Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
It has taken her several years and over 180,000 bites, but Simon Fraser University biologist Regine Gries has discovered a group of chemical attractants that could help end the global bedbug epidemic.
Gries, her husband and fellow biology professor Gerhard Gries, SFU chemist Robert Britton and a group of students discovered a set of pheromones that can lure the nighttime pests into traps and keep them there. Following a series of successful trials, they published their findings earlier this week in the international chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie.
The study authors conducted those trials in bedbug-infested apartments in Metro Vancouver, and they said that their findings will be used to develop a new effective and low-cost bait and trap for detecting and monitoring bedbug infestations. That trap will be created with the assistance Victoria-based Contech Enterprises Inc. and should be available early next year.
“The biggest challenge in dealing with bedbugs is to detect the infestation at an early stage,” explained Gerhard Gries, who is an NSERC-Industrial Research Chair in Multimodal Animal Communication Ecology. “This trap will help landlords, tenants, and pest-control professionals determine whether premises have a bedbug problem, so that they can treat it quickly. It will also be useful for monitoring the treatment’s effectiveness.”
“It’s a solution the world has been waiting for,” the university added. “Over the last two decades the common bedbug (Cimex lectularius), once thought eradicated in industrialized countries, has reappeared as a global scourge. These nasty insects are infesting not just low-income housing but also expensive hotels and apartments, and public venues such as stores, movie theatres, libraries and even public transit.”
Previously, bedbugs were looked upon only as an annoyance, but recently scientists have discovered that they can transmit the pathogen responsible for Chagas disease, a condition that is prevalent in Central and South America. Most tools for detecting and monitoring the insects have been costly and difficult to use, which led to the search for an inexpensive, easy-to-use alternative.
The Gries’ work in the field began eight years ago, when Gerhard began the search for pheromones that could lure and trap bedbugs. To assist with the research, his wife was in charge of the lab and field experiments, and also served as the dinner for the bedbug colony being studies. It may sound like she drew the short straw, but the researchers explained that Regine was immune to the bites and did not suffer the itching and swelling that may others do (including her husband).
During their initial work, they discovered a pheromone blend that worked well in laboratory conditions, but failed to attract bedbugs in an infested apartment. They realized that some component must be missing, and turned to Britton (an expert in isolating and solving the structure of natural products) for assistance.
Using spectrometers, he studied the chemical Regine had isolated from shed bedbug skin for more than two years looking for the missing ingredient before finally discovering that the molecule histamine indicates the presence of a safe-haven for bedbugs. Once they come in contact with the molecule, they remain in place, whether they had recently fed on a human host or not.
But histamine alone or in combination with other previously-identified pheromone components still wasn’t enough to effectively attract and trap bedbugs. So Regine started to analyze airborne volatile compounds from bedbug feces as an alternate source of the missing components. After nearly half a year and 35 experiments, she found three new components that when combined with the previous-identified substances, effectively lured the bedbugs into traps.
Their research, which was funded with a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada industry grant in partnership with Contech Enterprises Inc., continues as they put the finishing touches on the commercial lure. This means that Regine will have to serve as a bedbug snack for a little longer, the university said, something she says she is “not too thrilled about, but knowing how much this technology will benefit so many people, it’s all worth it.”
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
For the first time, researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Weizmann Institute in Chiacago have created the precursors to egg and sperm using human stem cells.
While these primordial germ cells had previously been created from rodent stem cells, the new research – which was funded Wellcome Trust and BIRAX (the Britain Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership) and is detailed in the latest edition of the journal Cell – marks the first time they have been achieved efficiently using human embryonic stem cells.
As an egg cell is fertilized by a sperm, it begins to divide into a cluster of cells known as a blastocyst, the researchers explained. The blastocyst, which is the earliest stage of the embryo, contains cells that form the inner mass and will become the fetus, as well as some that form the outer wall and will become the placenta.
Cells contained within the inner cell mass are ‘reset’ into stem cells, which allows them to form into any type of cell in the human body. Some of those cells develop into primordial germ cells (PGCs), and they have the potential to become egg or sperm cells (also known as germ cells) later on in life, allowing them to pass on the offspring’s genetic information to its own children.
“The creation of primordial germ cells is one of the earliest events during early mammalian development,” said first author Dr. Naoko Irie of the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge.
“It’s a stage we’ve managed to recreate using stem cells from mice and rats, but until now few researches have done this systematically using human stem cells,” Dr. Irie added. “It has highlighted important differences between embryo development in humans and rodents that may mean findings in mice and rats may not be directly extrapolated to humans.”
Lead investigator Professor M. Azim Surani from the Wellcome Trust Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, Dr. Irie and their colleagues discovered that a gene known as SOX17 was essential for coaxing human stem become PCGs. This discovery was described as a surprise, because the mouse equivalent of the gene was not involved in the process at all, suggesting that this is one key difference in the development of rodents and humans.
Previously, scientists had demonstrated that SOX17 was involved in directing stem cells to become endodermal cells, which then develop into cells for the lung, gut and pancreas. However, this marks the first time that it has ever been observed becoming involved in PGC specification.
The researchers demonstrated that PCGs could also be make from reprogrammed adult cells, including skin cells, which will allow them to investigate on patient-specific cells to gain new insights into the human germline, infertility and germ cell tumors.
“The research also has potential implications for understanding the process of ‘epigenetic’ inheritance,” Cambridge University explained. “Scientists have known for some time that our environment – for example, our diet or smoking habits – can affect our genes through a process known as methylation whereby molecules attach themselves to our DNA, acting like dimmer switches to increase or decrease the activity of genes.”
Those methylation patterns can be passed down to the offspring, and Professor Surani’s team has found that during the PGC specification stage, a program is launched that can serve as a type of ‘reset’ switch, erasing these methylation patterns. However, traces of these patterns might be inherited, and it is currently unclear why this could occur, the study authors noted.
“Germ cells are ‘immortal’ in the sense that they provide an enduring link between all generations, carrying genetic information from one generation to the next,” said Professor Surani. “The comprehensive erasure of epigenetic information ensures that most, if not all, epigenetic mutations are erased, which promotes ‘rejuvenation’ of the lineage and allows it to give rise to endless generations. These mechanisms are of wider interest towards understanding age-related diseases, which in part might be due to cumulative epigenetic mutations.”
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Invasive species are often bad news for the local environment, but new research suggests that the European fire ant could be double trouble for forest ecosystems in eastern North America.
In a new paper, evolutionary biologists from the University of Toronto report that the European fire ant (Myrmica rubra) can not only invade people’s backyards and deliver a nasty sting in the wrong circumstances, but it is also helping spread the seeds of an invasive plant seeds.
“Ecologists think invasive species might help each other to spread, but there are few good examples. They talk about ‘invasional meltdown,’ because ecosystems could be very, very rapidly taken over by invasive species if invaders help each other out,” explained Megan Frederickson, one of the authors of a study that will be published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “Our results suggest that invasional meltdown could be happening right under our noses, here in Ontario.”
Frederickson, Kirsten M. Prior, Jennifer M. Robinson and Shannon A. Meadley Dunphy, all from the university’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, created artificial ecological communities inside 42 small plastic swimming pools. These communities, also known as mesocosms, were created a field station, the Koffler Scientific Reserve at Jokers Hill.
Each of the pools was filled with soil, and the researchers planted four species of spring wildflowers – three native species (sharp-lobed hepatica, Canadian wild ginger and bloodroot) and one invasive species (greater celandine). Next, they collected colonies of either the European fire ant or a native woodland ant, adding them to the pool. Each ant picked up and relocated seeds of their respective plant species as the study authors monitored their activity.
“The pools with the invasive ant were overrun by the invasive plant, but pools with the native ant had lots of native plants,” Prior said. “Unfortunately, as a result of humans rapidly moving species around the globe through trade and traffic, most ecosystems are now home to numerous invasive species.”
“Our finding that multiple invasive species can accelerate invasion and cause ecosystems to become dominated by invasive species is a troubling one,” she added. “Invasive species are a leading threat to natural ecosystems, and can have impacts on society. Research on how ecosystems become invaded and the consequences of invasion is important. It sets us on the right path to develop solutions to reduce the spread and impact of these harmful species.”
The findings contradict previous research which found that invasive ants tended to be poor seed dispersers in comparison to their native counterparts. The University of Toronto team found that both native and invasive ants had a strong but divergent impact on plant communities, as the invasive plants dominated in the presence of the invasive ant and the native plants dominated in the mesocosms infested by native ants species.
“Community changes were not due to preferences for coevolved partners: variation in functional traits of linked partners drove differences. Here, we show that strongly interacting introduced mutualists can be major drivers of ecological change,” the authors wrote. Their research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation.
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A stone knife discovered in Turkey is the oldest tool of its kind to ever be found there, and it suggests that humans passed from Asia into Europe far earlier than originally believed.
In research published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London and an international team of colleagues report on a humanly-worked quartzite flake that was discovered in the ancient deposits of the river Gediz in western Turkey. High-precision dating indicates that the tool is roughly 1.2 million years old.
The finding supports claims that early humans were in living in Turkey’s Anatolian peninsula at the time – claims based on the discovery of skull fragments from Homo erectus discovered in the region last year, according to the Daily Mail. Previously, it was believed that those remains were only 500,000 years old.
According to the study authors, the finding provides a major new insight into how and when early humans entered Europe from Asia and Africa. Using high-precision equipment, they were able to date the deposits of  the ancient river meander, providing the first accurate timeline for when the first humans would have started occupying the region.
“This discovery is critical for establishing the timing and route of early human dispersal into Europe,” said Danielle Schreve, a professor at the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway. “Our research suggests that the flake is the earliest securely-dated artifact from Turkey ever recorded and was dropped on the floodplain by an early hominin well over a million years ago.”
Both high-precision radioisotopic dating and palaeomagnetic measurements from lava flows, which both pre-date and post-date the meander, were used to establish that early humans were likely present in this area between approximately 1.24 million and 1.17 million years ago.
“The dating of the flake suggests that the maker would have been Homo erectus, which is widely believed to have evolved in Africa and then spread into Eurasia by 2 million years,” Schreve told the Daily Mail, adding that the site “has been re-dated several times, with dates from around half a million to just over a million years old, so the new evidence from the Gedix River really firms up our knowledge of chronology of early human occupation in Turkey.”
“The flake was an incredibly exciting find,” she added. “I had been studying the sediments in the meander bend and my eye was drawn to a pinkish stone on the surface. When I turned it over for a better look, the features of a humanly-struck artifact were immediately apparent. By working together with geologists and dating specialists, we have been able to put a secure chronology to this find and shed new light on the behaviour of our most distant ancestors.”
Researchers from Newcastle University and the University of Southampton in the UK, Harran University in Turkey, and Twente University, VU University, Wageningen University, Utrecht University in The Netherlands were also involved in the study.
“When the flake was struck, it would have had razor-sharp edges and presumably been used, as we know other flakes were, for cutting hides, meat or even plant materials There are a handful of sites in southern Europe – Spain, Italy and southern France – that have produced artifacts dating to around 1.2 million years,” Schreve told the UK newspaper, calling the find “secure confirmation, for the first time, of early humans in this area.”
“The dating of these sites is very controversial in many cases, or the stone tools are not clearly associated with the dated deposits, which makes it difficult to make meaningful observations as to the timing and route of dispersal of early humans,” she added. “The key point regarding the new flake from Turkey is that it comes from river sediments that are sandwiched between volcanic deposits, which can be securely dated using two very robust methods, Argon-Argon dating and palaeomagnetism.”
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John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

