Researchers at Penn State University have developed a new technology that they believe will be capable of producing large amounts of energy – possibly more than one-third the amount needed to meet global energy demands – in coastal areas where seawater and freshwater meet.

“The goal of this technology,” assistant environmental engineering professor Christopher Gorski explained earlier this month in a statement, “is to generate electricity from where the rivers meet the ocean. It’s based on the difference in the salt concentrations between the two water sources.”

According to Gorski and his colleagues, that difference in salinity levels could potentially create enough energy to meet nearly 40 percent of the world’s electricity needs. However, methods that experts currently use to harness that power have failed to fully capitalize on that potential.

The most commonly used technique, pressure retarded osmosis (PRO), uses a semi-permeable membrane to filter salt out of the water, generating osmotic pressure which is then turned into power using turbines. While Gorski explained that PRO is “the best technology” developed thus far “in terms of how much energy you can get out,” it is not without issues – namely, the technique uses tiny membranes to filter out the salt, and those membranes can easily become blocked.

A second technique, reverse electrodialysis (RED), uses an electrochemical gradient to develop voltages across ion-exchange membranes, and a third, capacitive mixing (or CapMix), harnesses electricity from two identical electrodes when they are sequentially exposed to a pair of different kinds of water. However, neither is able to mass-produce energy, the researchers explained.

Combined method produces more electricity than current techniques

Now, however, Gorski and his colleagues have developed an electrochemical flow cell that uses elements from both the RED and CapMix methods to harness electricity. “By combining the two methods,” the Penn State professor explained, “they end up giving you a lot more energy.”

First, they created a custom-built flow cell in which they used an anion-exchange membrane to separate two channels, then put a copper hexacyanoferrate electrode in each channel. Next, they added graphite foil (to collect the current) and sealed each of the cells with end plates, nuts and bolts. Synthetic seawater was fed into one chamber, and synthetic freshwater into the other.

By switching the flow paths of the water from time to time, the researchers were able to recharge the cell and produce additional power. They then studied the impact that different variables, such as changing flow paths, salinity levels and external resistance, had on energy production.

“There are two things going on here that make it work,” Gorski explained in a statement. “The first is you have the salt going to the electrodes. The second is you have the chloride transferring across the membrane. Since both of these processes generate a voltage, you end up developing a combined voltage at the electrodes and across the membrane.”

While the RED technique produced a maximum of only 2.9 watts of energy per square meter, and PRO managed 9.2 watts per square meter, the new method is able to produce a peak of 12.6 watts per square meter, the researchers said. While they called the results promising, they added that they hope to further improve the system, making the electrodes more stable and determining how its performance could be affected by some of the elements found in actual seawater.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Having your cats declawed could increase their risk of long-term or persistent pain, and might even make them more aggressive and less likely to use the litter box, according to new research published online Tuesday in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery.

As part of the study, lead author Nicole Martell-Moran, a veterinary practitioner at the Feline Medical Center in Houston, Texas, and her colleagues looked at a total of 137 cats that had not undergone the procedure known as onychectomy, and another 137 which had (including 33 that had the claws removed on all four feet).

Each of the cats were examined for signs of discomfort and barbering (or excessive licking or chewing of fur), and their medical history was reviewed for negative behaviors. What the study authors found was that declawed cats were approximately seven times more likely to urinate or soil outside of the litter box, four times more likely to bite, and three times more likely to either become aggressive or overgroom themselves.

Furthermore, the declawed felines were nearly three times more likely to be diagnosed with back pain than cats that had not undergone onychectomies, the study authors said. This is likely due to shortening of the declawed limb, altered gait and/or chronic pain at the site of the procedure.

“The result of this research reinforces my opinion that declawed cats with unwanted behaviors may not be ‘bad cats,’ they may simply need pain management,” Martin-Moran explained in a statement. “We now have scientific evidence that declawing is more detrimental to our feline patients than we originally thought and I hope this study becomes one of many that will lead veterinarians to reconsider declawing cats.”

Even proper onychectomy technique can lead to problems

Of the cats involved in the study, 176 were cared for by owners, the researchers said. Eighty-eight of those were declawed, and 88 had not been declawed. Ninety-eight of the cats studied were shelter cats (49 clawed, 49 declawed). Two years worth of their medical histories were reviewed, and all declaw cats were radiographed for distal limb abnormalities.

Martin-Moran and her colleagues found “significant increases” in the risk of back pain, biting and barbering in declawed cats, and nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of the declawed cats showed radiographic evidence of residual bone fragments in their third phalanx (P3). Those cats which retained P3 fragments were more likely to experience back pain, aggression or elimination issues than those whose P3 fragments were completely removed.

“Optimal surgical technique, with the removal of P3 in its entirety, was associated with fewer adverse outcomes and lower odds of these outcomes, but operated animals remained at increased odds of biting and undesirable habits of elimination compared with non-surgical controls,” the authors reported. “The use of optimal surgical technique does not eliminate the risk of adverse behavior subsequent to onychectomy.”

The reason for these behaviors, the researchers explained in a statement, is that removing the distal phalanges (P3) forces the cat to place additional weight on the soft cartilaginous ends of the middle (P2) phalanges. Discomfort in those phalanges leads the cat to urinate or defecate on softer surfaces, such as a carpet, rather than the gravel-like surface in a litter box. Furthermore, cats that have been declawed are more likely to bite as due to their law of claws for self-defense, and this could be potentially harmful to their owners.

Sperm stored on the International Space Station (ISS) for a nine-month period has successfully been used to give birth to healthy baby mice, indicating that it may possible for humans to have children while flying to other worlds, a team of Japanese researchers announced Monday.

