POLLY WANTS A SOBRIETY TEST

Drunken parrot season isn't referring to a Jimmy Buffett tour.

In Australia's Northern Territory, red-collared lorikeets, a brightly colored parrot, seem to get tanked every year starting at the end of the dry season in June and August and ending with the wet season in October and November. The apparent avian alcoholics stagger about the streets and fall from trees.

"They exhibit odd behavior like falling over or difficulty flying [and] they keep running into things," said veterinarian Stephen Cutter from The Ark Animal Hospital in Australian Geographic.

Like shy humans, the apparently blitzed birds get friendlier and lose their fear of people. But the revelry may be a sign of a deadly illness, not just bacchanal bliss from fermented fruit.

Unlike a human on a bender, the birds don't just sleep it off. The effects last several days, and are accompanied by respiratory problems and a discharge from bird's nostrils, mouth, and eyes. Cutter suspect a virus may be at work.

About half of the affected birds brought into Wildcare Inc NT, a non-profit wildlife care and rescue organization, die. And there are more birds every year. A few hundred were brought in last year.

"Ten years ago we only had two or three," said Mignon McHendrie, the president of Wildcare.

Cutter notes that drunken parrot season started late this year. He has only just now started seeing birds brought in for rehab.

The first solar-powered vertebrate

Species: Ambystoma maculatum
Habitat: Throughout the eastern USA and parts of southern Canada, leaving other salamanders green with envy

When you think about it, animals are weird. They ignore the abundant source of energy above their heads – the sun – and choose instead to invest vast amounts of energy in cumbersome equipment for eating and digesting food. Why don't they do what plants do, and get their energy straight from sunlight?

The short answer is that many do. Corals are animals but have algae living in them that use sunlight to make sugar. Many other animals, from sponges to sea slugs, pull the same trick. One species of hornet can convert sunlight into electricity. There are also suggestions that aphids can harness sunlight, although most biologists are unconvinced.

But all these creatures are only distantly related to us. No backboned animal has been found that can harness the sun – until now. It has long been suspected, and now there is hard evidence: the spotted salamander is solar-powered.

Plants make food using photosynthesis, absorbing light to power a chemical reaction that converts carbon dioxide and water into glucose and releases oxygen. Corals profit from this reaction by housing photosynthetic algae inside their shells.

Long-term partners

Spotted salamanders, too, are in a long-term relationship with photosynthetic algae. In 1888, biologist Henry Orr reported that their eggs often contain single-celled green algae called Oophila amblystomatis. The salamanders lay the eggs in pools of water, and the algae colonise them within hours.

By the 1940s, biologists strongly suspected it was a symbiotic relationship, beneficial to both the salamander embryos and the algae. The embryos release waste material, which the algae feed on. In turn the algae photosynthesise and release oxygen, which the embryos take in. Embryos that have more algae are more likely to survive and develop faster than embryos with few or none.

Then in 2011 the story gained an additional twist. A close examination of the eggs revealed that some of the algae were living within the embryos themselves, and in some cases were actually inside embryonic cells. That suggested the embryos weren't just taking oxygen from the algae: they might be taking glucose too. In other words, the algae were acting as internal power stations, generating fuel for the salamanders.

To find out if that was happening, Erin Graham of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and colleagues incubated salamander eggs in water containing radioactive carbon-14. Algae take up the isotope in the form of carbon dioxide, producing radioactive glucose.

Graham found that the embryos became mildly radioactive – unless kept in the dark. That showed that the embryos could only take in the carbon-14 via photosynthesis in the algae.

Big help

The algae do not seem to be essential to the embryos, but they are very helpful: embryos deprived of algae struggle. "Their survival rate is much lower and their growth is slowed," says Graham.

It's less clear how well the algae get on without the embryos. In the lab, they transform into dormant cysts. The salamander eggs are only around in spring, suggesting that in the wild, the algae spend the rest of the year as cysts. The ponds they live in dry up in summer, so the algae may sit out the rest of the year in the sediment.

Now that one vertebrate has been shown to use photosynthesis, Graham says there could well be others. "Anything that lays eggs in water would be a good candidate," she says, as algae would have easy access to the eggs. So other amphibians, and fish, could be doing it. It's much less likely that a mammal or bird could photosynthesise, as their developing young are sealed off from the outside world.

Turning People Into Plastic

Plastic Surgery???