The California Academy of Sciences has detailed the 221 new species they discovered in 2014. The species come from five continents and two oceans, and include finds in remote caves and the bottom of the sea. However, experts tell us that we can all find new species in our gardens too, and considering that we are still to meet 90 percent of the species on Earth perhaps we should be helping out.

The new species of plants and animal include 110 ants, 16 beetles, three spiders, 28 fishes, 24 sea slugs, two marine worms, 9 barnacles, two octocorals, 25 plants, one water bear and one tiny mammal. The discoveries help us to understand how life evolved as well as predicting what shape it may take in future. We can also make better conservation decisions because of what we learned in 2014.

“Academy scientists tirelessly explore the unexplored regions of Earth – not only to discover new species, but also to uncover the importance of these species to the health of our natural systems,” says Dr. Meg Lowman, the Academy’s Chief of Science and Sustainability. “Our findings help to sustain the future of life for our children and grandchildren.”

“Even in our own backyards,” she adds with deserved enthusiasm, “new discoveries abound!”

Across the world, three tiny ray spiders have been discovered in Southeast Asia, where the bio-diversity of the tropical forests in countries like the Philippines and Malaysia makes biologists feel as dwarfed by their task as the spiders are by their surroundings. The number of spider species alone is mind-blowing.

In Africa, a round-eared sengi, or elephant-shrew, was uncovered in the remote deserts of Namibia, a challenging environment for scientists and the find is the result of several years of work. Despite their small size, the creatures are more closely related to elephants, sea cows, and aardvarks than they are to true shrews.

“With only about a dozen new species of mammal discovered in the wild each year, it is amazing that the Academy has been involved in describing three new sengis in the last decade,” says Galen Rathbun, one of the world’s foremost experts on sengis and an Academy Fellow and Research Associate. “There are new and exciting insights into biodiversity awaiting discovery, even in a group as familiar as mammals.”

Meanwhile, over the other side of Africa on the island of Madagascar, entomologist Dr. Brian Fisher, who has worked in the biodiversity rich yet critically threatened region for more than 20 years, found and described 110 new species of ants. One that stands out is the hero ant, which has a range of special nest-building techniques, including the formation of a funnel-like nest to enhance oxygen exchange and protect the colony from suffocation. However, the name “hero” is due to the ants’ defense against predators which involves a brave lone ant tackling an intruder that approaches the entrance, taking them both over the lip of the nest.

“Some arboreal ants have been observed taking to the air to avoid a predator, but no type of ant is known to sacrifice itself alongside an invader,” says Fisher. “This remarkable species is one of thousands threatened by slash-and-burn agriculture in Madagascar. The more we know about this critically diverse region, the more we can do to help protect it.”

Among the dozens of marine life species is a gigantic deepwater worm eel. At nearly 50 inches from head to tail it is the largest of its kind; almost twice as long and three times heavier than any known worm eel. It is believed to live close to 1,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface and was also found close to the Philippines.

Not all of the species are still with us, in fact at least one is long gone, but they can tell us more about species that we do have. An ancient fossil relative of the megamouth shark has been identified using teeth found in 23-million year old marine sediment California’s Central Valley. The teeth sat around in cabinets for decades after being found during digs in the 1960s and 70s, until finally the required work was done on them and the prehistoric shark was identified.

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

New models detailed in a recent edition of Nature Geoscience have revealed that diamonds can provide information about how carbon-bearing fluids move – a discovery that could provide new information about how life on Earth began and what it looked like in its earliest stages.

The research was led by Johns Hopkins geochemist Dimitri Sverjensky and colleagues with the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), a 10-year multinational and multidisciplinary effort to unlock the planet’s secrets by studying organic carbon, and revealed calculations of how much and what types of the element was present in subduction-zone fluids deep below the Earth’s surface.

“The deep earth carbon cycle is an area of research that has been neglected until the start of the Deep Carbon Observatory five years ago,” Sverjensky, from the university’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, told Popular Science on Monday. “These studies will also help us make a connection to the shallow carbon cycle of interest to current global changes.”

These fluids, the study authors explained, could have been carried from the surface into the upper mantle in the form of small plants and shells through movements of the Earth’s crust, also known as plate tectonics. It marks the first time that scientists have determined how much carbon can be mobilized in these fluids, and they believe diamonds could provide additional insights, such as what happens to the water at these depths.

Diamonds, Popular Science explains, are comprised of carbon atoms that are linked together. Each of the atoms shares electrons with four others, forming an incredibly-strong five-sided crystalline structure. However, this structure only forms under the high temperatures and intense pressures typically found hundreds of miles below the surface of the planet.

