Nature involves Science, too! (Nobody Cares...)

[Beebo Brink]

Mystery Prototaxites tower fossils may represent a newly discovered kind of life | Scientific American

Before trees came along some 400 million years ago, our planet’s landscape was dominated by enigmatic, spire-shaped life-forms that towered more than 25 feet above the ground. Their trunklike fossils were discovered in 1843. Yet despite more than a century of speculation, scientists have struggled to answer the most basic question about Earth’s original terrestrial giants: What were they?

According to a new study, that may be because they belonged to a previously unknown branch of life.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

They're Slaver Stage Trees, or maybe the Mpul trees the Tnuctipun developed them from.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

The "study" makes a huge leap. It dooes not match extant plants or fungi so it must be a new kingdom?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Yesterday's fountains at Kilauea were the highest so far, at 1,575 feet sustained - and a few chuffs making it up even substantially higher than that. The very large tephra plume drifted out of the crater and over public observation areas, a few populated towns and the nearby Hilo Airport, canceling some flights for a while. Tephra can be pretty sharp and abrasive and there are reports of some minor injuries among tourists and watchers as the stuff rained down on them.

 

[Isabeau]

The Earliest Known Vertebrates Had Four Eyes—and They Worked a Lot Like Ours Do, New Research Suggests

Many spine-bearing creatures, or vertebrates, have a curious bit of tissue deep in their brains called the pineal gland. It helps regulate sleep rhythms by reacting to light detected by the eyes. Sometimes, the gland is even nicknamed the “third eye.”

Now, new research hints that this label might not be so far-fetched. The earliest known fossil vertebrates, from 518 million years ago, may have viewed the world through four eyes—and one pair of them was the precursor to the pineal gland, according to a study published January 21 in the journal Nature.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Hail Eris!

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Holy smoke, that was a BIG solar flare just now. X8.11.

That's gonna make the news, watch out for it.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Holy smoke, that was a BIG solar flare just now. X8.11.

That's gonna make the news, watch out for it.

Any word on which way it is pointing?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Any word on which way it is pointing?

Not yet, still waiting for it. I haven't heard anything about the CME yet.

 

[Isabeau]

Apes Show Ability to Imagine in ‘Tea Party’ Experiments, and Scientists are Very Excited

Apes share the human ability to imagine and pretend, suggests new research that included a series of tea party experiments.

www.goodnewsnetwork.org

 

[Free]

Flowering plants are little more than leafy, firestarting angiosperms.

 

[Free]

Bringing the "functionally extinct" American chestnut back from the dead

Wiped out in its native range by invasive pathogens, the trees may make a comeback.

arstechnica.com

Very few people alive today have seen the Appalachian forests as they existed a century ago. Even as state and national parks preserved ever more of the ecosystem, fungal pathogens from Asia nearly wiped out one of the dominant species of these forests, the American chestnut, killing an estimated 3 billion trees. While new saplings continue to sprout from the stumps of the former trees, the fungus persists, killing them before they can seed a new generation.

But thanks in part to trees planted in areas where the two fungi don’t grow well, the American chestnut isn’t extinct. And efforts to revive it in its native range have continued, despite the long generation times needed to breed resistant trees. In Thursday’s issue of Science, researchers describe their efforts to apply modern genomic techniques and exhaustive testing to identify the best route to restoring chestnuts to their native range.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Tardigrades

 

[Free]

Are there words that sound more round to you than others? It's possible your pets hear the same thing. And the same goes for the chicken I had for dinner tonight...

From chickens to humans, animals think "bouba" sounds round

There seems to be a deep-seated association between sounds and shapes.

arstechnica.com

Does “bouba” sound round to you? How about “maluma”? Neither are real words, but we’ve known for decades that people who hear them tend to associate them with round objects. There have been plenty of ideas put forward about why that would be the case, and most of them have turned out to be wrong. Now, in perhaps the weirdest bit of evidence to date, researchers have found that even newly hatched chickens seem to associate “bouba” with round shapes.

The initial finding dates all the way back to 1947, when someone discovered that people associated some word-like sounds with rounded shapes, and others with spiky ones. In the years since, that association got formalized as the bouba/kiki effect, received a fair bit of experimental attention, and ended up with an extensive Wikipedia entry.