The findings, which were detailed in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper that has not yet been released to the public, used freeze-dried sperm samples that had been sent to the ISS in 2013, returned to Earth in 2014, then used to impregnate a mouse via IVF.

According to BBC News and the Associated Press, the sperm’s DNA suffered slight damage due to the intense radiation of space, which is more than 100 times that present on the Earth. Even so, the mother who received it was able to give birth to healthy offspring that grew to adulthood and which experienced no fertility issues of their own, the media outlets reported.

Lead author Sayaka Wakayama of the University of Yamanashi and colleagues called their work a step towards reproducing humans and other mammals using sperm preserved in space and said that it could ultimately make multi-generational missions or off-planet sperm banks possible.

Mice had no genetic damage, some even had their own offspring

According to United Press International, the sperm used in the experiment was stored on the ISS for a total of 288 days, and while its DNA demonstrated more damage than sperm kept on Earth, it was still able to fertilize eggs, and only minor differences in offspring were reported.

As lead author Teruhiko Wakayama, a biologist at the University of Yamanashi, told The Verge in an email, “We got many healthy offspring from space sperm,” and none of the mice who were born from the space sperm demonstrated “any genetic damage” whatsoever. Some of them even went on to have offspring of their own, according to BBC News.

The study authors believe that some of the damage to the sperm’s DNA was repaired by the egg after fertilization but cautioned that if sperm samples were to remain in space for longer periods of time, the amount of damage they suffer may eventually surpass the egg’s ability to repair it.

“If the DNA damage occurring during long-term preservation is found to have a significant effect on offspring, we will need to develop methods to protect sperm samples against space radiation, such as an ice shield,” they wrote. Once all possible issues are resolved or accounted for, the authors said that it could open the door for long-term storage of sperm on or under the moon, which they call ideal due to the low temperatures and protection from space radiation.

Don’t expect to see space babies anytime soon, say experts

However, as Professor Joseph Tash, a NASA-supported physiologist at the University of Kansas Medical Center, told BBC News, the research does not necessarily mean that astronauts will ever be able to have children on long-duration spaceflights – at least, not healthy ones.

“The ISS orbit is within the protection of the Van Allen radiation belt – the magnetic field that diverts most high energy radiation particles from hitting the earth or the ISS,” he explained. On the Moon and in areas further away from Earth, the risk of radiation would be far higher, and in light of “the nine-month gestation for humans,” special “radiation-hardened” facilities would be needed to protect pregnant mothers and their unborn children from harm.

“I’m not surprised this sperm is fine. We know that astronauts who come back from space have been just fine and have had children normally,” Dorit Donoviel, an associate professor at the Baylor University Center for Space Medicine in Houston, Texas, told The Verge.

“No one got pregnant in space and had the baby,” she added. “An ideal experiment would be to really have mice mate and deliver a litter of pups in space, and I don’t even know if the mating is even feasible for mice in zero gravity” – and even if they could, there could be issues with a fetus that develops while in space, due to the affects of gravitational forces on organ formation.

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Image credit: Teruhiko Wakayama 

Thanks to the discovery of an astonishingly complete fossil of an ancient toddler in Ethiopia, a team of researchers has now discovered that key elements of the human spinal structure already were in place 3.3 million years ago – far earlier than experts had previously believed.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), Carol Ward, a pathology and anatomical sciences professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, and her colleagues revealed that they discovered the well-preserved remains back in 2000.

The child, identified as Selam (which means “peace” in the Ethiopian Amharic language) was a 2.5-year-old female belonging to the species of early human relatives known as Australopithecus afarensis, the study authors explained in a statement. Her spinal column was said to be the most complete of its kind discovered to date and included the neck, rib cage and vertebrae.

Since Selam’s spine was so complete and so well preserved, Ward’s team was able to determine that she had only 12 rib-bearing vertebrae – the same number as modern humans and one fewer than is typically found in most apes, according to The Verge. Previously, this characteristic had only been found in ancient humans dating back roughly 60,000 years, the website added.

The discovery established that “the human type of segmentation and numbering of our backbone emerged 3.3 million years ago, and this fossil provides us for the first time the hard evidence, the fossil evidence, to confirm that indeed the structure is as ancient as we’re claiming it now to be,” senior author Zeray Alemseged told NPR.

Findings confirm that human ancestors were upright walkers

Alemseged, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, found Selam while working at Dikika, Ethiopia, 17 years ago. In the years that followed, he and his lab assistant Christopher Kiarie worked to clear away the sandstone surrounding the bones, and used imaging technology to further analyze the structure of the early human predecessor.

In a statement, he explained that “continued and painstaking research on Selam” confirmed that “the general structure of the human spinal column emerged over 3.3 million years ago, shedding light on one of the hallmarks of human evolution.” He added that this degree of preservation was “unprecedented, particularly in a young individual.”

Selam likely died unexpectedly, and then drifted into nearby water, where her body was covered in sediment that eventually hardened into sandstone, said NPR. While her vertebrae were still in the process of forming and fusing together, she was clearly found to possess the same number of neck and mid-back vertebrae as modern humans (seven and 12, respectively), they added.

The analysis revealed “unique” information that has helped provide new insight into “one of the key milestone events in human evolution… the transition from the more ape-like arrangement of the backbone to the more humanlike arrangement of the backbone,” Alemseged told NPR. While the research confirms that Australopithecus afarensis could walk upright on two legs, he pointed out that there were “some minor differences” between their spines and those of modern humans.

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Image credit: Zeray Alemseged, University of Chicago

Newly discovered pre-human remains dated to more than seven million years ago could change common assumptions about the origins of humanity, suggesting that people may have diverged from great apes hundreds of thousands of years earlier than experts had previously thought.

