ScienceShots

• Winter's end. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured the sharpest images yet of the erstwhile planet Pluto. Synthesized from hundreds of individual photos snapped in 2002 and 2003, the images show that Pluto's appearance is changing remarkably quickly, as the dwarf planet makes its 248-year orbit of the sun. Compared with earlier images taken from the ground, the Hubble shots show that Pluto grew significantly brighter between 2000 and 2002. That change may have been triggered by temperature increases, which would have vaporized carbon dioxide ice on the dwarf planet's surface, scientists speculate. They expect to learn more about the phenomenon when NASA's New Horizons probe arrives in 2015. (Photo: NASA/ESA/M. Buie-Southwest Research Institute)
• Bug repellent. White horses have a tough time in the wild. They're prone to skin cancer, and they stick out to predators. But they do have one advantage: They attract far fewer blood-sucking horseflies than do brown or black horses. The reason has to do with physics, researchers report online 3 February in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The flies home in on polarized light--light whose electric field vibrates in a single direction--which a horse's glossy coat reflects in abundance. But a white horse's pale hide and hair also reflect large amounts of non-polarized light, scrambling the signal that otherwise says "I'm tasty" to hungry horseflies. (Photo: Photos.com)
• Crystal trophy. Growing crystals of proteins requires skill, perseverance, and imagination. Witness the first crystallization of a retroviral integrase enzyme, which HIV uses to infect human cells. Researchers led by biochemist Peter Cherepanov of Imperial College London attempted to crystallize it 40,000 times. Eventually, they crystalized the integrase from prototype foamy virus, which they contend closely matches the enzyme used by HIV. Drugs that thwart this enzyme are highly effective, but the new work, published online 31 January in Nature, offers the first explanation for how these inhibitors actually work. The researchers hope the new insights will lead to even more effective treatments. (Photo: Hare et al., Nature, Advanced Online Publication (January 2010)
• Dad's no good. When picking a mate, even fish sometimes have to settle. The female broad-nosed pipefish (Syngnathus typhle) deposits her eggs into a pouch on the male's abdomen, leaving him to care for the developing brood. While she prefers to entrust her eggs to a large, capable-looking male, competition for guys is so fierce that she often gets stuck with a puny mate. If that happens, the female deposits eggs that have higher than normal amounts of protein, researchers report 27 January in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This extra boost of amino acids, used for tissue growth and energy, gives her offspring a better shot at survival, even if dad's a bit of a loser. (Photo: Anders Berglund)
• Deep impact. NASA's Opportunity rover has delivered yet another surprise. This rock, named Marquette Island, is unlike any other the six-wheeled robot has found. Its coarse-grained composition shows it originated not on the planet's surface but within its interior. Sometime in the past a massive object--probably a small asteroid--slammed through the Martian surface, ejecting rocks from inside the crust. After being flung high into the sky, the basketball-sized rock landed on Meridiani Planum, conveniently where Opportunity has been exploring for the past 6 years. "It is from deep in the crust and someplace far away on Mars," says chief mission scientist Steve Squyres. "Though exactly how deep and how far we can't yet estimate." (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell)
• Glow parade. Researchers have trained bacteria to put on a light show. Genetically modified Escherichia coli were equipped with a communication system allowing them to sense each other's presence using secreted small molecules. When this system was linked to a genetic clock inside the cell, the bacteria were able to synchronize the production of a green fluorescent protein across the colony (see video). When the cells reached a critical density, this resulted in bursts of fluorescence (shown left). The work, reported 21 January in Nature, may enable researchers to develop cell implants capable of administering therapeutics at appropriate times. (Photo: Tal Danino/Octavio Mondragon-Palamino/Lev Tsimring)
• Tough guy. This gastropod's shell has even the best metal armor beat. It's the kind of protection the scaly-foot snail (Crysomallon squamiferum) needs as it fights enormous water pressure and the vice-like grip of crabs on the deep sea bottom. The shell's unique three-layered structure--an iron-sulfide outer shell, a thick organic middle, and an inner calcified layer--dissipates stress so well, researchers report online 19 January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that copying it should lead to tougher personal-protection vests and bomb-proof vehicles. (Photo: Anders Warén/Swedish Museum of Natural History)
• Shrinkage. Printable electronics are about to become a whole lot smaller. Scientists have developed a new way to write electrically conducting silicon ink onto a plastic backing with five times more accuracy than previously possible. Whereas past printable electronics have manually placed components using, for example, inkjet printers, the researchers have developed an elaborate way of making the components fall into place like scattered iron filings spontaneously tracing out a picture, they report online the week of 11 January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team demonstrated its self-assembly technique by building a flexible solar cell out of silicon crystals the thickness of a human hair (shown left, with magnified section showing crystals). (Photo: Heiko O. Jacobs)
• Turmoil. Researchers have figured out what causes Saturn's moon Enceladus to spew icy jets hundreds of kilometers into space. Like a frigid lava lamp, subsurface heat slowly builds up from tidal forces, causing blobs of partially melted ice to push toward the surface. That produces the massive geysers, researchers report online 10 January in Nature Geoscience, as well as the cracks and huge gouge seen in this image. All of this turmoil has melted and reconstituted up to 40% of the Enceladus's icy surface--but the moon is slowing down. Based on 5 years of observations by the Cassini spacecraft, plus new computer simulations, researchers have concluded that Enceladus's lava lamp will soon shut down, and the moon will remain quiet for up to 2 billion years. (Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)
• Long haul. Large birds don't necessarily fly farther than small ones. In fact, the new record for longest annual migration belongs to the 125-gram arctic tern, researchers report online 11 January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By attaching tags weighing just over a gram to the birds' legs and recovering them later, the team was able to show that the tern can cover 71,000 kilometers on average on the round trip from its arctic breeding grounds to the high latitudes of the Southern Ocean. That's over 7000 kilometers farther than the much larger sooty shearwater bird, the previous record holder. Tracking small birds like terns was previously impossible because the weight of earlier instruments would have interfered with their flight. (Photo: Carsten Evegang/ARC-PIC.com)
• Step off! Male toads wrestle each other over a female, but sometimes the weaker male still gets to her. To keep him from scoring, the female inflates her body, the same trick she uses to repel predators, researchers report online 6 January in Biology Letters. That makes it more difficult for a weak male to get a firm grip--and it makes him vulnerable to a larger, stronger male, which can wrestle him off. When the researchers surgically prevented female cane toads from inflating, she was more often stuck with the first suitor to latch on. (Photo: Crystal Kelehear)
• Going, going. Maybe they should have named this comet Icarus. On 3 January, the comet--actually a fragment of a larger comet that broke up about 2000 years ago--passed so close to the sun that it evaporated. Astronomers call such objects Kreutz sungrazers, after the 19th-century German astronomer who discovered them, because their orbits take them very close to our star's surface. Such encounters almost always result in the grazer's demise, but most such objects are too small to be tracked easily. This time, however, the camera aboard NASA's SOHO spacecraft, which usually observes solar phenomena, treated scientists to a ring-side seat. (Photo: NASA/Alan Watson)

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