At Dalian Hoffen Bio-Technique Company in northern China, people turn other people into plastic. Plastination is a four-step process during which polymers replace water and fat molecules in biological specimens.

Plastinated bodies don’t decompose, and museums and medical schools can display them with exposed muscles, veins and brains in exhibits around the world. One such exhibit, called “Bodies,” has visited dozens of cities worldwide since it opened in 2005. Hong-Jin Sui founded the Dalian facility in 2002 after he studied plastination under the man who invented it, Gunther von Hagens. Sui says the human bodies processed at Dalian Hoffen come from medical universities and the animals from zoos and aquariums. It can take more than two years to plastinate large animals, such as whales, but humans take only eight to 12 months.

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Cell Phone Radiation Could Interact With Human Tissues in a Never-Before-Considered Way

More Cell Signal Controversy Steve Kazella via Wikimedia

Los Alamos National Labs is often associated with bombs, and the one it dropped today is no less likely to stir up a firestorm. Figuratively speaking, of course. That simmering controversy surrounding cell phone signals’ effect on biological tissue surfaced again today via a Los Alamos researcher who says the microwaves emitted by cell phones can interact with human tissues in an entirely new way that has yet to be taken into account.
There are obviously two sides to the debate here, one that cites evidence showing that cell phone signals have been shown to influence human behavior and health, and the other which claims that epidemiological evidence shows no indication that cell phone signal exposure correlates to the aforementioned health effects.
But the particularly potent argument for cell phone safety is that microwave photons don’t have enough energy to break chemical bonds. And if they can’t break chemical bonds, then they can’t damage biological tissues. For many physicists, this is case closed.
Bill Bruno, theoretical biologist at Los Alamos, says otherwise. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty science of it, there’s a link to his paper at the bottom of this post. But the basic argument is this: the traditional idea that microwaves aren’t strong enough to affect human tissues only applies when the number of photons in a space equivalent to a cubic wavelength is less than one. When the density is higher, photons can interfere constructively--that is, the effects can compound and interact in stronger ways than they normally could.
Bruno cites optical tweezers as an example. We know that optical tweezers, which use photons to manipulate very small objects like cells, can do damage to structures. That’s well documented. And that’s because the photons are piled on--the more photons, the stronger the force (and the more potential damage).
Optical tweezers work in the infrared generally, but it raises questions about whether the same is true of photons in the microwave range because one thing is clear: the density of photons per cubic wavelength in cell signals is many orders of magnitude greater than one. So, Bruno says, there is a mechanism by which damage could occur, and the conditions for that mechanism to work are present around cell phones and cell towers.
Now, this doesn’t mean that microwave photons are necessarily scrambling your neurons, but it does add another wrinkle to the debate and is cause for concern and further evaluation. At the very least, Bruno says the argument that microwaves can’t achieve the strength to break chemical bonds is no longer enough to discount the idea that cell phones are harmful to biological tissue.
Consider this controversy far from resolved. The full paper is available here.

Bandages Made of Edible Starch Could Dissolve On Your Skin Once You're Healed

No need to peel them off Duct Tape Bandage There is a better way. Finely spun starch fibers woven into a bandage could dissolve on your skin and be absorbed by your body, eliminating the sting and hassle of ripping it off in one fast motion. Starch fibers could also be used to produce toilet paper, napkins and other biodegradable products, according to researchers at Penn State. Food science researchers dissolved starch into a fluid, then spun it into long strands that can be woven into mats, according to a university news release. Anyone who has ever dissolved starch in water knows it can have some awesome physical properties, but the resulting thick paste is not that useful beyond a fun experiment or maybe thickening some soup. To spin it into thin threads, the Penn State researchers added a solvent to help the starch break down more readily. The solvent allowed it to maintain its molecular structure, and the researchers used an electrospinning device to spin the material into long strands. The fibers could then be woven like any other fiber into a wide range of materials, from bandages to paper. If they're used as a bandage, the starch fibers could simply degrade into glucose after some time and be absorbed by the body, according to grad student Lingyan Kong, who led this research. No more ripping off a Band-Aid. The fibers could serve other functions where other polymers, like cellulose or petroleum-based plastics, are typically used. The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and now the Penn State team is applying for a patent.

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES EXPLAINED

brent.dunn@jefferson.kyschools.us

photo: iStockPhoto

Do you believe in life after death?