In fact, in a pair of studies published this week in the journal PLOS One, an international team of scientists reported that they had not just discovered fossil evidence of what they believe might be the oldest hominid ever, but possible proof that humans split from their great ape ancestors in the Eastern Mediterranean, not in Africa, as researchers had long hypothesized.

The team, led by Professor Madelaine Böhme of the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen in Germany and Professor Nikolai Spassov of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, studied Graecopithecus fossils discovered in Greece and Bulgaria, and determined that they belonged to pre-humans.

Previous studies have suggested that the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, their closest living relatives, lived in Africa between five and seven million years ago. However, in the new study, the researchers used computer tomography technology to analyze the lower jaw and upper molar of the Graecopithecus hominids. They found that the roots of the molar were widely fused – “a feature that is characteristic of modern humans, early humans, and several pre-humans including Ardipithecus and Australopithecus,” Böhme explained in a statement.

Findings place the human-chimpanzee split in the Mediterranean Era

Specifically, Böhme’s team found that the roots of the Graecopithecus molar converge and were partially fused, unlike those of great apes, which typically have two to three separate roots which diverge. Furthermore, they found additional dental root features in the jaw, further indicating that the species known as Graecopithecus freybergi could be part of the pre-human lineage.

If that is indeed the case, the discovery is significant, as the new fossils are reportedly hundreds of thousands of years older than the currently oldest known possible pre-human, the six to seven million-year-old Sahelanthropus specimen from Chad, the researchers said. The sediment around the sites where the new fossils were discovered were dated to 7.175 and 7.24 million years ago.

“It is at the beginning of the Messinian, an age that ends with the complete desiccation of the Mediterranean Sea,” explained Böhme. “This dating allows us to move the human-chimpanzee split into the Mediterranean area,” added University of Toronto paleoanthropologist Professor David Begun, co-author of one of the two new PLOS One papers.

The researchers also analyzed the sediments in which the fossils were found, and discovered that they were similar in composition to those found in the Sahara desert, and that isotopes of lead, uranium, and thorium found in individual dust particles suggested that they were North African in origin and between 0.6 and 3.0 billion years old. The sum of the evidence suggests for the first time that the Sahara desert had been spreading 7.2 million years ago, and that storms caused the desert dust to be transported to the northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

Furthermore, they that a savannah was developing in Europe at around the same time, and that the record of microscopic charcoal and plant silicate particles (phytoliths) showed evidence of severe drought. Combined, these factors “may have played a central role in the splitting of the human and chimpanzee lineages,” Böhme concluded.

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Image credit: Wolfgang Gerber/University of Tübingen

It’s a well-known fact that many species of birds fly south for the winter and return north once spring arrives, but migrating trees? That’s a new one, and the authors of a new study published this week in the journal Science Advances believe that climate change is to blame.

In the new study, Purdue University professor Dr. Songlin Fei and his colleagues explained that the warming temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns resulting from human activity are causing trees in the eastern United States to slowly shift north and west, said USA Today.

Warmer, drier conditions have caused the trees to move an average of 20 miles to the north and 25 miles to the west, and while the study authors explained to the Associated Press that the move northward in search of cooler conditions was expected, the shift westward came as a surprise.

Of course, the trees themselves aren’t exactly moving, per se – no Lord of the Rings-style trees uprooting themselves and changing location here. Rather, new trees are tending to sprout farther north and west while those located more to the south and east are dying off.

Fei’s team looked at 86 different species of trees over a 30 year period and discovered that the warmer temperatures in the southern states and the lack of rainfall (particularly in the southeast) was responsible for the shift of their geographical center. These changes could ultimately result in the extinction of some species of trees, the researchers revealed in their report.

Lack of moisture, not heat, the primary reason for the shift

As part of their study, the authors examined abundance data for the affected groups and species of trees across the eastern US, and found that 73 percent of them were shifting to the west while only 62 percent of them had been moving to the north in terms of their overall density.

The trend was “stronger for saplings than adult trees,” they explained, adding that “the observed shifts are primarily due to the changes of subpopulation abundances in the leading edges and are significantly associated with changes in moisture availability and successional processes.”

Furthermore, they found that many of the species affected by the shifts have similar characteristics (such as drought tolerance, seed weight, and wood density) and that, in general, most angiosperms moved westward while most gymnosperms moved northward. The researchers also reported that changes in moisture availability tended to affect the trees than changes in temperature.

“Different species are responding to climate change differently. Most of the broad-leaf species – deciduous trees – are following moisture moving westward. The evergreen trees – the needle species – are primarily moving northward,” Fei said to The Atlantic. “The results seem to show that moisture plays a much more significant role in the near-term, which is very intriguing.”

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Image credit: Chelsea Bock/Unsplash

The Tyrannosaurus rex possessed the most powerful bite ever recorded, chomping down with nearly 8,000 pounds of force, according to a new computer model based on high-resolution CT scans of fossilized skulls and detailed in the latest issue of the journal Scientific Reports.

That powerful bite was capable of pulverizing the bones of its prey with force roughly equal to the weight of three small cars, according to Live Science and Popular Mechanics, but the most damage came from the teeth of the T. rex, which could exert pressures of up to 431,000 pounds per square inch (nearly 3,000 megapascals), the study authors revealed.

T. Rex could generate 431,000 pounds per square inch with its massive jaw muscles. (Credit: Gignac & Erickson/Scientific Reports)

“It was this bone-crunching acumen that helped T. rex to more fully exploit the carcasses of large horned dinosaurs and duck-billed hadrosaurids whose bones, rich in mineral salts and marrow, were unavailable to smaller, less equipped carnivorous dinosaurs,” study author Paul Gignac, an assistant professor of  paleontology at Oklahoma State University, told Popular Mechanics.