Carbon is the chemical basis of all known life on Earth, and its involvement in deep carbon cycles may have played a critical role in the origin of life. Until recently, scientists knew very little about how much carbon is stored underground, or how it reacts when its near the Earth’s core. Finding those answers could reveal much about life on our world, the website said.

“We don’t know how the building blocks for life originated, whether from outer space or the earth itself. Diamonds are helpful for this kind of research because they have inclusions, which provide us clues about what happens in the very deep earth,” Sverjensky explained, noting that the jewels could reveal much about how carbon-bearing fluids move.

Since that “is what makes earth habitable,” he said, “you could fairly say it’s critical to understand.” Unlike previous models, which “hit a limit at about nine miles down,” his new model “allows us to make predictions down to 111 miles, which gets us into the zone where we suspect there are intense chemical interactions.”

“Organic species like acetate and propionate – which we’ve known for decades exist at shallow levels – and methane and carbon dioxide could be in equilibrium at high pressures. This helps us to understand how carbon might be carried in water so deep,” Sverjensky added. “It also suggests that a chemical basis for life is much deeper than we previously thought.”

The DCO, which was founded in 2009, recently presented 100 deep carbon science-related projects at the American Geophysical Union’s 2014 Fall Meeting, held from December 15 and 19 in San Francisco. Included among those presentations were reports detailing recent findings on the quantities, movements, forms and origins of deep carbon.

“Understanding carbon at a fundamental level is critical to the health and wellbeing of society, and deep carbon is an important part of that story that we just don’t know very much about,” the organization’s executive director, Robert Hazen, recently said in a statement.

“Carbon is not only the element of life but now the premiere element of science,” he added. “Deep carbon has proven an incredibly powerful organizing principle for a range of observational, experimental, and modeling programs. It has given us a strong handle on Earth’s extraordinary history.”