Many people believe in ghosts and heaven, and about three in 100 Americans report actually having near-death experiences. These typically include an awareness of being dead, out-of-body experiences, meeting dead people, entering tunnels of light, and so on.

But these are stories and anecdotes; what does science have to say?

A new article published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by neuroscientist Dean Mobbs, of the University of Cambridge's Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, and Caroline Watt, of the University of Edinburgh, finds that "contrary to popular belief, research suggests that there is nothing paranormal about these experiences. Instead, near-death experiences are the manifestation of normal brain function gone awry, during a traumatic, and sometimes harmless, event."

Mobbs and Watt noted that many classic NDE symptoms are actually reported by people who were never in danger of dying in the first place. This suggests that the perception that one is near death is traumatic and disturbing enough to cause some of the experiences.

Researcher Susan Blackmore, author of Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (Prometheus Books, 1993), notes that many NDEs (such as euphoria and the feeling of moving toward a tunnel of white light) are common symptoms of oxygen deprivation in the brain.

The new paper also discussed something called "walking corpse" syndrome, named after French neurologist Jules Cotard. Co-author Watt told Discovery News, "The sufferer feels that he or she is dead, even though not actually near death. It can be associated with trauma and some illnesses. It's not fully understood why individuals suffer from Cotard syndrome, but one possibility is that it's the brain's attempt to make sense of the strange experiences that the patient is having.

"This is relevant to NDEs because the near-death experience may also arise out of an attempt to interpret unusual physiological and psychological experiences, and the NDE includes the perception that one is not alive in the normal sense of the word."

Watt's research also busts another myth: that people have "returned from the dead" -- if by dead you mean clinical brain death.

No one has survived true clinical death (which is why the experiences are called near-death). Many people have been revived after their heart stopped for short periods of time -- around 20 minutes or more -- but anyone revived from brain death would be permanently and irreparably brain damaged and certainly unable to report their experiences.

"The idea of surviving clinical brain death is mythical," Watt said. "NDEs are sometimes reported after a person experiences some of the preliminary 'stages' of death -- for instance, when the heart stops beating for a while and the person is then revived. I think it's curious, however, that a survey has shown that 82 percent of individuals who have survived being actually near death do not report a near-death experience. That would seem to undermine the idea that these experiences give a glimpse into life after death."

Watt believes that near-death experiences hold an enduring fascination for people because they like the idea that humans survive bodily death.

"Some people find this a comforting idea," Watt said, "because it suggests we are not simply like other biological organisms on our planet."

The fact that near-death experiences can be chemically induced and explained by neurological mechanisms suggests a natural -- instead of supernatural -- cause.

FLY PARASITE TURNS HONEY BEES INTO 'ZOMBIES' The parasites that cause the transformation may provide a clue to the mysterious colony collapse disorder

American scientists have discovered that a fly parasite can turn honey bees into confused zombies before killing them, in an advance that could offer new clues to why bee colonies are collapsing.

So far, the parasite has only been detected in honey bees in California and South Dakota, American researchers reported in the open access science journal PLoS ONE this week.


But if it turns out to be an emerging parasite, that "underlines the danger that could threaten honey bee colonies throughout North America," said the study led by San Francisco State University professor of biology John Hafernik.

Hafernik made the discovery by accident, when he foraged some bees from outside a light fixture at the university to feed to a praying mantis he'd brought back from a field trip.

"But being an absent-minded professor, I left them in a vial on my desk and forgot about them. Then the next time I looked at the vial, there were all these fly pupae surrounding the bees," he said.

Soon, the bees began to die, but not in the usual way by sitting still and curling up. These bees kept trying to move their legs and get around, but they were too weak, said lead author Andrew Core, a graduate student in Hafernik's lab.

"They kept stretching them out and then falling over," said Core. "It really painted a picture of something like a zombie."

Further study showed that bees that left their hives at night were most likely to become infected with the fly parasite, identified as Apocephalus borealis.

Once bees were parasitized by the fly, they would abandon their hives and congregate near lights, a very unusual behavior for bees.


"When we observed the bees for some time -- the ones that were alive -- we found that they walked around in circles, often with no sense of direction," said Core.

The parasite lays its eggs in the bee's abdomen. About a week after the bee dies, the fly larvae push their way into the world, often exiting from between the bee's head and mid-section.