This powerful bite force “allowed T. rex to bite through and even shatter bone before consuming it,” Gignac told Live Science. He and co-author Gregory Erickson, a biological science professor at Florida State University, created their simulations using CT scans of the skull and muscles that were added based on an amalgamation of the creature’s closest living relatives (birds, crocodiles, and alligators), then compared the bite force to that of a saltwater crocodile.

Bite force allowed it to puncture, slice through bones

As Popular Science explained, this is not the first study to examine the bite force of a T. rex. In 2012, biomechanist Karl Bates and his colleagues reported that the dinosaur had a maximum bite force of 12,800 pounds – higher than the current study. In both cases, however, one thing is clear – the T. rex had a bite force that was stronger than any land animal in history.

In addition to the raw force of the bite, the study also found that the sharp, serrated teeth of the T. rex enhanced the power of the dinosaur’s jaws to  431,342 pounds per square inch (psi) – around 1/128 the estimated pressure at the Earth’s core, and exponentially higher than the 2,000 psi that a hydraulic press used to crush motor vehicles is capable of delivering, the website noted.

“Having high bite force doesn’t necessarily mean an animal can puncture hide or pulverize bone, tooth pressure is the biomechanically more relevant parameter,” Erickson said in a statement. “It is like assuming a 600 horsepower engine guarantees speed. In a Ferrari, sure, but not for a dump truck.”

The T. rex was definitely closer to a Ferrari than a dump truck, as it “regularly scored, deeply punctured, and even sliced through bones” using its “incredible, nearly 8,000-pound bite forces and record-breaking, 431,000 pounds per square inch tooth pressures,” Gignac told Live Science. The creature “managed these feats, in part, because of its large size but more so because a specific set of tooth traits – extraordinarily large, conical and strongly rooted teeth that were replaced after being worn biennially,” he added.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

While they are relatively close to each other, astronomically speaking, Earth and Mars are quite different in terms of chemical composition – a fact which a new study claims could be explained if the Red Planet had originally formed in a completely different part of the solar system.

The study, which is currently available online and will appear in the June 15 edition of Earth and Planetary Science Letters, suggests that Mars originally formed within the asteroid belt, and later migrated to its current location between the asteroid belt and the sun, explained Seeker.

That would explain why the elements on the Red Planet have different atomic masses than those on Earth, said lead study author Ramon Brasser, an associate professor from the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Earth-Life Science Institute. But how did it migrate to its current position?

Brasser explained that the cause is likely the interaction between Mars and planetesimals (small objects) in the asteroid belt. Since the planet is more massive than the asteroids and other bodies surrounding it, he said, “it tends to lose energy” when interacting with them. Those interactions, he said, cause the planetesimals to be passed to Jupiter, then ejected from the solar system.

Kevin Walsh, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado who was not a member of Brasser’s team, told Science News that the newly-published study is part of a re-analysis of the origins of the solar system, and that since scientists have learned that “planets move around, possibly a lot,” they “may not have formed where we see them today.”

Analysis of Venus’ isotopes needed to confirm the theory

Scientists had long believed that the solar system formed when a cloud of gas and dust became gravitationally compressed, possibly by a passing star, explained Seeker. Over time, particles of dust and gas accumulated and formed the sun and the planets, they said. However, many experts now believe that the planets may have migrated at some point during this process.

One theory of planetary formation, known as the Grand Tack model, suggests that Mars ended up being smaller than the Earth because of Jupiter, which migrated towards the sun until it made it to Mars’ current orbit, and was then pulled back to the outer solar system by Saturn. In such a scenario, Jupiter’s journey to the sun caused material to accumulate and form Venus and Earth. The leftover material, the researchers said, formed Mercury and Mars.

However, while running Grand Tack simulations as part of their new study, Brasser’s team found that in about one out of every 50 scenarios, Mars actually formed in the asteroid belt, not close to the Earth’s current orbit, said Science News. Then it was pulled towards the sun by Jupiter during the gas giant’s migration – a voyage which also diverted material away from the Red Planet, thus resulting in its relatively small mass.

“Bulk elemental and isotopic data for Martian meteorites demonstrate that key aspects of Mars’ composition are markedly different from that of Earth,” the study authors wrote. “This suggests that Mars formed outside of the terrestrial feeding zone during primary accretion. It is, therefore, probable that Mars always remained significantly farther from the Sun than Earth.”

Their “potential dynamical pathway” of Mars formation would help explain the “strict age and compositional constraints, as well as mass differences” between the Red Planet and other inner worlds in the solar system, they added. Confirming this theory, the researchers explained, would require an analysis of Venus’ elements and isotopes, which according to their theory should be similar to those found on Earth.

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Image credit: NASA JPL

A recent measles outbreak that has caused dozens of Somali-Americans living in Minnesota to contract the highly contagious virus has been traced to an anti-vaccination campaign linking the potentially life-saving immunizations to autism, state health officials said on Monday.

According to Live Science, the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) revealed Friday that it had confirmed 54 cases of measles in the state. All but three of those cases involved children under the age of 18, and the majority of them had not been vaccinated, they revealed in a report.

Since then, four new cases had been confirmed, including two involving unvaccinated children in Le Sueur County, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune noted. That brings the number affected to 58 – two more than the total number of cases reported between 1997 and 2016, MDH said.

So what is the cause of the current outbreak? Kristen Ehresmann, director of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Prevention and Control at MDH, told Live Science that the spread of the ailment can be traced back to local media reports, published in 2008, which found that Somali-American children in the Minnesota area were more likely to require special education services.

