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.