The research, which has also confirmed that the same flies have been parasitizing bumblebees, won local excellence awards when it was first presented last year.

Next, the team hopes to find out more about where the parasitization is taking place, and whether the "zombie bees" leave the colony of their own accord or if their disease is sensed by comrades who then push them out.

Researchers plan to use tiny radio tags and video monitoring to find clues to the mystery.

"We don't know the best way to stop parasitization, because one of the big things we're missing is where the flies are parasitizing the bees," Hafernik said.

"We assume it's while the bees are out foraging, because we don't see the flies hanging around the bee hives. But it's still a bit of a black hole in terms of where it's actually happening."

Experts have theorized that the huge die-off of bees worldwide since 2006, a major threat to crops that depend on the honey-making insects for pollination, is not due to any one single factor.

Parasites, viral and bacterial infections, pesticides, and poor nutrition resulting from the impact of human activities on the environment have all played a role in the decline.

The mysterious decimation of bee populations in the United States, Europe, Japan and elsewhere in recent years threatens agricultural production worth tens of billions of dollars.

FYI: Could Scientists Really Create a Zombie Apocalypse Virus?

Dead Head Infectious proteins called prions could shut down parts of the brain and leave others intact, creating a zombie. iStock

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Maybe, but it’s not going to be easy. In West African and Haitian vodou, zombies are humans without a soul, their bodies nothing more than shells controlled by powerful sorcerers. In the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, an army of shambling, slow-witted, cannibalistic corpses reanimated by radiation attack a group of rural Pennsylvanians. We are looking for something a little in between Haiti and Hollywood: an infectious agent that will render its victims half-dead but still-living shells of their former selves.

See our gallery of real live zombies in nature.
An effective agent would target, and shut down, specific parts of the brain, says Steven C. Schlozman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and author of The Zombie Autopsies, a series of fictional excerpts from the notebooks of “the last scientist sent to the United Nations Sanctuary for the study of ANSD,” a zombie plague. Schlozman explained to PopSci that although the walking dead have some of their motor skills intact—walking, of course, but also the ripping and tearing necessary to devour human flesh—the frontal lobe, which is responsible for morality, planning, and inhibiting impulsive actions (like taking a bite out of someone), is nonexistent. The cerebellum, which controls coordination, is probably still there but not fully functional. This makes sense, since zombies in movies are usually easy to outrun or club with a baseball bat.
The most likely culprit for this partially deteriorated brain situation, according to Schlozman, is as simple as a protein. Specifically, a proteinaceous infectious particle, a prion. Not quite a virus, and not even a living thing, prions are nearly impossible to destroy, and there’s no known cure for the diseases they cause.
The first famous prion epidemic was discovered in the early 1950s in Papua New Guinea, when members of the Fore tribe were found to be afflicted with a strange tremble. Occasionally a diseased Fore would burst into uncontrollable laughter. The tribe called the sickness “kuru,” and by the early ’60s doctors had traced its source back to the tribe’s cannibalistic funeral practices, including brain-eating.
Prions gained notoriety in the 1990s as the infectious agents that brought us bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease. When a misshapen prion enters our system, as in mad cow, our mind develops holes like a sponge. Brain scans from those infected by prion-based diseases have been compared in appearance to a shotgun blast to the head.
Now, if we’re thinking like evil geniuses set on global destruction, the trick is going to be attaching a prion to a virus, because prion diseases are fairly easy to contain within a population. To make things truly apocalyptic, we need a virus that spreads quickly and will carry the prions to the frontal lobe and cerebellum. Targeting the infection to these areas is going to be difficult, but it’s essential for creating the shambling, dim-witted creature we expect.
Jay Fishman, director of transplant infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, proposes using a virus that causes encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain’s casing. Herpes would work, and so would West Nile, but attaching a prion to a virus is, Fishman adds, “a fairly unlikely” scenario. And then, after infection, we need to stop the prion takeover so that our zombies don’t go completely comatose, their minds rendered entirely useless. Schlozman suggests adding sodium bicarbonate to induce metabolic alkalosis, which raises the body’s pH and makes it difficult for proteins like prions to proliferate. With alkalosis, he says, “you’d have seizures, twitching, and just look awful like a zombie."