Those reports caught the attention of the anti-vaccination movement, a group claiming that the potentially life-saving immunizations have been linked to autism, Ehresmann said. In the wake of those reports, anti-vaxxers began to spread propaganda regarding the purported link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and the neurodevelopmental disorder.

‘Dramatic decline’ in vaccinations among Somali-Americans

The purported link between vaccines and autism can be traced back to a now-discredited 1998 study, published in The Lancet, and subsequent papers from the same author suggesting that the MMR vaccine was unsafe. The original study was later retracted by The Lancet, with editor-in-chief Richard Horton calling it “utterly false” and saying that the journal had been “deceived.”

Nonetheless, the claims of a possible link have persisted, causing some parents to choose not to have their children vaccinated (and leaving them potentially vulnerable to diseases like measles). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has even set up a web page specifically designed to present the scientific evidence showing that immunizations do not cause autism.

“Studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing [autism spectrum disorders, or ASD],” the CDC said, citing both a 2011 Institute of Medicine study and their own 2013 report that found no link between vaccines and the neurodevelopmental disorder. Furthermore, the agency said, research has shown that there is no link between the ingredients of vaccines and autism – including the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, which was removed or reduced to trace amounts in nearly all childhood vaccines between 1999 and 2001.

Despite the evidence, anti-vaxxers “have been very aggressive in taking advantage of concerns about autism” in Minnesota’s Somali-American community, Ehresmann told Live Science. Since the 2008 reports and the subsequent launch of the anti-immunization campaign in the area, there has been a “dramatic decline” in vaccinations among those Somali-Americans, she added.

“The big message,” Le Sueur County public health director Cindy Shaughnessy told the Star-Tribune, “is to vaccinate, just can’t say that enough.” She and her colleagues are working hard to convince the parents of unvaccinated children to have them immunized in the hopes of stopping the current measles outbreak – the largest to hit the state in nearly two decades – in its tracks, the newspaper added.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Narwhals are superb creatures – they have a great name and a striking appearance, largely due to the long and imposing tusks protruding from their heads.

But as remarkable as these whales’ tusks look, it has until recently been unknown exactly how they are used.

Drone footage shot around the remote Nunavut region of Canada has put an end to the mystery, revealing that the so called “unicorns of the sea” use their tusks to stun prey.

In behavior caught on camera for the first time, narwhals are seen using the tusks as a club to hit and stun Arctic cod. Once stunned, the fish are easier to catch and eat.

Adam Ravetch of the World Wildlife Fund Canada, and researchers from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, were working in the far Northeastern region when they got the footage.

The remoteness of locations in which narwhals are found goes a long way to explaining why the behavior has not been noted before.

Three quarters of the world’s population can be found in the Lancaster Sound, close (in relative terms) to where to footage was taken.

The tusks are likely multipurpose

Marianne Marcoux, a research scientist for Fisheries and Oceans Canada, said that: “Drones are very exciting, we can see things we couldn’t see before.”

The bigger planes previously used for such ventures often came up with incomplete footage or scared the narwhals.

“They don’t jump like other whales. They are also notoriously skittish. This is an entirely new observation of how the tusk is used,” said Brandon Laforest, a senior specialist of Arctic species and ecosystems with WWF-Canada.

However, there may be other uses for the tusks, along with that seen in the new observation. Using them as ice picks, weapons, for echolocation or for sexual selection are all possibilities.

Laforest suggests that, given the thousands of nerve endings and pores covering the tusks, they may be important as sensory organs.

“They can feel their surroundings similar to how a human’s broken tooth would have feeling,” explained Marcoux.

The tusks are indeed a canine tooth on the heads of males, sometimes growing up to 9 feet long. All of their tooth-growing ability seemingly having gone into this impressive body part, they have no internal teeth and swallow food whole with a sucking action.

Protecting the narwhal population

Along with solving the mystery of the tusks, at least partly, the work done by the researchers in the region will help with vital conservation work.

Experts had thought that narwhals only feed in their winter waters around the southern part of Baffin Island, but the latest research shows they also feed in their summer waters.

Mineral extraction, tourism and climate change (their food web is entirely dependent upon sea ice), all threaten the narwhal population, 90 percent of which is in Canadian waters.

They are under threat from colliding with ships and from having their communication abilities disrupted by underwater noise from vessels.

The northern Inuit community is also heavily reliant upon narwhals for food and crafts.

The Canadian government is currently considering making the Lancaster Sound a protected area. Tailoring shipping to cause lease disturbance, and assessing narwhals calving areas, are important next steps in conserving the splendid whales.

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Image credit: Glenn Williams/NIST

A newly-discovered fossil is helping close a significant gap in the evolutionary history of the baleen whales by revealing how the ancestors of modern-day filter feeders with the humpback and blue whale began to diverge from toothed creatures like the sperm whale.

According to Nature and Science News, the approximately 36-million-year-old fossil skeleton is the oldest known specimen of the mysticete group, predating what had been the oldest remains of a fossilized whale predecessor by at least 2 million years and shedding new light on the transition that caused some species of whales to have their sharp teeth replaced by fibrous plates.

“This is the fossil that we’ve been waiting for,” explained Nicholas Pyenson, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC who was not among the authors credited on a new Current Biology paper detailing the research, during an interview with Nature. It can answer many of the questions scientists have regarding the origins of living whales and the appearance of the first known ancestors of modern baleen whales, he added.

The original whales were predators with extremely sharp teeth, closer in nature to modern orcas than humpbacks or blue whales, said Science News. At some point, however, mysticetes evolved and replaced those teeth with baleen, using those fibrous plates to filter fragments of food out of seawater. The newfound specimen marks the beginning of that transition, the authors noted.

