ScienceShots: July 2009

• Eye candy. Argonne National Laboratory is touting this picture as the "coolest image ever created on a supercomputer," and the Illinois facility may not be far off. Utilizing a computer that runs 80,000 times faster than a desktop computer does, researchers were able to create in mere minutes this simulation of a supernova from quadrillions of data bits. Attempting such a complex task on even conventional supercomputers can take months. But the Argonne team developed a new processing technique that effectively eliminates the graphic processing unit, which must convert raw data into images on a video screen. The approach should help scientists probe more deeply into many other complex phenomena, such as the migration of pollutants through the atmosphere or the combustion of fuels in rocket engines. (Image: Hongfeng Yu/ANL)
• Lights out. We spend about 10% of our waking lives blind due to blinking. But new research reveals that we subconsciously time these 400-millisecond visual outages to not lose critical information. While watching video clips of Mr. Bean, an action-filled British comedy with an unpredictable story line, subjects blinked more during scenes that required less attention, such as of Mr. Bean driving on an empty road or during scene breaks. Volunteers blinked about 2% less in all when watching Mr. Bean than when watching a video of landscapes or tropical fish and 5% less than while listening to an audio recording of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone; researchers report 29 July in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (Photo: Gerhard Heeke/Wikipedia)
• Burp! Rude as it may seem, one of our galaxy's most massive stars is belching its innards far into space. New telescopic observations released 29 July reveal gigantic gas bubbles erupting from Betelgeuse, the behemoth that lies 640 light-years away and sits on the constellation Orion's right shoulder. The observations solve the mystery of how such a gravitationally powerful star could be ejecting material far away from its surface. As the gas bubbles burst and collapse, they slingshot parts of themselves out into space. Astronomers still don't know how the bubbles form, but they do know one thing: The Betelgeuse system is no place for a party. (Image: ESO/L. Calcada)
• Zombies! Turn over a leaf in a Thai forest and you may uncover a graveyard of zombie ants. The insects' minds have been taken over by a parasitic fungus known as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which compels the tree-dwelling ants (Camponotus leonardi) to climb down to the forest floor and find a sapling leaf to bite into. The parasite steers the ants to leaves about 25 centimeters off the ground; researchers report online 23 July in The American Naturalist. Compared with the ants' nests about 20 meters above, the climate in these spots is cooler and more humid--perfect fungus-growing weather. The ant soon dies, but its job isn't done yet: The parasite camps out in the insect's outer shell and sprouts a stalk, which will eventually release spores that create more zombie ants. (Photo: David Hughes)
• Smurfy. Warning: This treatment could turn your skin blue. Researchers have found that Brilliant Blue G (BBG), a close relative of the common food dye, Blue No. 1, may protect neurons in mammals with spinal cord injuries. After such injuries, ATP, which facilitates signaling in neurons, can flood the area around the injured spinal cord and send neurons into a firing frenzy. That leads to inflammation and irreversible tissue damage. But BBG can cross the highly selective blood-brain barrier and block the spinal neuron's ATP receptors; researchers report online 27 July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When administered 15 minutes after an acute spinal cord injury, BBG prevented inflammation and improved motor recovery in rats. But, as you can see, there was one side effect. (Photo: Maiken Nedergaard)
• Coiled. Like a serpent poised to strike, the giant galaxy NGC 1097 seems ready to devour a smaller cousin. But that's just an illusion: the smaller galaxy (in blue) actually lies far in the background. The real interest in the image, taken in infrared light by the Spitzer Space Telescope and released 23 July, is the vast amount of star-making activity going on (in red). NGC 1097's central, supermassive black hole, which is a hundred times heavier than the one at the Milky Way's center, seems to be stirring up titanic amounts of gas and dust--the building blocks of stars. Astronomers want to study the galaxy to learn more about the evolution of supermassive black holes. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/The SINGS Team/SSC-Caltech)
• Gem or junk? It all depends on how light strikes the metallic "jeweled" beetle (Chrysina gloriosa). When hit with left circular polarized light, which produces a left-handed corkscrew reflection, or when in normal sunlight, the beetle reflects a bright green hue once valued in jewelry. But when hit with right circularly polarized light, the insect sports a washed-out, olive green color. The disparity, researchers report in the 24 July issue of Science, is due to hexagon-shaped cells on the beetle's curved shell that selectively reflect light. The observations could help researchers understand how some animals use light to communicate. (Photo: P. Vukusic, University of Exeter)
