Researchers from The University of California, Riverside, measured the testicular tissue mass of young male crickets that had been played cricket song, and found that they grew up to have nearly 10% more testicular mass than the youths without such auditory cues of competition. A big part of the male crickets’ mating strategy involves a long-range call. The song can be ‘parasitized’ by other males, who lurk nearby, taking credit for the masculine calls to impress arriving females. But, the males that grew up surrounded by the songs of other males were less likely to use such underhand tactics. Instead they were generally bigger, noisier and in overall better shape.

It seems mating matters to crickets, in fact so fixated are decorated crickets that they will sacrifice their health to impress the females. As part of the mating process, males offer their mates an adorably named ‘nuptial food gift’, a gummy blobby concoction that they synthesize and transfer to the females along with sperm. Scientists from Illinois State University managed to coerce some decorated crickets into producing larger food packages, which they did, despite it lowering their immune systems.

After all that effort, when the deed has been done, mating mission accomplished, there’s still no guarantee that the sperm that entered the female cricket will be the sperm that fertilises her eggs. Of course some of it will be, but with the promiscuity of female crickets, and the aggressive mating tactics of males, multiple matings with the same female are common. So, who becomes the daddy?

Researchers from Exeter university found that even after mating with up to ten males, promiscuous female field crickets can control the amount of sperm that they store from each mate, regardless of the order they mated in. Although crickets don’t avoid mating with relatives, they do reduce the chances of producing unfit inbred offspring, by using their abdominal muscles to keep hold of more of the sperm from unrelated males. Scientists from Australia and Switerland went further and found that a male’s chances of fathering “increases with its attractiveness and decreases with the size of the female”.

In the harsh world of insect reproduction, once the eggs have been laid, the little ones are on their own. Although the mothers don’t stick around, researchers at the University of South Carolina Upstate, have found that they can leave hidden maternal messages in their unborn babies, to prepare them for the harsh realities of existence. Storm and Lima (researchers, with names like comic superheros), placed pregnant crickets in enclosures with predatory wolf spiders whose fangs were tipped with wax. This meant the spiders could stalk the crickets, make them extremely frightened, but not actually kill them.

The offspring of mothers born to the spider-stalked mothers were faster to react to the danger of predators, than the control offspring from mothers kept more cushy circumstances. These offspring of ‘stalked’ mothers ran for cover more quickly and stayed in hiding for more than twice as long. They would also freeze when coming across signs of their predators, signs such as spider silk or spider faeces. Having this fear, unsurprisingly meant that they ended up with higher survival rates.

An international team of scientists lead by the University of California, Los Angeles compared genetic data from more than 900 dogs and 200 wolves to create a “family tree” that shows the connections between the various breeds. Previous research suggested that dogs originated in East Asia, but that was based only on genetic changes in mitochondria, tiny structures found in all animal cells. This new work examines a much larger section of the canine genome, comparing 48,000 different locations across species DNA.

Dogs and wolves are all connected.

Researchers have traditionally pointed their finger at the Chicxulub crater in Yucatan, Mexico as the culprit for the extinction of T-Rex and his chums 65 million years ago, but Sankar Chatterjee and his team are turning their attention to India’s Shiva Crater.

This underwater basin measures almost 500km across, easily overshadowing Chicxulub’s measly 180km, and was most likely carved out when approximately 25km of space rock came hurtling to Earth. Dr Chatterjee and his colleagues hope to study the crater further to establish once and for all whether it was indeed caused by an impact 65 million years ago.

The underwater Shiva Crater, off the coast of India, may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The tell-tale sign of a space-based impactor is abnormally high levels of Iridium, an element abundant in asteroids but a rarity in the Earth’s crust. Iridium levels at impact sites tend to be a hundred times greater than usual.

Whilst impacts of this size are certainly not every day, or even every millennium events, there have been five extinction level events, where over 50% of the animal population have been pole axed, in the last 540 million years. Many are attributed to asteroid and/or comet impacts, although there are other possibilities.

Subsequently the study of the position and trajectories of the asteroid and comet families has become big scientific business including NASA’s dedicated Near Earth Object program. Programs such as these led to a potential impactor being discovered in 2004 that experts rated as a 1-in-60 chance of colliding with the Earth.

Happily, they have since revised their estimations upwards. However, asteroid 99942 Apophis (2004 MN4) will still pass the Earth over 13 times nearer than the Moon, rather eerily on Friday 13th April 2029, culminating in the closest approach of such a sizeable object for a thousand years.