Scientists still uncertain why filter-feeding eventually won out

Identified as Mystacodon selenensis, the fossil whale is described as a small to medium-sized creature that had teeth, but in other ways resembled modern humpbacks and blue whales, they explained – hence its name, which Science News said translates to “toothed mysticete.”

The remains were discovered in the deserts of Peru by a team led by Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences paleontologist Olivier Lambert. It was approximately four meters long, or about as big as a modern-day pilot whale, and like primitive whales, still had a protruding hip bone indicating that it still had hind legs left over from when its ancestors were terrestrial quadrupeds.

However, the creature also had a flat snout similar to those of modern-day baleen whales, and while ancient whales had elbow-like joints in its front flippers, M. selenensis does not – nor do modern-day baleen whales, according to the authors of the new Current Biology paper.

Lambert’s team believes that M. selenensis might have used vacuum-like suction to gather prey from the ocean floor, according to Nature. While the earliest whales used a variety of feeding mechanisms, the researchers believe that this could have been one step towards the development of filter-feeding techniques used by modern-day baleen whales, which had taken hold by around 23 million years ago for reasons not fully understood by the scientific community.

“I don’t think suction feeding alone is the primary step,” Lambert told Science News. Rather, he believes that the answer lies in yet-to-be-discovered ancient whale remains likely residing in the same area where M. selenensis was found – the Pisco Basin on the southern coast of Peru. As he explained, “There is huge potential for the area where we excavated.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

The remains of an 18-foot long, 3,000-pound, 110-million-year old dinosaur heralded as the most well-preserved fossil of its kind ever discovered, is now being displayed as part of an exhibit that opened earlier this month at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta, Canada.

The creature, identified as a nodosaur, was a four-legged herbivore whose massive size and body armor caused it resemble a tank, museum officials told CNN. Not only is it among the most well-preserved specimens on Earth, it is the oldest known dinosaur ever found in Alberta.

The nodosaur belongs to a previously unknown genus and species, they explained. The specimen was discovered at the Suncor Millennium Mine, some 17 miles north of Fort McMurray, in 2011, according to National Geographic. For the past six years, the museum has prepared the specimen for public viewing, and now, it is the centerpiece of their new Grounds for Discovery exhibit.

“We don’t just have a skeleton. We have a dinosaur as it would have been,” Caleb Brown, who worked on the nodosaur as a postdoctoral researcher at the museum, told Nat Geo. That is a rare feat, the publication explained – “as rare as winning the lottery” – because in most cases, only a handful of bones and/or teeth are preserved, and soft tissues are almost never fossilized.

Specimen may be ‘the Rosetta Stone’ for dinosaur armor

Following the discovery of the nodosaur remains in 2011, paleontologists spent more than 7,000 hours reconstructing the specimen and preparing it for public viewing, CNN said. While that was going on, visitors to the facility were able to watch technicians working through a window in the lab, the museum said in a statement. Now, they can return to see the finished product.

And what a sight it is, too. According to Nat Geo, the nodosaur specimen resembles “a nine-foot-long sculpture of a dinosaur.” It’s neck and back are covered in body armor and individual scales are visible up-close. The massive creature has a pair of 20-inch shoulder spikes that it likely used to defend itself from predators, and the remains are believed to weigh at least 2,500 pounds.

How the dinosaur probably appeared. (Credit: Robert Clark/ National Geographic)

“That was a really exciting discovery,” Victoria Arbour, a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum who was familiar with but was not involved with the nodosaur project, said to Nat Geo. “It represents such a different environment from today and such a different time, and it has great preservation.”

Arbour knows a thing or two about well-preserved dinosaur specimens: she was a member of a team that recently announced the discovery of Zuul crurivastator, a newly discovered species of ankylosaur that had a horned face and clublike tail and was named because of its resemblance to the demonic entity that possessed Sigourney Weaver’s character Dana Barrett in Ghostbusters.

As for the nodosaur specimen, museum officials have yet to finalize its scientific description and have not yet settled on a official name for the new species, according to Nat Geo. However, even without an official name and description, the researchers said that it is providing new insight into how these dinosaurs armor was constructed. In fact, the Royal Ontario Museum dinosaur curator, Donald Henderson, called it “the Rosetta stone for armor.”

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Image credit: Robert Clark/National Geographic

Humans have long been told that our sense of smell is far inferior to our other senses and that our ability to detect odors and fragrances is light-years behind that of animals such as dogs and rats, but research published this week in the journal Science has revealed otherwise.

In fact, according to study author and Rutgers University neuroscientist John McGann, the belief that humans have a weak, underdeveloped sense of smell when compared to rodents and canines is nothing more than a 19th-century myth perpetuated by a scientist named Paul Broca.

Broca, McGann said in an interview with NPR, “was interested in free will” and “had this idea that smell was this very animalistic sense and that it compelled animals to have sex and feed. And humans, having free will, could choose how we responded to smells and presumably had a less strong or less special sense of smell than other animals.”

A neuroanatomist by trade, Broca’s research suggested that the evolutionary enlargement of the frontal lobe that helped humans develop free will came at the expense of their olfactory systems, which are proportionately smaller than those of other species. However, modern research shows that the human olfactory system is actually quite large when compared to rats and mice (despite the continued erroneous belief that said creatures have superior senses of smell).

“For so long people failed to stop and question this claim, even people who study the sense of smell for a living,” McGann, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus, explained in a statement. “The fact is the sense of smell is just as good in humans as in other mammals, like rodents and dogs.”

People are capable of detecting ‘trillions’ of different odors

McGann has spent the past 14 years studying the human sense of smell, and over the past year, he reviewed much of the existing research on the olfactory system to find the root cause of this long-held belief that people were inferior to other animals when it came to detecting scents.

