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SCIENCE NEWS - SPACESUITS #

SPACE SUITS

SCIENCE NEWS - WHALE EAR WAX #20

WHALE EAR WAX

Cerumen. It’s a lovely word. Especially considering that it means earwax. And we’re not the only species that produces the stuff. Some whales build up waxes, along with lipids and keratin protein into what’s called earplugs. And researchers now know that examining these plugs tells them about a whale’s lifetime exposure to pollution.
Alternating layers of dark and light in the plugs correlate to seasons of feeding or migration. So the plugs have been used to determine a whale’s age. Think tree rings. 
In the latest study, scientists analyzed an earplug from an endangered blue whale killed by a ship near California. They found that levels of stress hormones doubled over the whale’s life.
They also found evidence that the whale had been exposed to pesticides such as DDT, with the highest levels during the whale’s first six months of life. The whale was likely exposed to the pesticides in its mother’s milk.
They also found a couple of peaks of exposure to mercury. The study is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Stephen J. Trumble et al., Blue whale earplug reveals lifetime contaminant exposure and hormone profiles]
Future earplugs should offer additional clues about whale lives. So look for researchers to give new attention to leviathan cerumen.
—Cynthia Graber

SCIENCE NEWS - WHY DOES WATER EXPAND? #19

SCIENCE NEWS - ZAMBONI #18

SCIENCE NEWS - SHOPPING CART #16

As a grocer in Oklahoma, Sylvan Goldman had a hunch that he was losing business because customers only bought as much as they could carry. Check out this episode to learn how his Stuff of Genius saved his store and spread throughout the world.

SCIENCE NEWS - POTATO CHIPS #15

Frustrated by a picky customer, cook George Crum fried up some paper-thin potato slices. Find out how George's revenge scheme went awry -- and how his potato chips became the Stuff of Genius -- in this episode.

SCIENCE NEWS - BLACK BOX #14

Nowadays flight recorders are a mandatory piece of equipment for all commercial planes -- but why? Tune in and learn more about black box recorders, as well as the genius behind them, in this episode.

SCIENCE NEWS - STANDARD TIME #13

Sanford Fleming: Standard Time 

Although you may not have heard of Sir Sanford Fleming, his Stuff of Genius influences every second of your life. Turn back the clock and take a look at the man who standardized time in this video podcast 

SCIENCE NEWS - SMALL POX #12

Edward Jenner: Smallpox Vaccine 

Although forms of vaccination had been discovered thousands of years ago in Asia and Africa, Western Europeans didn't pick up on it until Edward Jenner turned an old wives' tale into the Stuff of Genius.

SCIENCE NEWS - SUGAR #10

SCIENCE NEWS - CONTACT LENSES #9

SCIENCE NEWS - SUBMARINES #8

With loads of experiments and inventions under his belt, Cornelius Drebbel was a true Renaissance man. But one of his inventions was more useful than any other, even if England didn't think so at the time. Tune in and learn more about submarines.

SCIENCE NEWS - KEVLAR #7

When Stephanie Kwolek couldn't pursue a career in medicine, she took a job as a research chemist. Tune in to learn how this unplanned career led to the Stuff of Genius that changed the world and saved thousands of lives.

SCIENCE NEWS - BANDAIDES #6

Earle Dickson was exhausted. He spent nearly every night making bandages for his accident-prone wife, and he knew there had to be a better, faster way. Learn how his Stuff of Genius healed cuts around the world in this episode.

SCIENCE NEWS - TICKS #4

TICKS

Ticks can really get under your skin—literally. And in many parts of the country they spread illness, including Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Add to that list a new scourge: Heartland virus, which doesn't respond to treatment.
This infection was described for the first time last year after two Missouri men were hospitalized with fever and headaches. No one was sure how the men contracted the disease. Now a study in theAmerican Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene confirms that ticks were the transmitters. [Harry M. Savage et al., First Detection of Heartland Virus (Bunyaviridae: Phlebovirus) from Field Collected Arthropods]
Researchers tromped out to the two men's properties, and 10 more sites in the region, to set up tick traps. These included containers of dry ice, which emit carbon dioxide to attract ticks, and flannel bedding, which traps them. They also picked some ticks off of area dogs and horses.
All told, they collected more than 56,000 tick specimens. And they found the virus residing in lone star ticks—the most common in the region. About one in 500 of the arachnids carried the virus. Enough to make me check for ticks. And then check again.
—Katherine Harmon