It is not a question of if but when a Shiva Crater causing asteroid has our name on it. Yet if Dr Chatterjee and his team are correct it will be another piece in the puzzle explaining what led to the disappearance of the dinosaurs and the advent of the mammals that would evolve to worry about a similar fate.

Paul Bettany and Martha West as Darwin and his daughter Annie are superb, and I was genuinely moved by their on-screen relationship. But, for every touching father-daughter moment there came scene after scene of Darwin manically running after the ghost of his dead child.

The real Darwin struggled to live with Annie’s death, and suffered throughout his life from a mysterious illness that likely caused him great mental trauma. He was not however stark-raving mad, as the film portrays him, and after the first few interactions with the ghost of Annie, my sense of immersion was shattered.

The film is a dramatisation though, and not a documentary, so some bending of the truth is allowed. I imagine what more people will take issues with is the portrayal of religion. Darwin’s wife Emma, played here by Bettany’s actual wife Jennifer Connelly, was deeply religious, and Darwin delayed publication of his theory for many years because he feared her (and the world’s) response.

This is played out in the film, but perhaps in the most ham-fisted way possible. “Science is at war with religion,” declares Thomas Huxley near the start, and Darwin must win the fight for science.

Why must the theory of evolution always be set against religion in this way? It is perfectly possible to both accept the truth of evolution and believe in God – not a philosophy I ascribe to personally, but nor one I feel the need to constantly assault.

If Creation is meant to convince people of the truth of evolution over God, then it will fail. As the lack of a US distribution deal indicates, those who do not wish to have their minds changed will simply refuse to see it. But if the film is meant to appeal to Darwin’s loyal supporters, then the sight of him raving at the ghost of his daughter is unlikely to please.

Who then is Creation intended for? I don’t know. It’s certainly a film worth seeing; I enjoyed it as a well constructed piece of cinema. I’m just not sure that I liked it.

Honours for UK astronauts

The British Interplanetary Society (BIS) have created an award for people from the UK who have flown in to to space – all five of them.

The silver pins were give to Helen Sharman and Richard Garriott, who were backed by private funds, and Michael Foale, Nicholas Patrick and Piers Sellers who all became US citizens to fly with NASA.

Despite UK government resistance to human spaceflight, the BIS have made up another five pins that they hope to give to future UK astronauts.

One quarter of Londoners believe in creationism

The figure falls to one in seven nationwide, which is still fairly concerning. Worse though are the one in five Londoners who have never even heard of Darwin – you don’t have to believe the guy, but at least know his name!

US Navy is building electromagnetic plane guns

As in, guns that fire planes. Well not quite, but the Pentagon has spent half a billion dollars on building a new launch system for aircraft carriers.

Currently, they use “steam catapults” to launch planes off the short carrier runways – which is pretty much what it sounds like. The new Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System will instead use an electric linear motor to shoot the planes off in to the sky.

Self-help books don’t

A psychological study has found that self-help books can actually have the opposite effect to that intended. The research showed that people with low self-esteem actually feel worse about themselves after repeating typical self-help statements like “I am a lovable person”.

Monkeys barter and trade on a simian stock market

Instead of pounds or dollars, non-human primates use grooming as currency. Scientists from the University of Strasbourg in France examined monkey exchange rates by placing food in a box that only one female was trained to open.

An hour after she did, the other members of the group rewarded her with longer and more frequent grooming, and she reciprocated less.

Her new-found wealth wasn’t to last however. When the scientists introduced another trained monkey, the first female’s grooming “stock value” decreased as the second female’s rose. Eventually the “market” equalised and they were both groomed for the same amount of time.

Charles Darwin used sheet after sheet of paper when writing On the Origin of Species, since redrafting before the days of Microsoft Word meant writing the whole thing out again. Only a handful of these draft papers have survived, mostly because Darwin gave his used sheets to his children for use as drawing paper.

Battle of the Vegetables

Next week one such sheet will go on display in a new exhibition at Cambridge University Library. Named “Battle of the Vegetables” by Library staff, it depicts a battle between one man riding a carrot and another on what could possibly be a stale potato.

Did Michael Jackson’s death contribute to climate change?

Duncan Graham-Rowe of the Guardian asks whether we should consider the carbon cost of all the increased web activity following the singer’s death. I’ve discussed the carbon cost of Googling before – 0.2g per search, according to the company’s own figures.

As one commenter points out, if you added up the tiny contributions of all the tributary Tweets and YouTubes they probably wouldn’t exceed the Jackson’s personal carbon footprint, considering the lavish life he led.