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
While the fossil record has found that wrists and fingers have an aquatic origin, previous attempts to link fingers and fins have proven unsuccessful. Now, though, a team led by University of Chicago researchers has discovered the reason why: scientists were studying the wrong fish.
Writing in Monday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), organismal biology and anatomy professor Dr. Neil Shubin and his colleagues explained that the found the basic genetic machinery for mammalian limb development in a non-model fish known as the spotted gar.
Since comparisons of fin and limb morphology had proven unsuccessful, they looked at the spotted gar using developmental and molecular data. The fish, whose genome had recently been sequenced, revealed that the regulatory networks controlling wrist-and-digit-building genes were deeply conserved between fish and tetrapods.
“Fossils show that the wrist and digits clearly have an aquatic origin,” Dr. Shubin explained in a statement. “But fins and limbs have different purposes. They have evolved in different directions since they diverged. We wanted to explore, and better understand, their connections by adding genetic and molecular data to what we already know from the fossil record.”
The earliest attempts to verify the link based on comparing the shapes of fin and limb bones proved unsuccessful. The wrist is made up of a series of small nodular bones followed by thin, longer bones that make up the digits. On the other hand, the bones of living fish feature a set of longer bones that end in smaller, circular ones known as radials.
The HoxD and HoxA clusters genes, which are responsible for shaping the bones, also differ. Dr. Shubin and his co-authors first tested the ability of genetic “switches” controlling these genes in bony, ray-finned fish called teleosts to shape the limbs of developing transgenic mice. These fish control switches did not trigger any activity in the autopod, however.
Teleosts are a widely-studied group of fish that includes nearly all commercial varieties of fish. However, the researchers soon realized that they were not ideal for comparison studies of how ancient genes were regulated. When it came to looking for genetic switches involved in wrist and digit-building, they found “a lack of sequence conservation” in these species.
The problem was traced back to radical change in teleost fish genetics which occurred over 300 million years ago, when the fish-like creatures that became tetrapods split off from other types of bony fish. At this time, a common ancestor of the teleost lineage experienced a whole-genome duplication (WGD) – a phenomenon that has taken place several times in evolution.
This WGD doubled the genetic repertoire of teleost fish and provided them with the potential for tremendous diversification, the study authors explained. This may have helped telosts to adapt to several different types of environments, and during this process, the genetic switches controlling autopod-building genes would up changing their function somewhat.
As a result, those genes became harder to identify in comparison to mice and other types of animals, lead author and University of Chicago graduate student Andrew Gehrke explained. Not all bony fishes went through this process, however, and as it turns out, the spotted gar was one of those that had split off from teleost fishes before the genome duplication event occurred.
When the investigative team compared Hox gene switches from the spotted gar with tetrapods, they discovered “an unprecedented and previously undescribed level of deep conservation of the vertebrate autopod regulatory apparatus.” They said that this seems to indicate a high degree of similarity between “distal radials of bony fish and the autopod of tetrapods.”
They tested this notion by taking the gene switches related to fin development from the spotted gar and inserted them into developing mice. The resulting patterns of activity were described as “nearly indistinguishable” from those driven from the mouse genome, leading the authors to conclude that their results “provide regulatory support for an ancient origin of the ‘late’ phase of Hox expression that is responsible for building the auto pod.”
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Humans evolved their current lightweight modern skeletons relatively recently, no earlier than the start of the Holocene about 12,000 years ago and even later in some populations, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) report in a new study.
The study, which appears in this week’s edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), involved high-resolution imaging of bone joints from both modern humans and chimpanzees, as well as from the fossils of extinct human species.
That imaging revealed that ancient humans had high bone density for millions of years before a dramatic decrease took place in recent modern humans. Furthermore, the authors said that there was a higher decrease in the lower limbs than in the upper ones – a discovery which suggests that the cause of the transformation may be linked to the adoption of a more sedentary lifestyle.
“Despite centuries of research on the human skeleton, this is the first study to show that human skeletons have substantially lower density in joints throughout the skeleton, even in ancient farmers who actively worked the land,” explained study author Brian Richmond, a curator in the AMNH Division of Anthropology and a research professor at George Washington University.
When compared to both our extinct ancestors and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, modern humans have a larger body size, lower-limb joint surfaces and a relatively lightweight and spongy skeleton. Previously, however, experts were not aware that our bone joints were far less dense than those of other animals, or at what evolutionary point this trait first appeared.
“Our study shows that modern humans have less bone density than seen in related species, and it doesn’t matter if we look at bones from people who lived in an industrial society or agriculturalist populations that had a more active life. They both have much less bone density,” explained lead author Habiba Chirchir, a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “What we want to know now is whether this is an early human characteristic that defines our species.”
To solve the mystery, Chirchir and Richmond (both of whom were with George Washington University when they started the study) and an international team of colleagues used high-resolution computed tomography and microtomography to spongy or trabecular bone of the limb joints in modern humans, chimpanzees and in several groups of ancient human predecessors, including Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus and Homo neanderthalensis.
The researchers found that the only group with low trabecular density throughout their limb joints was the recent modern humans, and that the decrease was particularly evident in lower joints such as the hip, knee and ankle. They concluded that the appearance of this physiological change may have resulted from the transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a more settled one.
“Much to our surprise, throughout our deep past, we see that our human ancestors and relatives, who lived in natural settings, had very dense bone,” Richmond said. “And even early members of our species, going back 20,000 years or so, had bone that was about as dense as seen in other modern species. But this density drastically drops off in more recent times, when we started to use agricultural tools to grow food and settle in one place.”
The study was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation Wadsworth Fellowship, The Leakey Foundation Baldwin Fellowship, Smithsonian’s Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Richmond and his colleagues added that their findings provide an anthropological context to osteoporosis and other related bone disorders.
“Over the vast majority of human prehistory, our ancestors engaged in far more activity over longer distances than we do today,” he explained. “We cannot fully understand human health today without knowing how our bodies evolved to work in the past, so it is important to understand how our skeletons evolved within the context of those high levels of activity.”
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The building of the future could feature windows capable of changing the amount of light they let through at the push of a button and facades that can alter their color based on the amount of sunlight at any given time, researchers from Friedrich Schiller University claim.
In addition, the university’s Large-Area Fluidic Windows (LaWin) project, materials scientist Lothar Wondraczek and his colleagues are looking to design structures featuring facades and window parts that have been integrated with transparent photovoltaic modules, or in which microalgae are being bred to provide the home or office with its own source of biofuel.
“Many of these ideas are certainly within imagination end even technological feasibility, today, in particular within the field of façades which may adapt to their environment and thus improve the energy efficiency of modern buildings,” Wondraczek explained in a statement. “But only a fraction of this potential has been tackled so far, as the relevant materials and production processes are still missing.”
Wondraczek and an international team of architects, materials researchers and engineers are looking to solve these problems through the LaWin project. Their goal is to develop functional building fronts and window modules. He and his colleagues are currently working on new glass modules that will consist of two joint glass layers, one built from a very thin and high strength cover glass and another constructed from structured glass.