SCIENCE NEWS - THRESHER SHARKS #3

THRESHER SHARKS

They’re called thresher sharks. But perhaps thrasher is more accurate. Because a population of these fearsome predators was spotted engaging in an unusual hunting strategy.
Forget jaws—try the other end. Researchers observed them slapping their long, scythe-like tails at high speeds through the water. These whaps stunned or killed several smaller fish with each strike. The observations were made off the coast of the Philippines.
Killer whales and dolphins also may use a similar tail-slapping strategy. But this is the first time the behavior has been seen in sharks.
Although the formidable, three-meter-long pelagic thresher shark seems able to catch food face-first, the ability to immobilize more than one fish at a time makes the method highly efficient. The findings are in the journal PLoS ONE. [Simon P. Oliver et al., Thrasher Sharks Use Tail-Slaps as a Hunting Strategy]
These sharks used both vertical and horizontal tail slaps to capture prey, which were stunned or killed either by direct impact or by a shockwave from the smack. More than a third of the vertical slaps resulted in a meal for the shark—better stats than when sharks chased prey head on. And that's no tall tale.
—Katherine Harmon

SCIENCE NEWS - PEE-POWERED CELL PHONES #2

Pee-Powered Cell Phones! July 19, 2013 – We've heard of having to take nature's call (having to go to the bathroom to pee); but now nature's call may soon be able to power your everyday cell phone calls!

That's right – pee-powered environmentally friendly cell phones have been developed by a few scientists at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in England. The team sent text messages, checked their e-mails, and made phone calls on their modified Samsung cell phone that was powered for 24 hours by 500 millilitres (16 ounces) of pee. The pee was turned into power by a microbial fuel cell, an energy converter that converts one form of energy into another. Deep inside these cells are the same live microbes that you would find in a pile of dirt or living in a lake. These microbes break down one substance –in this case, pee– and convert it into electricity. "Just imagine the microbial fuels as [being the same as] batteries. We collected them, gave them urine as the fuel, and that's what is used to charge the mobile phone battery," said Ioannis Ieropoulos, the leader of the project. The project is partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same organization that held a contest to create a toilet that can convert human waste into energy last year! The overall goal of the foundation is to give technology real-world uses for people in developing countries who don't usually have access to a lot of high technology. As of now the pee has to be filtered through a lot of complex cords and tubes to generate energy, but Ieropoulos hopes that one day someone in the developing world will be able to use their pee-powered phone to call for help in an emergency. "If one was at a remote location and they had this technology available, they could urinate into this technology and get the central electricity to charge up their phone and contact the people they had to contact if they were in a distressed situation," said Ieropoulos. But what Ieropoulos really likes about this phone is how its technology can take something as ordinary as human waste and turn it into something as useful and potentially lifesaving as electricity.

SCIENCE NEWS - SCARY GIANT BLACK JELLYFISH #1

This Scary Giant Black Jellyfish Is Stinging Swimmers In Southern California

It's got a three-foot bell and a whopping 20-foot-long body. Eeeep.

By Dan NosowitzPosted 07.10.2013 at 12:00 pm1 Comment

Black Sea Nettle via Flickr user Ganesha.isis

Reports coming out of Orange County, in Southern California, suggest that a rare giant jellyfish, only recently discovered, is invading beaches and stinging swimmers. On July 4th, swimmers in Laguna Beach, a beach town famous as a setting for great television, came ashore with hefty stings on their bodies and dark, odd membranes sticking to them.

So what is this weird plague?

The black jellyfish (Chrysaora achlyos, also called the black sea nettle) is huge, with a bell (that's the dome-shaped part of the body) that can reach three feet across. But it's the rest of the body that's so scarily big: its arms, described by the Monterey Aquarium as "lacy and pinkish" can reach 20 feet long, and its tentacles can by nearly 8 feet long. It was only officially named and described in 1997, though it can be seen in photographs as far back as 1926. (It's clear in photographs, since it's the only dark-colored jellyfish in that part of the Pacific Ocean.)

This jellyfish invades the coast periodically, dependent, we think, on ocean temperature (its invasions coincide with El Niño and La Niña). Human influence on the oceans may also be a factor; increased levels of organic matter, like fertilizer from farms, may attract or feed zooplankton, which the jellies follow and eat. We have no idea what it does or where it lives when it's not washing up on the shores of wealthy Southern California beach towns, but it comes in large numbers every decade or so. It was first noticed in 1989, then in 1999, and now this year.

It eats zooplankton and sometimes other jellyfish, we think; we know hardly anything about this creature. We do know that its sting is painful but not debilitating or deadly to humans, the pain only lasting about 40 minutes and having no known lasting effects. That's likely due to its diet; jellies that feed on larger or more complex animals like fish tend to have stronger stings. The stings of some jellyfish, like a few species of box jellyfish, can be fatal to humans. Not the black sea nettle, thankfully.