The Guardian’s James Randerson also chimes in to say the point of the article isn’t really the carbon cost of Jackson’s death, but to highlight the issue of unsustainable internet growth. Whilst this is a problem, I can’t imagine that alternative methods of information distribution are any greener. As with many climate change conundrums, the answer is far from clear.

What’s on alien TV?

Webcomic Abstruse Goose has this rather nice image of what aliens might be watching on TV. When TV signals are broadcast some of them radiate out from the Earth, and could be picked up by any extraterrestrials out there. Like all electromagnetic radiation, the signals travel at the speed of light, so depending on how far from Earth the aliens are it’s going to take them a while to receive our latest programmes.

Whilst inhabitants of the relatively near Sirius system might have been enjoying episodes of Family Guy and The Sopranos for the past few years, everyone out in Aldebaran is still waiting for coverage of World War II to arrive. I just hope any aliens out there will forgive us for polluting space with broadcasts of Big Brother…

As a student of science communication, I watched dutifully. I was not impressed. It felt like sitting through an episode of CSI or 24, with crash zooms and blinking maps featuring heavily. Scientists breathlessly compared the impact of Ida to “an asteroid hitting the Earth”

In the lead up to last night’s programme, Ida has been riding a hype wave that would be the envy of any Hollywood starlet. Unveiled by a press conference last week, and paraded around the media, Ida is big news. But is she big science? Anyone watching last night would certainly think so, but the scientific paper published in PloS One tells a slightly different story.

Ignore for a moment the fact that most biologists now question the need for a “missing link” in our evolution. The fossil record demonstrates the transition from early primates all the way along the evolutionary tree to humans. Although a somewhat outdated model of evolution – see New Scientist’s Darwin Was Wrong cover – the tree idea is still useful for thinking about how one species evolves in to another.

For us to be descended from Darwinus masillae, you would expect to trace a line down from Ida’s position on the tree to ours. That is what the documentary would have you believe, but as far as I can tell, it isn’t what the scientific paper says. As this diagram from New Scientist suggests, Ida belongs on the lemur track of evolution – although she herself was not a lemur.

Ida doesn't necessarily lie on our evolutionary branch.

I’m concerned by the extent to which Atlantic Productions, who made the documentary, influenced the science behind Ida. It is clear that they were involved from a fairly early stage – one scene in the documentary is a suspicious looking “home video” of the first discovery of Ida by lead scientist Dr Jørn Hurum. Scientists working on the fossil were asked to sign contracts and NDAs and some have even complained of being forced to work to media schedules. “It’s not how I like to do science,” said co-author Dr Philip Gingerich.

What would Atlantic have done, if Ida was shown to be a fairly uninteresting example of a lemur? Can the documentary, and lose their investment? Or would they have pressed for the scientists to reconsider their decision, to find the story? Worryingly, it appears this might be what happened.

At the end of the day, Ida is an amazingly complete example of such an ancient fossil. She is a great find for science, but unfortunately just does not deserve the hype afforded to her. And whilst Darwinus masillae is certainly related to us, as all animals are in some way related to us via the very earliest life forms, Ida cannot possibly be our earliest ancestor. For one thing, she died before ever reaching sexual maturity, and thus never bore any children. But on a broader scale, she zigged when our ancestors zagged. Somewhere out there might be a fossil that directly relates to us both, but even that does not deserve the label “missing link”. Of course that won’t stop another media circus, should it ever be discovered.

Bit of a strange one this. A study published in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences suggests a possible explanation for the disappearance of the Neanderthals – we ate them.

A Neanderthal jawbone appears to show marks similar to those found on deer remains from the early Stone Age. Lead researcher Fernando Rozzi, of the Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique in Paris, believes that this idea has been suppressed in the past. “For years, people have tried to hide away from the evidence of cannibalism, but I think we have to accept it took place.”

I’m not sure eating Neanderthals is technically cannibalism, as they are a different species, but they’re human enough to make it pretty creepy. Urgh.

Beware the “super rats”

The governing principle of natural selection is that the fittest survive. In the case of rats, those with a genetic resistance to poison will survive attempts to exterminate them, and pass on this immunity to their descendants. Before you know it, we’ll be over-run by super rats.

Ratcatchers in Swindon are reporting a 500% increase in rodent populations, and Professor Robert Smith of the University of Huddersfield thinks that Darwin is to blame:

“Natural selection means that when you have a rat population in your town, poison will kill the ones that aren’t resistant, the ones that survive may have the gene, they then have babies who can receive the gene themselves,” he said.

“There are mutations and changes in their DNA that alter the ability of rats to deal with these poisons. It appears to be moving west and has now been located in Swindon and Bristol. It is a warning of things to come.”