“This structured glass contains microfluidic channels through which a functional fluid circulates. As an example, this liquid will make it possible to automatically adjust the incidence of light or to harvest exterior heat which will then be transported to a heat pump,” he said.
They plan to put the facade and window modules through a battery of tests in order to optimize the materials they use and make sure that they function in the most efficient way possible. The plan is to implement their designs with reference buildings in order to test them in real world conditions and see how well they operate.
“The challenge lies in the large size,” Wondraczek noted. “As of today, there is no production process for such large-sized glass sheet with integrated micro structures. Moreover, the new glass facades have to be able to be integrated into conventional window and facade systems.”
In addition, they will have to be cost-effective to use, since a reported one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions and 40 percent of energy consumption throughout the European Union are the result of the heating, cooling, lighting and air conditioning of buildings. He and his colleagues hope to make buildings more energy efficient while also significantly reducing CO2 emissions.
A total of 14 institutions are participating in the LaWin project, including Friedrich Schiller University, Weimar University, Beuth University of Applied Sciences and 11 private-sector firms from Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Czech Republic. The research is being funded by the European Commission as part of its Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) Initiative to support research to enhance the sustainability of European industrial leaders and innovators.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The mating habits of the animal kingdom tend to be fairly basic and predictable, but one type of insect has tried to spice things up a bit by opting to use a variety of different mating patterns and sexual positions during its reproductive ritual.
The creature in question is the gold swift moth (Phymatopus hecta), and according to researchers from the University of Leeds’ School of Biology, it has one of the most complex sex lives in the insect world. In fact, research published last month in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society suggests that its reproductive repertoire reads like an insect version of the Kama Sutra.
“With most insects, you expect to find a fairly set mating process. In moths like this, you might see the female staying still, emitting a scent and then mating with the first male moth to arrive,” explained study author Professor John Turner. “Colleagues have commented that this is the most elaborate mating procedure known in any insect and I have certainly not observed anything to surpass it.”
The gold swift moth usually performs its courtship rituals throughout wooden areas of the UK during June and July, and Professor Turner said that he and his colleagues have identified a plethora of different courtship “dances” used by the creatures. In fact, they report that the moths were able to pull out a fresh set of moves if their first attempts failed to produce the desired response.
They can use the classic moth mating pattern in which the female hangs from foliage and emits a scent, then mates with one of the males that arrives on the scene. Alternately, the male can be the one hanging from foliage, with the female traveling to him for mating, or they can perform a mutual ceremony when a female flies up to a hovering male and they “dance” in the air together.
In some instances, a group of males can form a hovering swarm and follow the females as they fly out of the swarm. Once the female lands by hanging under a leaf, a male lands next to her and they mate. Also, a male could hang from foliage, only to have a female land nearby and fan her scent towards him using her wings to get his attention so they can fly off together.
Similarly, a female can fly at a hanging male, bump into him and land nearby. The male then flies towards the female, hanging beside her and fluttering, before the two go off to mate together. Professor Turner also reported observing “fighting dances” between males and the occasional “homoerotic” courtships, in which males embarked on mating procedures with other males. He suggests the later is caused by confusion due to the nearby triggering of female scents.
“I intervened on some occasions to stop the mating,” he explained. “The insects would pause and then resume using a different pattern. It started to look a bit like a human courtship, with the moths doing it every which way and having a whole range of tactics for attracting a mate.”
The researchers also found that the moths tended to vary their sexual positions. Unlike most types of insects, they used two primary approaches: one in which the male hangs facing the female, reaches over to connect his abdomen to hers, and then lets go so that he hangs there freely until sunrise; and another in which he hangs with his back to her, bends his abdomen backwards, and then twists around with his mate until their bodies are connected.
Variations on both primary positions were also observed, and the study authors conclude that the complexity of their mating rituals are evolutionarily stable, likely having persisted in the species for tens of thousands of years. They believe that the relative scarcity of the moth’s mating grounds could explain the phenomenon, as both male and female members of the species have to live together in restricted areas that could encourage the development of new ways to find mates.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Butterflies are some of nature’s most beautiful creatures, with the shiny blue Morpho butterfly standing out as among the most spectacular. But how do the colors and patterns featured on their wings evolve? Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley intend to find out.
According to KQED, Nipam Patel, a professor in the Bay Area university’s Molecular & Cell Biology Department, is in the process of studying the thousands of tiny cells on their wings, known as scales. While from a distance, the rows of scales look like vivid patterns, up close they more closely resemble a dab of paint or a single tile in a mosaic, he explained.
Each scale represents an individual unit of color, and each is “a single cell,” said Patel, who recently published a study detailing his work in the journal Developmental Biology. “As far as cells go, they are huge, much larger than the typical cells in our bodies. A human blood cell is about 10 microns in size – a pretty typical size for a cell in our bodies. A butterfly scale is…a huge one, about 50 microns across and 200-250 microns long.”
While some butterfly scales are colored by pigments, others rely on a phenomenon known as “structural color,” which involves the production of hues by elaborate nanoscale shapes that bend and reflect light. Among the butterfly species that utilize this phenomenon is the Morpho, a stunning blue butterfly typically found in South America, Mexico and Central America.
A Morpho butterfly is “a master of nanoscale light bending,” according to Gwen Pearson of Wired.com. Its scales, which are essentially made from the same sugars that make up the rest of the creature’s skeleton, reflect wavelengths of light in order to create its appearance. Essentially, it gets it shine from detailed nanostructures of longitudinal ridges and crossbeams, she said.
As part of its research earlier this year, Patel’s lab examined the developing wings of a pupa, the stage bridging the gap between caterpillar and butterfly. They found that two types of cells were involved: scale cells and socket cells, which anchor the scale cells to the wing’s membrane.
In caterpillars, these are perfectly ordinary cells, but early on in the pupal stage, they begin to organize themselves in rows that correspond to where the wing will eventually grow. This process begins when the transitional phase is approximately seven percent complete. Scale cells go on to form strings of proteins known as f-actins that serve as the framework.
When the metamorphosis is a little more than one-fourth complete, it is possible to see both cells and ribbed bundles of actin beginning to form, Pearson explained. Scale cells create and assemble a lattice of actins that will form the template for the rest of the scale, and by the time the process in nearly two-thirds complete, those protein bundles will start to disappear. Eventually, the scale cell dies and leaves behind a finished scale that hardens once it emerges.
“What’s cool about this work is that in contrast to the way people currently mimic naturally occurring structural colors – by using industrial processes deposit layers of heavy metals by electricity that’s expensive and energy-intensive – butterflies and moths have evolved a way to create these stunning colors with a string of sugar molecules,” Ryan Null, a graduate student in Patel’s lab, told KQED.
“The genetic program controlling the creation of the nanostructures is elegant, robust and done in a way that is not hazardous to the life of the animal,” he added. “If we can figure out how the butterflies do what they do, we have the potential to apply what we learn to a vast array of problems like creating cars that have their ‘paint’ grown from the surface of their sheet metal, vivid cosmetics that are inherently safe for use with minimal testing, and even making solar cells more efficient.”

