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ScienceShots: October 2005

  • Belly Telling belly. Is telling the truth a gut instinct? Scientists have discovered that the electrical rhythm of the stomach shows significant changes when people are lying, as measured by an electrogastrogram, a device similar to an electrocardiogram but that uses electrodes over the stomach rather than the chest. Such a device could improve the accuracy of standard polygraph tests, which some subjects can fool by regulating their breathing, researchers report 31 October at the annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology. (Photo: clipart.com)
  • Red blood cells Bendable blood. Red blood cells are amazingly flexible: they can deform and squeeze through even the tiniest capillaries. But how do they do it? Scientists knew the cell’s protein skeleton consists of thousands of linked hexagons with a central rod-shaped filament holding its shape. And now, a new model suggests that those filaments aren’t just scaffolding: as the cell deforms, elastic fibers twist the filaments around, giving the oxygen carriers plenty of limberness, researchers report online 21 October in Annals of Biomedical Engineering.
  • Tetraplatia Ocean enigma. With the stinging cells of a jellyfish and the wiggling movements of a worm, it's no wonder researchers have had a hard time placing Tetraplatia on the evolutionary tree. Now, DNA analysis may have finally solved the mystery. Tetraplatia's flapping arms, which aid its worm-like movements, are merely modifications from a recent jellyfish ancestor, placing the bizarre creature squarely in the Narcomedusae order, researchers report online 18 October in Biology Letters. (Allen Collins / Smithsonian Institute)
  • Sea Lilly Run away! Sea lilies, once thought to be firmly planted in the sea floor, have been caught on videotape crawling for their lives. When danger threatens, the flower-like echinoderms uproot and creep away on their sides, dragging themselves along by their finger-like “petals” at speeds up to 5 cm/s. The creatures may use a strategy like that of lizards, abandoning part of their stalk to escape predatory sea urchins, researchers reported 16 October at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. (Photo: T. K. Baumiller and C. G. Messing/Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution)
  • Noodles Neolithic takeout. The Chinese have won the latest round in the great international debate about who invented the noodle. A sealed bowl of the boiled strands found at a 4000-year-old site in northwestern China is now the oldest record of noodles—predating evidence of early Italian noodles by nearly 2000 years. The ancient noodles are made from ground millet and seem to have been prepared by traditional Chinese methods, which involve pulling and stretching the dough by hand to half a meter in length, the team reports 13 October in Nature. (Photo: K.B.K. Teo, E. Minoux et al.)
  • Sea Slug Fair trade. When it comes to mating, one sex usually risks less than the other. So how do hermaphrodites, which can choose to be the more advantaged sex, play fair? In the case of sea slugs, they trade sperm, with each partner assuming a male role and inseminating the other, researchers report 11 October in Current Biology. When biologists created "cheater" slugs, which mate without releasing sperm and thus don't waste gametes, they found that the cheater's partner cut off the mating ritual early, preventing the would-be scammers from gaining an advantage in the battle of the double-sexes. (Photo: Anthes et al./Current Biology)
  • Photo of Pisaura mirabilis Dead sexy. Female Pisaura mirabilis spiders have a nasty habit of consuming their lovers on sight, so courting males try to distract them with a tasty offering of silk-wrapped prey. But if the female still threatens, the most successful males have another trick ready: They drop and play dead until the female starts to devour her gift, then sneak up behind her to mate, researchers report online 5 October in Biology Letters. (Photo: Allan Lau)
  • Photo of Whale Shark Sky to sea. Does the whale shark get around as much as its relatives? Researchers may soon find out thanks to pattern-recognition software originally developed to locate astronomical objects in the sky. A NASA astrophysicist and his colleagues have begun a Web-based photo library to track these gentle giants, whose starry spots are as unique as fingerprints, the team reports in the upcoming December issue of the Journal of Applied Ecology. (Photo: Brad Norman/Ecocean)
  • Photo of Pterosaur Fossil full. Two new species of pterosaur, an extinct kind of flying reptile that includes pterodactyls, have been unearthed in northeastern China. The new fossils are closely related to European species never before seen in Asia and make the 125-million-year-old Chinese deposits the most diverse assembly of pterosaur specimens in the world, researchers report 6 October in Nature. [Photo: X. Wang et al., Nature 437, 875-879 (2005)]
  • Photo of 10th Planet Moon Travelling buddy. The so-called 10th planet is becoming more planetary by the day. Astronomers have detected a faint spot next to 2003 UB313 that appears to be its moon, according to a report in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. More detailed analysis of the object, which orbits its companion every 2 weeks, may help astronomers determine whether UB313 is indeed more massive than Pluto and truly deserves to be called a planet. (Photo: Robert Hurt/IPAC)

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