Solar System might be thrown towards new orbits passing through the inner part where Earth goes about it’s day. Of course, Earth is then more likely to be hit, and it just so happens that we were probably passing right through the galactic plane about 65 million years ago when a large comet hit Earth, causing what is called the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event that killed off large parts of life on Earth.

So no, passing through the galactic plane didn’t finish off the dinosaurs, but it might have increased the probability of the asteroid collision that did.

On a quick but interesting note in the last part of the piece, the scientists behind the theory also mentions that large collisions like this one might be able to send micro-organisms hurling into space, seeding the Universe with life from Earth… or maybe that is how life on Earth first started? In that case the green aliens might not be so green and alien after all!

One scientist at least seems to think so. Assistant professor Mark Changizi, from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, suggests that those annoying optical illusions that your friends send you through mass-emails, are nothing but your eyes trying to predict the future.

Now no-one is suggesting anything paranormal here, but rather an ability we have gotten through evolution, to theorize as to what would happen in the near future, given what we are seeing now. This would also explain reflex moves such as quickly ducking out of the way of a fastball. Take for example the picture on the left, there you have a big dot and lines radiating from it, which kind of looks as if you were traveling at high speed through a tunnel or towards something. The vertical red lines appear to bend a little bit if you look in the middle, as the brain is predicting what it expects to happen next in this scene (if we were in fact moving). These “premonitions” help compensate for delays caused by neurons traveling from the eye to the brain (one tenth of a second), because by the time the brain has received the information, the situation has already changed, so this guess gives us an approximation of what the situation might look like now, helping us to make the right reactions. I’ll forever look at optical illusions in another light now, if I’m bothered to look at them at all that is.

If you’re interested in reading more about this, and how the professor has categorized various optical illusions into a periodic table of sorts, i recommend the press release.

Well i guess that “working on” is a bit of an understatement, as they already have a working hand-held device capable of identifying various bacteria and fungi already in use at the international space station. They are however still working on getting it even better. You see, the current version can detect some bacteria, and a recent upgrade to it allows it to detect some fungus as well (which is good, as it can damage equipment). They are working on getting even more capabilities on it (detecting more types of bacteria), and hoping that the end-product will actually perform much like a medical tri-corder from Star Trek, capable of detecting what ails a crewman who has fallen ill and such. If you look at the picture to the left here, you can even see that it kind-of looks like a tri-corder (post-original series anyway).

Now don’t get me wrong, i don’t have anything against health/medicine or anything (in fact i rather enjoy my own), but if you’re trying to copy star trek you could’ve picked something cooler then a medical tri-corder. Be that as it may, more Star Trek inspired technology can never be bad, although I’m sure we’d all prefer the holo-suite for some depraved fun.

If you’re interested in reading the whole story, head over to NASA’s website.

Ok, so there are some press-releases popping up now from the University of Washington, about a new video game that is making some bold claims (or at least has some bold goals), their have made a video game where us mere mortals are allowed to contort proteins into 3D shapes in hopes of creating something that is of actual use (link to game website).

The game is based on the actual physics of proteins, and the hope is that gamers around the world will embrace it and gain a sixth sense of sorts to building proteins in a good way, in fact, David Baker, one of the biochemists working on the project, says that his 13 year old son is better at the in-game protein bending then he is. So i guess they’re hoping that kids will gain an intuitive understanding of the physics involved and contort the proteins accordingly, utilizing the natural 3D puzzle solving skills that we humans have.

You might think that it’d be easier to just have a computer have a go at brute-forcing it’s way through it (try every permutation and see what works best), well they’ve already tried that and the number of different proteins needed to be tested are ridiculous, according to the article, it would still take centuries to solve even if all the computers in the world worked on it. So this is why they are trying to come up with an innovative way of finding new breakthroughs in medical science.

I tried downloading the game and playing it, and it was fairly easy to get started and work through the introduction part that explains to you the basic tools at your disposal (even worked fine with wine on my Linux computer). I do have serious doubts about the hefty amount of buzzwords used in their press-release though, take for example this line from one of the scientists:

Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize.

Plus of course the mention of perhaps curing HIV with it. This is obviously just shrewd PR work, as it is something that makes for quite catchy titles (”Will the next noble prize winner be a 12 year old gamer?”, “Will gaming nerds cure HIV?” etc), but it almost always seems that science press-releases with too many buzz-words are too good to be true.

I really wish i knew more about biology/chemistry so I’d be more qualified to comment on this whole thing (being a physicist myself), as i DO find it to be a very interesting idea, regardless of my distaste for their PR campaign. They claim that very soon they will be holding competitions for people to make proteins that might be of actual use in the medical industry and such, where the top proteins in the competition will actually be produced and tested in petri dishes at Dr. Bakers lab (and given credit if they publish an article on it).

I’m curious though, how they actually intend on picking winners out of possibly thousands of protein structures submitted, as they don’t know beforehand exactly what protein will solve whatever problem it is they have at hand, but that might just be skepticism from someone that does not grasp this field well enough.