One of the initial ideas to explain it was similarity to actual words (either phonetically or via the characters used to spell them), but then studies with speakers of different languages and alphabets showed that it is likely a general human tendency. The association also showed up in infants as young as 4 months old, well before they master speaking or spelling. Attempts to find the bouba/kiki effects in other primates, however, came up empty. That led to some speculation that it might be evidence of a strictly human processing ability that underlies our capacity to learn sophisticated languages.

A team of Italian researchers—Maria Loconsole, Silvia Benavides-Varela, and Lucia Regolin—now have evidence that that isn’t true either. They decided to look for the bouba/kiki effect well beyond primates, instead turning to newly hatched chickens, only one or three days old. That may sound a bit odd, but chickens have a key advantage beyond ready availability: unlike a 4-month-old human, newly hatched chicks are fully mobile and able to interact with the world.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

'Smiling' fossil discovered in Northumberland

The unusual looking fossil is estimated to be a few hundred million years old dating to the Carboniferous period.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Free]

Chimpanzees enjoy getting zonked. And why wouldn't they?

Boozy chimps fail urine test, confirm hotly debated theory

Spare a thought for the intrepid graduate students who spent last summer in Africa collecting chimp urine.

arstechnica.com

The urine of chimpanzees contains high levels of alcohol byproduct, most likely because the chimps regularly gorge themselves on fermented fruit, according to a new paper published in the journal Biology Letters. It’s the latest evidence in support of a hotly debated theory regarding the evolutionary origins of human fondness for alcohol.

As previously reported, in 2014, University of California, Berkeley (UCB) biologist Robert Dudley wrote a book called The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol. His controversial “drunken monkey hypothesis” proposed that the human attraction to alcohol goes back about 18 million years, to the origin of the great apes, and that social communication and sharing food evolved to better identify the presence of fruit from a distance. At the time, skeptical scientists insisted that this was unlikely because chimpanzees and other primates just don’t eat fermented fruit or nectar.

But reports of primates doing just that have grown over the ensuing two decades.

 

[Free]

The science of how fireflies stay in sync

Engineers have uncovered the mathematical rules fireflies follow to sync up their flashes.

arstechnica.com

Scientists have discovered that male fireflies in a South Carolina swamp follow local interaction rules to synchronize their flashing mating displays. The research is being presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver. (A preprint is also available on the biorxiv.) Such work could one day lead to insights into how the body’s cells sync to its internal circadian rhythm, or how neurons fire together in the brain, as well as the design of drone swarms communicating through synchronized flashes.

 

[Free]

Birds Are Getting Hooked on Cigarettes

Some species of birds are getting hooked on cigarettes, scientists have found — but not for the reason you might think.

futurism.com

Nicotine, the highly addictive chemical compound in cigarettes, is having a bit of a resurgence as of late — with patches of the stuff even appearing in vending machines at tech company offices, offering overworked staffers a way to get through the day.

Even some species of birds are getting hooked on cigarettes — but not for the reason you might think. Instead of suffering from a debilitating nicotine addiction, blue tits across Europe are hoarding cigarette butts to ward off parasites using the natural and artificial toxins in tobacco and cigarette butts, as the New York Times reports. It’s a bizarre evolutionary outcome resulting from an otherwise ecologically damaging side effect of our collective smoking addiction.

Finally, an actual benefit.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Man Trains Crows to Attack MAGA Hats

In a particularly creative expression of anti-MAGA sentiment, a man who goes by the username “biz_dave” says he successfully trained crows to attack MAGA hats. As detailed in a series of posts on Threads, the self-proclaimed “big nerd” and “very part-time artist” stuck some tasty treats, including “peanuts, chicken scraps, mealworms, and dog kibble,” underneath a MAGA hat.

 

[Free]

Oh sure, deprive us of one of the best reasons to enjoy living in colder climates during the winter months.

This Winter Fly Is Doing Something Scientists Didn’t Think Was Possible

Unlike most bugs, snow flies thrive in the cold—thanks to a baffling mix of genetic kinks that scientists never expected to find.

gizmodo.com

Insects are cold-blooded. Low temperatures make them too sluggish to function, hence the marked decrease in bug sightings during winter. But many insects manage to survive in the cold, and new research suggests that one species, the snow fly, truly defies common sense when it comes to surviving winter.

Snow flies (Chionea) are small, wingless bugs that actively flit around the snow in winter, even as temperatures drop below freezing. They’re an enigma to researchers, but a recent Current Biology study presents genetic evidence with startling implications: snow flies appear to generate their own body heat, like mammals, while also producing antifreeze proteins more reminiscent of Arctic fish, not insects.