It was during this time that he found Broca’s work, which he said influenced noted neurologist Sigmund Freud. Building on Broca’s research, Freud argued that atrophy of the olfactory system (later known as “microsmaty”) made individuals increasingly susceptible to mental illness. This theory of microsmaty persisted for much of the 20th century, which caused scientists to overlook research into the olfactory system.

The reality, McGann told Popular Science, is that “most people with a healthy sense of smell can smell almost anything that gets in the nose. In fact, there used to be whole field of trying to find odors that people couldn’t smell.” Even though “folk wisdom and poorly sourced introductory psychology textbooks” claimed that humans could only detect about 10,000 unique odors, people can actually discriminate upwards of one trillion smells, he added in a statement.

The truth, the neuroscientist noted, is that the human olfactory bulb – the part of the brain which transmits signals related to the identification of various scents elsewhere – is actually quite large when compared to other species of mammal. With more than 400 smell receptors, McGann said, people are capable of detecting and discriminating “an extraordinary range of odors.” In fact, he wrote, “we are more sensitive than rodents and dogs for some odors.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

A newly-identified species of ankylosaur sporting a horned face and a spiked, club-like tail has been named in honor of Zuul, the monstrous demigod featured in the 1984 movie Ghostbusters, according to new research published this week in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Take one look at the new species, officially named Zuul crurivastator, and it’s easy to see why the paleontologists who discovered it chose to name it after the fictional beast: it bears a striking resemblance to the entity that possessed Sigourney Weaver’s character Dana Barrett in the film.

“We couldn’t resist,” Dr. Victoria Arbour, a postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto and one of the researchers who discovered the new species, told USA Today. In fact, they even brought in Dan Aykroyd, who played Ray Stanz in the movie, to introduce the creature and discuss its similarities to Zuul in a short video.

“We are so honored that the Royal Ontario Museum would accord the name of this magnificent creature with the appellation that we called our terror god in the movie,” Aykroid said.

The new species was discovered in Hill County, Montana and is believed to be approximately 75 million years old, the Museum explained on its website. Its entire body was covered in scales and it was about 20 feet long with a roughly 10-foot tail, according to Los Angeles Times reports.

Specimen could provide new insight into ankylosaur evolution

In addition to the novelty of its name and its resemblance to a well-known movie monster, Zuul crurivastator is important because it could provide scientists with new insight into precisely how diverse these creatures were shortly before the end of the dinosaurs’ era, the Times noted.

Zuul crurivastator had a spiked, club-like tail and a pair of horns behind its eyes, Dr. Arbour told the newspaper. It weighed about 5,500 pounds or about the same as a white rhinoceros, and even though it looked menacing, the study authors believe that it was most likely a herbivore. Also, it does not appear as though the new ankylosaur species was a servant of the forces of evil.

Those spikes look like they’d hurt. (Credit: Danielle Dufault / Royal Ontario Museum)

Dr. Arbour said that the specimen was discovered by accident, while she and her colleagues were in the process of excavating another dinosaur. Typically, complete ankylosaur fossils are difficult to find, she said, but in this case, they found not just the creature’s body but a complete skull and its entire tail as well – and all of the fossils were said to have been well preserved.

Detail of the dinosaur’s tail (Credit: Danielle Dufault / Royal Ontario Museum)

In fact, as the researchers told the Times, they were even able to discover soft tissue, including scales and sheaths for the spikes, that were likely preserved when the dinosaur was buried under sediment shortly after its demise. Not only that, but the spikes were held together in their original position, which Dr. Arbour said gave her team a good idea of what the creature looked like.

Andrew Farke of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in California, who was not a part of the team that discovered Zuul crurivastator, called the find “just incredible,” telling USA Today, “This is really going to be a keystone for understanding the evolution of this group of ankylosaurs in North America.”

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Image credit: Danielle Dufault / Royal Ontario Museum

A meteorite comprised of the oldest matter that mankind can touch, and a fragment from a space rock responsible for one of only two extraterrestrial impacts into a person are among the most unusual items currently available during a unique auction being held at Christie’s in New York.

Called the ”Deep Impact: Martian, Lunar and Other Rare Meteorites” event, the items available for purchase are precisely what one might expect from the auction’s name – 42 individual space rocks, some originating from the Moon, some from Mars, and some from elsewhere.

One of the items up for sale, with an estimated value of between $7,000 and $10,000, is a piece of the 15.5 ton Willamette meteorite at the American Museum of Natural History’s Rose Center, which Christie’s referred to as “perhaps the most famous meteorite in the world” in a statement.

Discovered in 1902 in Oregon, the Willamette meteorite has been on display at the museum for more than 100 years and has been seen or touched by an estimated 50 million people, according to the auction listing. It contains a number of deep cavities caused by the weathering out of iron sulfides, and the rock itself was formed in the metal core of a melted asteroid, they noted.

Background story, coordinates of impact detailed by Christie’s

Another item up for auction is said to contain the oldest matter mankind can touch: a meteorite fragment from a Mexican museum which purportedly contains some of the first particles to ever condense from the gaseous solar nebula during the formation of our solar system.

The meteorite fragment comes from Allende, which the auction house calls “the most important and most thoroughly researched meteorite of all time,” and contains CAIs or calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions that are nearly 4.6 billion years old – or, as Christie’s official James Hyslop said in an interview with CNN, nearly “a third as old as time itself.”

Other offerings include a piece of the Talladega County meteorite “Sylacauga,” which struck a woman in the leg in November 1954 and is one of only two known extraterrestrial objects known to have struck a person, and a piece of a fossil meteorite that is believed to have struck the Earth approximately one million years ago, according to the auction house listings.