Good question right? If we’re so great and at the top of the foodchain because of how smart we are, why haven’t more animals evolved in the same way? Why are so many of them stupid and seemingly entirely reliant on instinct rather then learning things?

This is the question that Dr. Tadeusz Kawecki from the University of Fribourg tries to answer in his latest round of experiments. I’m afraid that, once again, i’m left with a newspaper article, from NY Times this time around, but they actually cite which journal it’s about to appear in and it seems like a fairly straightforward article, so we’ll run with it.

While i can of course recommend reading the entire article as it is pretty interesting, it is also 2 pages long and if you’re anything like me you have a short attention span (generation Y and all), so i’ll summarize it quickly. What they did was use flies, and performed selective breeding on the ones exhibiting a better ability to learn. The test was to let them taste two jellies of different colors, both with delicious smell to the fly, but one of them spiked with an icky taste. The flies that were later able display that they had learned from their experience and chose the color not containing the crappy taste, were kept and bred. They did this for 15 generations and the results were noticeable, the new breed of flies were much faster to learn then the original breed. Despite them being better learners though, they did not have the upper hand when it came to survival, showing that brawns may win over brains.

It is therefore clear that flies can evolve into smarter creatures fairly fast, but do not do so in nature as it is not beneficial for them. The doctor proposes that they reach an equilibrium of sorts between learning power and instincts. There were some other results in there as well, that suggested that in such simple creatures that the very act of learning could be destructive, and even proposed that this is something that should perhaps be looked into with humans as well (although that all seemed very speculative).

Well i don’t dare to try and explain much more of the article for fear of getting something wrong (i’m a physicist after all! Not a biologist), but that was the gist of it. Like i said, i can recommend reading it for yourself, it’s not very dry and i found it to be easy to grasp (the basics of it anyway).

I’m not much of a biologist, but this is worth a mention if you hadn’t already heard about it. 36 years ago Italian wall lizards were moved from their home on the South African island Pod Kopiste, over to the neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru. Now they can report that they have adapted remarkably to their new environment despite only staying for such a short time.

The lizards are said to have a striking difference in head shape and size, as well as increased biting strength and having formed new structures in their digestive tracts. The island they were originally on was well suited for hunting and eating insects, while the new island had an abundance of plant-life to feast on, causing the change in head-size. To quote the researchers:

As a result, individuals on Pod Mrcaru have heads that are longer, wider and taller than those on Pod Kopiste, which translates into a big increase in bite force. Because plants are tough and fibrous, high bite forces allow the lizards to crop smaller pieces from plants, which can help them break down the indigestible cell walls.

Like i said earlier, i’m not much of a biologist, but it seems to me that people that criticize evolution the most, usually say that all the evidence is circumstantial (fossils) and only small scale evolution is observed (bacterias evolving to become immune to antibiotics etc). But assuming all this holds up to scrutiny, it would appear to me that this is evidence for evolution that is not only close to impossible to deny (although i don’t doubt many will), but it is also something that is compelling and easy to understand.

Ok this is not really the kind of science news we usually report on, but seeing as how i’m a sucker for trashy day-time television, such as Maury’s talkshow where he routinely has episodes doing paternity tests on multiple guys, i thought i’d mention this. Apparently some would-be baby-daddy’s have been trying to cheat the system by a not-so-novel and fairly gross approach. It’s a variant of the good old “clean urine” technique utilized by athletes for decades, with a little twist.

When DNA tests are taken, they usually obtain a sample from the subject by using mouth-swab, and a DNA analysis is done on that sample and compared to another. In this particular case it’s a paternity test so it’s compared to some kids DNA where they can see the similarities if the kid has the guys genes. So the guy mentioned in this specific press release, got results back from the scientists that were pretty much impossible unless there were two different DNA’s in the sample they collected. When confronted with this he confessed, and it turns out he was carrying an extra bottle of saliva from one of his friends, and put that in his mouth right before the mouth-swab.

Science prevailed though and saw through it fairly easily, and although this has lead to a new procedure in paternity testing in hopes of avoiding similar situations, it would be almost impossible to sneak one past the laboratory using this method. They will of course keep trying to find new and innovative methods of cheating the tests (after all, murder trials hang on these things as well), and scientists will try to keep up and out-smart them. They go to quite some lengths to try and cheat it though, as you can also read about in the press-release, they’ve had similar problems before with DNA tests from blood-samples, where the subjects tried to get a blood transfusion shortly before their test in hopes of beating it.

A new vastly improved Noah’s Ark is being planed in the International Lunar Exploration Working Group as we speak, as searches for the Old One have all turned out empty.

The group wants to build the Ark under the surface of the Moon, with samples of DNA, embryos and information stored in several languages that will be activated in the case of a catastrophic event on Earth. It will on activation send the information to special receivers on Earth so possible survivors could rebuild the biological world to its former glory. (more…)