• Welcome back. Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing, a U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite has captured images of five of the six Apollo mission landing sites. The photographs, released on 17 July, show long shadows cast by the lunar descent stages (white arrow)--the spacecraft sections left behind when the astronauts returned to Earth. Pictures of the Apollo 14 site such as this one also reveal faint trails of astronaut footprints leading from the lunar module. Launched 18 June, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter started taking the pictures 11 July and plans to travel past the remaining Apollo 12 landing site as it collects images of the lunar surface to help plan future moon missions. (Photo: NASA)
• Featherlight. Flying squirrels, frogs, and lemurs all have something in common: When they glide through the air, they flex out flaps of skin to catch the wind. But the neon blue-tailed tree lizard (Holaspis guentheri) opts for a different strategy. According to research reported in the 17 July issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology, the lizard doesn't change its shape when it leaps from branch to branch in the African tropical forest. Rather, thanks to hundreds of tiny air spaces in its bones that make it extremely light for its surface area, the lizard glides like a feather from tree to tree. (Photo: K. D'Aout)
• Fishy. The desert dwelling sandfish lizard (Scincus scincus) lives up to its name. It dives into sand dunes and "swims" beneath the surface to escape predators and the heat--and to sneak up on unsuspecting prey. But just how does the 10-centimeter-long lizard plough through this grainy substance? High-speed x-ray imaging reveals that, when sand-borne, the lizard tucks in its limbs and propels itself forward by zigzagging its whole body left and right, effectively swimming like a fish or snake at speeds of up to 15 centimeters per second. Armed with this new information, reported in the 17 July issue of Science, researchers have developed a model that could reveal how other denizens of the desert, such as scorpions and snakes, make their way under the sand. (Photo: Ryan Maladen and Yang Ding)
• Shhh. Western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica) like to stash their food for later. But they also like to pilfer each other's snacks. So how do they keep from being robbed? Hide their food quietly, researchers report online 15 July in Biology Letters. The scientists gave the birds 50 waxworms--a scrub-jay staple--and two possible places to bury them: a tray of noisy pebbles or a silent alternative, soil. When the birds were alone or knew they were being watched, they picked the pebbles more often. But when they knew another jay could only hear, not see them--as when a bush might block a bird's view in the wild--the jays went for the quieter dirt. (Photo: Wikimedia)
• Out of order. The crossed chicken the road. You and I can tell what's wrong with that sentence--but could a monkey? It turns out that cotton-top tamarind monkeys (Saguinus oedipus) do know when a word is out of place, according to a study published in the 8 July issue of Biology Letters. Researchers familiarized the primates with a series of words, each preceded by the word "shoy." The next day, the team played the monkeys another series of words; this time, each was followed by the word "shoy." The monkeys looked alertly at the loudspeaker when "shoy" changed from prefix to suffix, or vice versa, indicating that they recognized a change in word order. The researchers conclude that monkeys, like humans, can pick up on patterns in language, shedding light on the early evolutionary origins of this ability. (Photo: Ansgar Endress)
• R.I.P. This artist's impression shows what the death of one of the universe's first stars might look like. Nearly 11 billion years ago, this sun--about 100 times more massive than our own--shoved much of its material out into space, collapsed, and then exploded in a titanic blast called a supernova. When the explosion slammed into the stellar material, the collision lit up the star's entire galaxy. Even so, that galaxy is so far away that astronomers had to sift through years of dim telescopic images to find this moment. Analysis of the light, the researchers report 9 July in Nature, reveals the explosion as a rare Type IIn supernova and provides a glimpse of stellar evolution in the very early universe. (Image: M. Weiss/NASA/CXC)
• Neighbors. The two blobs in this Hubble Space Telescope image aren't a pair of amoebas sitting side by side in a Petri dish. They're adjacent solar systems in the process of forming. The systems and their central, nascent stars, collectively known as 253-1536 and located about 1300 light-years away, are bound by a common center of gravity. The stars are only about 50 billion kilometers apart, which means that the potential inhabitants of one system might someday realistically be able to visit the inhabitants of the other (the trip would take about 100 years with our current technology). Whether that event will resemble War of the Worlds or Close Encounters of the Third Kind remains to be seen. (Image: Nathan Smith/UC Berkeley)
• Fern frenzy. About 100 million years ago, flowering plants took over Earth, crowding out pine trees, cycads, and other non-flowering plants that had dominated the landscape until that time. But there was an exception: leptosporangiate ferns--known for spore-forming organs that burst and fling out spores--continued to thrive. Today, they account for 9000 of the 11,000 non-flowering vascular plant species. By reconstructing fern evolution using DNA and fossil data from more than 400 species, researchers have shown that these ferns often found new homes among the branches of newly emerging tropical rainforests, where about 55 million years ago, they began to diversify into thousands of new treebound species. The results are described in the 7 July issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Photo: Eric Schuettpelz, Duke University)

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