Hyslop explained to CNN that there are three main reasons that meteorites are so appealing to collectors: “Number one, they are incredibly rare. Number two, they are hugely beautiful. And number three, there is that wonderful philosophical conundrum about them. They don’t come from this world. They are extraterrestrial and otherworldly works of art.”

He added that each of the meteorite fragments were graded based on their size, shape, scientific appeal and background story. In addition to descriptions of how large each of the space rocks are and what they look like, each page of the online auction includes background information on the available meteorite, as well as the exact coordinates where it fell to Earth and was discovered.

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Image credit: Christie’s 

If you’re a member of a gym or fitness club, odds are that letting loose with a few F-bombs in the middle of a workout is highly frowned upon, but new research suggests that doing so may actually improve your performance when lifting weights or cycling on a stationary bike!

According to The Verge, research presented by Keele University psychologist Richard Stephens at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society last week which found that athletes who repeatedly swore in an even-toned voice performed better on various fitness activities.

Stephens and his colleagues conducted a pair of experiments, one involving 29 individuals who completed a short, intense burst of activity on an exercise bike and one involving 52 people who completed an isometric handgrip test, twice – once regularly, and once while “working blue.”

In some cases, the athletes swore during their first attempt at the activity, while in others they did so during the second, to ensure that factors such as fatigue did not play a role in performance. All of the athletes were found to perform better during the attempt in which they swore, according to the study authors, producing more power on the bike or having a stronger handgrip.

Findings linked to stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system

During their experiments, the researchers had 29 men and women with an average age of 21 ride an exercise bike for 30 seconds while either repeating a profanity or a non-swear word (brown or wooden, for example), according to The Guardian. Similarly, they had 52 people, average age of 19, take part in a pair of 10-second-long hand-grip strength challenges.

Whether the participant repeated a swear word or a regular term, they were instructed to speak it calmly and repeatedly, in an even tone and were told not shout it, the UK media outlet explained. Bikers who swore saw their peak power increase by an average of 24 watts, the study said, while those saying profanities during the grip test boosted their strength by roughly 2.1 kilograms.

Previously, Stephens’ team had found that repeating profanities could increase pain tolerance in an individual who had placed their hands in water. One possible reason for this, he explained in a statement, is that swearing “stimulates the body’s sympathetic nervous system” (the system that causes a person’s heart to accelerate and stimulates the body’s fight-or-flight response).

Based on that hypothesis, Stephens said, they expected to find that swearing would make people stronger, and while his study did produce such results, he said that his team found no “significant changes” to “heart rate and some other things you would expect to be affected if the sympathetic nervous system was responsible for this increase in strength.”

So why does swearing seem to make a person stronger and more tolerant to pain? That “remains to be discovered,” the psychologist admitted. “We have yet to understand the power of swearing fully.” Also, it should be noted that the research was a relatively small study, and because it was presented at a conference and has not yet been published in a scientific journal, the methods and findings have not yet been evaluated as part of the full peer-review process.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

A bizarre parasite that lived in the eyeballs of fish protect their hosts while they are young, but alter their behavior in an attempt to intentionally get them eaten by birds, according to research published online earlier this week by the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

While it sounds like the kind of mind control that you’d normally see in a science fiction film, the behavior is very real, and according to New Scientist, it’s part of the parasite’s plan to ensure its own survival, as it reproduces in the digestive tract of the bird that devours its former host.

The parasite in question is called the eye fluke or Diplostomum pseudospathaceum, and during its life cycle, it invades three different types of host, the website explained. After it mates within the bird’s digestive tract, its eggs are eliminated along with the bird’s feces. Those eggs hatch in the water, then the eye fluke’s larvae hunt down freshwater snails and infect them.

Once they infect the snails, the eye fluke grow and multiply, then are released into the water and look for a fish to infect. Once they find their target, they penetrate the skin of that fish and travel to its eye, where they grow and control the fish until it is time to get eaten and repeat the cycle.

Cycle is likely a key part of the food web, say study authors

In 2015, a team of scientists led by Mikhail Gopko from the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution in Moscow found that fish that had been infected with immature fluke larvae tended to be less-active swimmers than their uninfected counterparts, making them harder for predators to spot and less likely to be caught by a net, according to New Scientist.

Now, Gopko and his colleagues conducted a series of tests in which they infected rainbow trout with mature eye flukes and found that these infected fish were more active swimmers and stayed closer to the surface than uninfected fish. Furthermore, when the researchers simulated an attack by a predatory bird, the infected fish were found to recover more quickly than uninfected ones.

“Our results suggest that the eye fluke changes its host’s behavior in order to make it more vulnerable to the final host,” the authors wrote in their study. “Most importantly, the observed behavioral changes arose, when the infection intensity was similar to rates found in natural conditions. This implies that, in natural conditions, eye flukes can substantially alter host anti-predatory defenses and affect predator–prey interactions.”

However, as Gopko told New Scientist, the manner in which the eye flukes will influence their hosts’ behavior depends on how old they are. Younger parasites “are too young and innocent to infect a next host,” he said, so they must protect the fish they have infected until they are mature. Once they are ready to reproduce, however, they do everything they can to get inside a bird, and that means doing everything in its power to ensure that its host fish gets eaten.

“Our results suggest that the D. pseudospathaceum metacercariae can change rainbow trout’s behavior predisposing them to avian predation,” he and his co-authors wrote. “Since eye flukes are common freshwater fish parasites, the resulting behavioral changes caused by these parasites likely play an important role in freshwater food webs.”

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Image credit: Dr. Andrew Lee/Solent News