Hooking a 9-Volt Battery To Your Brain Improves Your Video Game Skills, Researcher Finds

(But don't try this at home)

9-Volt Battery Wikimedia Commons

We’ve already seen how magnets hovering close to a person’s head can affect speech, behavior and learning patterns. Now it appears zapping your brain with a 9-volt battery will make youbetter at video games, at least according to one researcher. Don’t try this yourself, though.
Neuroscientists at the University of New Mexico asked volunteers to play a video game called “DARWARS Ambush!”, developed to help train American military personnel. Half of the players received 2 milliamps of electricity to the scalp, using a device powered by a simple 9-volt battery, and they played twice as well as those receiving a much tinier jolt. The DARPA-funded study suggests direct current applied to the brain could improve learning.
This type of brain stimulation, called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), is controversial but could show promise for treatment of various neurological disorders and cognitive impairments. Click through to Nature News for a thorough overview.
It’s different from transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which a magnetic coil running at high voltage is positioned close to the head. The magnets stimulate electrical responses in the brain. Transcranial direct current stimulation is just what it sounds, applying the current directly to the brain.
We’ve been hearing quite a lot about these methods lately, and the scientific literature indicates the fields — tDCS in particular — are experiencing a revival, Nature News points out. Scientists hope the methods could be used to treat depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, stroke and autism, as well as to improve learning by increasing the brain’s plasticity.
Researchers are beginning to understand how an external electrical current affects brain function, including by inducing changes to the flow of electricity across neurons and increasing the expression of certain synapse proteins.
Apparently, it takes very little electricity to do all this. But please, don’t start hooking up 9-volt batteries to your brain — leave that to the scientific studies.

Scientists Resurrect Bonkers Extinct Frog That Gives Birth Through Its Mouth

It's been gone since 1983, but the Lazarus Project has brought it back to life. Gastric-Brooding Frog Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts In 1983, the world lost one of its weirdest frogs. The gastric-brooding frog, native to tiny portions of Queensland, Australia, gave birth through its mouth, the only frog to do so (in fact, very few other animals in the entire animal kingdom do this--it's mostly this frog and a few fish). It succumbed to extinction due to mostly non-human-related causes--parasites, loss of habitat, invasive weeds, a particular kind of fungus. There were two subspecies, the northern and souther gastric-brooding frog, and they both became extinct in the mid-80s sometime. Except--what if they didn't? Taking place at the University of Newcastle, the quest to revive the gastric-brooding frog became known as the Lazarus Project. Using somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), a method for cloning, the project has achieved the major step forward of creating an early embryo of the extinct frog. Essentially, they found a related frog--the great barred frog, which also lives in Queensland and has cool eye markings, like it's wearing sunglasses--deactivated its eggs, and replaced them with eggs taken from the extinct frog. Even though the gastric-brooding frog has been extinct for decades, it's possible to do this because individual specimens were kept preserved in, believe it or not, everyday deep freezers. When going through somatic-cell nuclear transfer, the eggs began to divide and form into the early embryo stage. The embryos didn't survive much longer than that, but it was confirmed that these embryos contain genetic information from the gastric-brooding frog--that yes, in fact, they have brought it back to life. The researchers are confident that this is a "technical, not biological" problem at this stage to breed gastric-brooding frogs to adulthood. This is a big step forward for the worldwide attempts to revive extinct animals--the Lazarus Project researchers will soon meet with those working to revive the woolly mammoth, dodo, and other extinct beasties to share what they've learned. Oh, and in case you were wondering: the gastric-brooding frog lays eggs, which are coated in a substance called prostaglandin. This substance causes the frog to stop producing gastric acid in its stomach, thus making the frog's stomach a very nice place for eggs to be. So the frog swallows the eggs, incubates them in her gut, and when they hatch, the baby frogs crawl out her mouth. How delightfully weird!

The Denver Zoo's Poo-Powered Rickshaw Turns Animal Waste into Energy

The Denver Zoo's Poo-Powered Rickshaw Denver Zoo

Teddy Roosevelt famously said “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” The folks at the Denver Zoo must have thought he was talking crap. The zoo happens to have a lot of animal dung on hand where it is, and via its own patent-pending gasification tech it is doing what it can, introducing a poo-powered rickshaw that turns animal waste and human trash into mobility.