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An analysis of six out of 12 major archeological sites in Syria that have been nominated as World Heritage Sites has found that four of them have been extensively looted and damaged, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced.
The Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights Project of the AAAS assessed and prepared a paper describing the condition of Dura Europos, Ebla, Hama’s Waterwheels, Mari, Raqqa, and Ugarit, with the remaining six sites set to be covered in a second report. Among the information cited in the report were high-resolution images documenting the condition at each location.
“As we continue to study the conditions at Syria’s important cultural sites, we have observed significant destruction that is largely the result of conflict,” said AAAS Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights Project director Susan Wolfinbarger. “However, unlike our previous analysis… we’re seeing a lot of damage that appears to be the result of widespread looting.”
“This report helps us understand how the extensive the actual damage is to Syria’s cultural heritage. It will inform future emergency preservation efforts,” added Brian Daniels, director of research and programs at the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s Penn Cultural Heritage Center. Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution also contributed to the research.
Images taken earlier this year that were included in the report depict several pits throughout three of the sites which were once home to ancient cities. Those pits typically do not appear in similar pictures taken three years ago, when the conflict in Syria first began. AAAS researchers said that they believe these images indicate evidence of looting due to the distinct nature of the craters.
“This type of documentation really allows us to make a firm statement based on scientific observation of things that have happened at a site,” said Wolfinbarger. “Sometimes when things are reported in the news media or social media, details can be obscured or purposefully misconstrued. But this analysis is replicable. We can say definitively, ‘we see this.’ And when it is tied it in with other types of information, satellite imagery can give us a more complete picture in parts of the world that are difficult to access.”
“These images show the destruction of ancient artifacts, architecture, and most importantly, archaeological context that is the record of humanity’s past,” added Katharyn Hanson, a post-doctoral fellow at the Penn Cultural Heritage Center and a visiting scholar at AAAS. “From the origins of civilization to the first international empires, Syria’s cultural heritage and these sites in particular are vitally important to our understanding of history.”
The authors of the report said that the most extensive looking took place at Dura-Europos, which was a frontier city founded during the third century BC. The AAAS analysis revealed that 76 percent of the area within the city was had been damaged as of April 2014, and that the looting pits were located so closely together that it was impossible to distinguish between each of them.
Outside the city walls, looting pits were described as less dense but still numerous. In fact, they found about 3,750 pits. Images from April 2 also depict four vehicles travelling through nearby Roman ruins, indicating that disturbances at the site may have been occurring at that time.
They also found looking pits at Ebla, the site of an important kingdom in the Early Bronze Age constructed out of mud brick, and the ancient Mesopotamian city of Mari. Images revealed 45 new holes from August 2013 and August 2014, eroded walls, vehicle tracks and other damage at the former site, and over 1,200 pits between March 25 and November 11, 2014 at the latter.
A fourth site, Raqqa, has been at the center of the conflict in Syria and was seized by ISIS in October 2013. This September, a US-led airstrike campaign targeted the former Greek/Byzantine urban center, and the damage there appears to be different in nature than that observed at the other locations. There is little evidence of direct military conflict there, but the damage that is present “appears to be nearly total and targeted,” the report said.
The nature of the destruction leads the research team to conclude that it was the result of the actions of ISIS, not the military forces of the Syrian Arab Republic Government or the bombing campaigns of the US and its international partners. The last two areas analyzed by researchers–the historic waterwheels of Hama and the ancient stone city of Ugarit–appear to be undamaged.
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