An appropriate photo for Sunday

You may have already seen this image circulated around the press, but it’s worth another look:

The Space Shuttle and Hubble telescope pass in front of the Sun. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

Earlier this week astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis undertook a mission to repair the Hubble telescope, and photographer Thierry Legault managed to catch them in the act. The spaceships appear as tiny dots in front of the vast Sun, but you can just make out the iconic shape of the Shuttle. More pics available here.

For British Beekeepers Association News…

Bumblebee flight continue to astound scientists

There is an old myth that bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly. The maths just doesn’t work. A new study from scientists at Oxford University shows that bumblebee flight is indeed more about power than finesse.

The researchers trained bees to fly along a wind tunnel erected between their hive and pollen-rich cut flowers. Smoke in the wind tunnel is disturbed by the flight, making visible the way that bees disturb the air around them. A high-speed camera captured the flight, and those images were analysed to develop a model for the motion of bees in flight.

The idea is very similar to the computer modelling used by swimmers to examine how efficient their stroke is through the water. But unlike athletes, bumblebees have not developed to move efficiently. In fact, the new study shows that the movement of air around the bee betrays a very uneconomical flying technique.

‘We found that bumblebee flight is surprisingly inefficient,” said Dr Richard Bomphrey, co-author of the report. He explained how a bee’s left and right wings do not flap in sync. And nor does the air flow around the two sides meet up, which would help make the flight more aerodynamic.

His colleague, Professor Adrian Thomas offered a possible reason for the evolution of such a disastrous technique: “a bumblebee is a tanker-truck, its job is to transport nectar and pollen back to the hive. Efficiency is unlikely to be important for that way of life.”

So the flight path between flower and hive resembles the slow lane on the M1 and not a quiet stretch of the Autobahn. But the brute force bees need to keep themselves going is spectacular in its own way. They are the powerhouses of the insect world, defying the mathematics that says they shouldn’t even get off the ground.

For Physicsworld…

Can bees teach us how to fly?

Scientists have shown that bumblebees use a unique technique to propel themselves through the air. In a study published in May in Experiments in Fluids, a team from the Zoology department in Oxford examined the air flow profile of a flying bee. The pattern of vortices created in the air surrounding the bee in novel.

Unfortunately, this novelty is unlikely to be useful for physicists and engineers interested in biomimetic developments in flight technology. The bee’s flying technique only makes it less efficient.

Like other insects and like aeroplane wings, a bumblebee creates a leading edge vortex during flight. It separates the air flow coming towards it at the front edge of its wings and flies by exploiting the resulting pressure difference above and below the wing.

But most insects also create other vortices, called root and tip vortices. The bee does not. Other insects and birds also co-ordinate right and left wing motion to maximise their propulsion. The bee does not do this either.

“We found that bumblebee flight is surprisingly inefficient,” said Dr Richard Bomphrey, co-author of the study. He added that the technique could have evolved to make bumblebees more manoeuvrable in the air – a facet that might be more valuable for bees than speed through the air.

So, although bees are inefficient flyers, their propulsion technique could be useful for research in other areas. If bees can be shown to have increased control over movement, then they offers a potential model for improving the control we have over airbound vehicles such as helicopters.

More research is needed before we can know if there is any application. But there is a possibility that the bumblebee, the famous example of an animal that flouts the engineering principles of flight, could help us improve our air technology.

Mycocepurus smithii, the ant without a sex life © Alex Wild 2007

There are of course drawbacks to completely lacking any genetic diversity, it is certainly putting all your unfertilised eggs in one evolutionary basket. As Laurent Keller of The University of Lausanne eloquently puts it, “in a colony of clones, if one ant is susceptible to a parasite, they will all be susceptible. So if you’re asexual, you normally don’t last very long.”

But there are advantages to such a mechanism too, as Dr Anna Himler explained to the BBC, “it avoids the energetic cost of producing males, and doubles the number of reproductive females produced each generation from 50% to 100% of the offspring,” she said.

And this is where the interesting part lies. In being complete clones of their female leader not only have the ants dispensed with intercourse but they have eradicated any males of the species. It is easy to see why this notion is preferred by evolution. Life in the formicary must be so much easier since the males were cut out of existence. No farting, no belching and definitely no screaming at the TV whilst the football is on. Imagine the joy of the female Amazonian ants as they can get on with life without any arse-scratching, woman-ogling, toilet-seat-leaving-up pesky males around. Surely it’s only a matter of time before you ladies have the same idea…