The rickshaw was purchased from Thailand and modified to run on gasified pellets created by the zoo’s own technology. Those pellets, composed of animal waste and garbage generated by human visitors and zoo staff, aren’t just powering the rickshaw, but will be used to generate power at the zoo’s upcoming 10-acre elephant exhibit. Eventually, the zoo thinks it will be able to turn 90 percent of its waste into energy, making use not only of the copious amounts of animal poo it has on hand but also eliminating some 1.5 million pounds of annual garbage waste that previously went into landfills.

The gasification technology was designed by three full-time zoo employees working with a little help here and there from the National Renewable Energy Lab in nearby Boulder, as well as a few other companies and agencies. So it’s a home-grown, DIY system that could presumably be exported to other zoos and anywhere else animal waste is in abundance and energy is needed. This particular rickshaw has already been exported, landing at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in Palm Desert, Calif., this week.

Nokia Patents a Tattoo That Vibrates When Someone Calls You

Is corporeal connectivity a good idea?

Sometimes, when I’m occupied or just don’t feel like answering it, I ignore my phone. Sorry, but I don’t always have time for a telemarketer or whatever. Now Nokia wants to make this physically impossible by patenting an electronic tattoo that would vibrate, on your body, whenever someone calls. It would work like a body-based caller ID system, vibrating in a specific pattern according to the caller or the type of message. Talk about a rude interruption.

Nokia’s patent application describes a system that could work in two ways. The first concept uses a detachable electronic material that could peel off your skin, much like these, that you could pair with a phone. The peelable circuitry could detect a magnetic field and cause a vibration, probably through piezoelectrics. When someone calls your phone, the phone sends a signal to the haptic material, which would vibrate in a certain pattern.

"A user of an electronic device may specify in settings of the device that when [the] caller is defined to be 'Bob' in accordance to the phone book of the mobile device, a magnetic field is induced by the electronic device in addition to the ring tone and other possible alert, like visual," the application says.

The second concept would use a ferromagnetic ink to permanently imprint this material into your skin. You could get whatever image you’d want, just like a regular tattoo, and after it’s applied it would be magnetized so it, too, could recognize a magnetic field from your phone. Unwired View breaks down Nokia’s patent application in greater detail.

To be sure, practical uses abound for electronic tattoos, like keeping tabs on your health and fitness. But using them as an attention-grabbing, physical interruption is something else entirely. You can always leave your phone behind — but what about when your phone is literally on your behind? There are plenty of moments in life when it's appropriate to ignore a ringing phone, but it's not easy to ignore your own pulsating skin. Yes, there is such a thing as being too connected.

If The Sun Went Out, How Long Could Life On Earth Survive?

Don't worry, you'll have time to post your goodbye selfies to Facebook.

Solar prominence NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory

If you put a steamy cup of coffee in the refrigerator, it wouldn’t immediately turn cold. Likewise, if the sun simply “turned off” (which is actually physically impossible), the Earth would stay warm—at least compared with the space surrounding it—for a few million years. But we surface dwellers would feel the chill much sooner than that.

Within a week, the average global surface temperature would drop below 0°F. In a year, it would dip to –100°. The top layers of the oceans would freeze over, but in an apocalyptic irony, that ice would insulate the deep water below and prevent the oceans from freezing solid for hundreds of thousands of years. Millions of years after that, our planet would reach a stable –400°, the temperature at which the heat radiating from the planet’s core would equal the heat that the Earth radiates into space, explains David Stevenson, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology.

Although some microorganisms living in the Earth’s crust would survive, the majority of life would enjoy only a brief post-sun existence. Photosynthesis would halt immediately, and most plants would die in a few weeks. Large trees, however, could survive for several decades, thanks to slow metabolism and substantial sugar stores. With the food chain’s bottom tier knocked out, most animals would die off quickly, but scavengers picking over the dead remains could last until the cold killed them.

Humans could live in submarines in the deepest and warmest parts of the ocean, but a more attractive option might be nuclear- or geothermal-powered habitats. One good place to camp out: Iceland. The island nation already heats 87 percent of its homes using geothermal energy, and, says astronomy professor Eric Blackman of the University of Rochester, people could continue harnessing volcanic heat for hundreds of years.

Of course, the sun doesn’t merely heat the Earth; it also keeps the planet in orbit. If its mass suddenly disappeared (this is equally impossible, by the way), the planet would fly off, like a ball swung on a string and suddenly let go.