When it comes to building cars and trucks that will inspire customer loyalty, it might be best for automotive companies to focus on what their products look like instead of how much horsepower they have, or how fuel-efficient they are, according to a new study.

In fact, researchers from San Francisco State University (SFSU) report in the Journal of Product Innovation Management that not even lower prices are as effective at inspiring consumer loyalty and passion for a particular automotive brand than a vehicle’s aesthetic value.

“In product design, if you focus more on the aesthetics of the product, the connections that you create with the consumer at the brand level will result in more loyalty and a more sustainable relationship,” explained co-author and SFSU associate professor of marketing Minu Kumar. “You might think that segment [of consumers] wants more functionality, more bang for their buck. That may not necessarily be true.”

“The customer might forget the functional attributes of the product over time, but they will love the brand if it has beautiful products,” he added. “The more you invest in aesthetics, the stronger the relationship outcome. If you invest more in the functionality – like providing extra buttons, another cup holder – the result is a more transactional relationship.”

Kumar and his colleagues examined data from over 700 consumers about their opinions of 30 small vehicles on a variety of factors, including styling, craftsmanship, cost and safety. While the general view is that consumers in the market for these types of products tend to have utilitarian priorities, the research indicates that social and emotional factors (including pride of ownership) is more important to them than price or gas mileage.

According to Kumar, this supports the idea that consumers tend to support name brands that have unique and pleasing designs, including Apple products, Dyson vacuums and the automobiles like the Volkswagen Beetle. He also noted that this type of thinking is likely diametrically opposed to what many designers believe, especially those that set out to create products that cost less.

Another interesting finding of the study, according to the authors, is that the altruistic value of a car – i.e. whether or not it was environmentally friendly – was not found to be a significant factor when it came to brand affection. In fact, Kumar said that the perception that a car was environmentally friendly ranked behind economic value, proving that people “don’t seem to give a lot of importance to sustainability” when it comes to purchasing a new set of wheels.

The purpose of the study, the SFSU professor said, it to help clarify what is most meaningful to consumers and to prevent disputes between marketers and designers in the automotive industry. “There is a classic fight” between these two different factions, he explained. “This research is part of a stream of literature… which is trying to bridge this gap.”