Why Spiders Will Always Find You

Spiders are among the most vibration-sensitive organisms in the world, second only to cockroaches.

Spiders abound this Halloween season, but for those who wish to slip past unnoticed by a real spider -- good luck. New research has found that spiders are second only to cockroaches when it comes to detecting vibrations.
Hungry spiders can detect the quietest movements and air flow shifts. Stimulus forces in the .01 near-undetectable range are enough for spider stimulation, according to a new published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
In fact, a spider's entire body is built to detect almost anything and anyone that might cross its path.
"The spider has more than 3000 strain sensors embedded in its exoskeleton at many different locations, but most of them are on the legs and the compound organs, like the vibration receptors, are near leg joints," co-author Friedrich Barth, one of the world's leading experts on spiders, told Discovery News.
Both he and lead author Clemens Schaber are neurobiologists at the University of Vienna. Along with colleague Stanislav Gorb of the University of Kiel, they used a process called white light interferometry to perform the first ever quantitative examination of the sophisticated micromechanics of spiders. This process combines light waves in an optical instrument, allowing for very precise measurements of the tiniest things, such as force on a spider strain sensor.
The spider's sensors consist of minute slits of the lyriform organs that receive information on local movements. The scientists determined that each slit's sensitivity was at the nanoscale level, gradually decreasing with decreasing slit length.
Schaber and his team focused their investigations on adult females of the large Central American wandering spider, Cupiennius salei, taken from their Vienna breeding stock. Given its size and impressive hunting talents, it's a favorite species for spider studies, and has been analyzed before.
This particular spider "does not build webs to catch prey, but is a nocturnal sit-and-wait predator," Schaber told Discovery News. "Our spider receives vibrations through the leaves of plants. Both on the plant and in the web, spiders (in general) will attack the stimulus source if the vibration amplitude induced is within a certain range and if it contains a biologically meaningful range of frequencies."
"If both parameters are far from being prey-like, a spider will not respond or escape," he continued.
Spiders may therefore detect the presence of a human or other animal, but unless the invader's movements mimic those of typical prey, the spider will probably not attack. With such a sensitive ability to detect vibrations, spiders would forever be wasting their time on useless hunts, were it not for their ability to fine-tune the incoming sensory information.
Biologist George Uetz of the University of Cincinnati and colleague Shira Gordon also recently studied spiders and found that when certain spiders are in the mood to mate, they drum unique sexy vibrations, preferably on leaf litter, to attract partners. Wolf spiders have a particularly showy display involving leg taps and body bounces.
It takes keen sensory perception for a spider to detect such movements out of the surrounding environmental din.
If a spider doesn't "feel" you, it can also see, smell and taste you. Schaber explained that spiders "have vision, sensitive for low light levels, but at low temporal resolution." Minute chemical-sensitive hair sensors on spider feelers, called pedipalps, can also receive odors. Female spiders release a sort of pheromone perfume that can attract males.
Aside from telling us more about spiders, the research could lead to improved bio-inspired sensors for use in medical, military, business and other possible industry applications.

Glow-In-The-Dark Cats Could Provide Answers About AIDS

Glow Kitten Mayo Clinic

Genetically modified glow-in-the-dark cats not only make stylish, futuristic pets, but now provideinsight into feline AIDS as well. The cats were injected with an antiviral gene from a rhesus macaque monkey that helps them resist feline AIDS, along with one that produces the fluorescent protein GFP. The latter gene, which is naturally produced by jellyfish, is regularly used in genetic engineering as a way to mark cells. If the cats aren't glowing, then the AIDS-resisting gene might not have made it into the cell either.

Infection-fighting proteins called restriction factors, made by both cats and humans, are powerless against their respective versions of AIDS. But monkey versions of restriction factors, like the ones produced by the gene from the rhesus macaque, are able to fight HIV and FIV, as the viruses' counter-weapons are designed to fight against human or cat proteins.

The team of American and Japanese scientists injected the antiviral gene and the GFP gene into feline eggs. Almost all of the offspring from these modified eggs had the restriction factor genes, with both fluorescent and AIDS-fighting proteins made throughout their bodies. Cells taken from the animals were found to be resistant to FIV, and the team plans to eventually expose the cats themselves to the virus to see if the restriction factors will protect them. Proof that these genes can protect cats from feline AIDS would be a huge step towards figuring out how to protect humans and prevent HIV.

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