The paper, “Enhancing Consumers’ Affection for a Brand Using Product Design,” was written by Kumar and co-authors Janell D. Townsend and Douglas W. Vorhies, also from the SFSU College of Business. It was published in the online edition of the Journal of Product Innovation Management in October, and will appear in the print version sometime next year.

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
While climate change has placed many different types of creatures in peril, others – including a species of Alaskan char known as Dolly Varden – have managed to adapt to warming conditions, claims new research published earlier this month in the journal Freshwater Biology.
According to lead author Christopher J. Sergeant of the National Park Service’s Inventory and Monitoring Program in southeastern Alaska and his colleagues, Dolly Varden have adjusted their migratory patterns in order to have continued access to a preferred source of food (salmon eggs), in spite of the fact that climate changes have altered the timing of salmon spawning.
This ability to adapt to climate-driven changes to food and habitat could be a key factor in how resilient different types of creatures are to global warming, the researchers explained. Predators that hunt at times in which their prey are no longer available could completely lose access to food, while others like the Dolly Varden have altered their schedules in order to survive.
Sergeant’s team believes that the key to the Dolly Varden’s success in this field may be that it ignored environmental cues. Instead of determining when it should migrate by variables such as water temperature or stream flow, the species took its cues directly from the presence of the salmon upon with it depends for food.
“Despite warming temperatures and shifting salmon migrations, Dolly Varden do a great job of following their food,” Sergeant explained. “Species that can handle a high degree of variability are the ones that should be most resilient to further changes associated with climate.”
This type of fish gets the bulk of its energy throughout the year by devouring salmon eggs, which are abundant during the summer and are rich in energy thanks to fatty acids, the study authors explained. Salmon eggs can be available during a narrow spawning window lasting two to six weeks, so the Dolly Varden has to keep a close eye on salmon migrations in order to take full advantage of this aquatic buffet.
However, the warming climate has resulted in changes to the migratory patterns of salmon, as previous research has indicated that  pink and coho salmon now travel to their spawning grounds 10 to 17 days earlier, while sockeye salmon migrate eight days earlier.
Dolly Varden living in the Auke Creek region have successfully adjusted their annual migrations from the ocean back to freshwater in order to remain in synch with the salmon, the authors noted. As a result, they have been able to have continued access to their salmon egg feasts.
“In short, the Dolly Varden are shifting their migration to follow their food instead of following temperatures or other environmental cues that, as the climate changes, might otherwise lead them to migrate at a different time than the salmon that provide their most important food,” the NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region explained in a statement.
However, they also caution that it is not clear yet whether or not other salmon predators could make similar adjustments to their schedule, either by watching them as the pass by or detecting the smell of their eggs. Nonetheless, the adaptability of Dolly Varden suggests that at least some creatures are more resilient to climate-induced migration changes than previously believed.
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John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A spiky-shelled sea snail that resides in one of the ocean’s toughest neighborhoods has been given an official punk rock image after being named for Joe Strummer, the late frontman of legendary British band The Clash.
Shannon Johnson, a researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, had such success in engaging kids by referring to the aquatic creatures as “punk-rock snails” that she and her colleagues decided to name the new species Alviniconcha strummeri.
“Because they look like punk rockers in the 70s and 80s and they have purple blood and live in such an extreme environment, we decided to name one new species after a punk rock icon,” Johnson told the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
The golf ball-sized mollusks live in the deep sea near thermal vents 11,500 feet under water. What’s more, “They live in hot, acidic poison, basically, so they’re pretty hardcore,” says Johnson on NPR. As oceanic environments go, the punk rock snail’s is comparable to the mean streets of 1970’s London, which inspired the Clash’s classic album London Calling.
Johnson adds that: “These guys are covered in bacteria,” a phrase that sounds as if it could have been uttered by a stuffy father when his daughter brought a punk rocker home. But Strummer had a softer side too, being a keen conservationist – another reason why the marine biologists thought that a Strummer tribute would be appropriate. “Not only was a he a punk-rock icon – he’s kind of one of the originators of the punk movement – but he also was kind of an environmentalist,” Johnson explains. “He started a foundation that was planting trees all over the world. He’s a neat guy.”
So deep in the ocean is the snails’ home that specimens have never survived a journey up to the surface. “Their proteins are unfolding by the time we get them up,” Johnson told the LA Times. Although the scientists are unsure exactly why the snails need all the bacteria they are covered in, it is clear that they do, and the spiky shells, which are made fragile by the extreme environment, have a greater surface area that allows more bacteria to grow.
There are quite a few creatures around the world named in honor of musical legends, including the ancient, giant lizard Barbaturex morrisoni which was named for “the lizard king” Jim Morrison of The Doors, and an Amazonian frog in the Amazon named after Ozzy Osbourne because of its shrill, bat-like call. Each member of The Ramones has donated their name to a different trilobite, and a parasitic wasp is named after Shakira because its writing movements reminded scientists of the Colombian singer’s dancing.
There is even a dinosaur named after Mark Knopfler, the frontman of radio-friendly rockers Dire Straits, who are often considered the ultimate dad’s band -meaning that Knopfler could be considered a pejorative ‘dinosaur’ himself.  But the dog-sized dinosaur Masiakasaurus knopfleri was actually named in his honor because the palaeontologists who discovered the fossil on Madagascar had been listening to a lot of Dire Straits during the dig, and in the face of any sneering the fact that he has a dollar for every year the dinosaur has been extinct will be of comfort.
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