Humans living on the Indonesian coast frequently discard halved coconut shells in the ocean, and it turns out that their eight-legged neighbors have been making use of them. Researchers have filmed veined octopi, Amphioctopus marginatus, moving the shell halves by placing their bodies inside the hollowed-out portion, draping their legs over the edges, and bringing the shells along for the ride. When the coconut-carrying octopus feels threatened, it will pull the half shell over its body (or sometimes pulls two halves of a whole coconut over itself), and wait inside their armored home until the threat passes.

Veined octopi have been seen hiding out inside coconut shells before, but researchers hadn't realized that the creatures were deliberately carting the shells around for this purpose. Marine biologist Julian Finn of Melbourne's Museum Victoria caught a lucky glimpse of a veined octopus carrying and using the shells, and has since filmed four octopi doing the same thing.

Finn and other researchers argue that this is the first reported use of tools by an invertebrate species, as this is a sophisticated, costly behavior in which an animal manipulates an object for future plans. While others argue that it does not fit the standard definition of tool use, since the octopus isn't using the object to act on another object, it may still require a sophisticated level of cognition, and we should investigate what makes such foresight possible.

Octopuses use coconut shells as portable shelters [New Scientist]

OK, I admit it: These really are pieces of jewelry, created by twentieth century American artist John Paul Miller, who was fond of using precious metals and enamel to recreate spiders, insects, and various cephalopods. I love how these piece look beautiful and disturbing at once.

You can see more of Miller's work in this online gallery. [via feuilleton]

The theory comes after researchers managed to inhibit the FoxL2 gene in fully-grown female mice, resulting in ovary cells changing into fully developed, testosterone-producing cells found in male testes, increasing their levels of testosterone 100 times higher than the average female level - the level of fully grown males, in fact. The international team of scientists, led by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, believe that this discovery could be used to remove the need for gender reassignment surgery in humans, according to the team's Robin Lovell-Badge:

We take it for granted that we maintain the sex we are born with, including whether we have testes or ovaries, [b]ut this work shows that the activity of a single gene, FoxL2, is all that prevents adult ovary cells turning into cells found in testes. If it is possible to make these changes in adult humans, it may eventually remove the need for surgery in gender-reassignment treatment... It's still very speculative, but it's possible that this approach could produce an alternative to surgery and the removal of gonads – ovaries and testes.

From Minnie to Mickey (and all they did was turn off a gene) [Independent.co.uk]

No one is completely sure what whale songs are used for – theories include mating calls, other forms of communication, and possibly a form of sonar. A group of researchers recently examined whale songs from several decades and from all the world's oceans. They found that the frequency, or pitch, of blue whale song has been steadily dropping for many years. Recently recorded whale songs are the lowest, while whale songs from the 1960s were higher in pitch.

The researchers don't know what's causing the change, but they have a theory based on a correlation with blue whale populations. When the songs were at their highest pitch, blue whales had been hunted to the brink of extinction. Since the International Whaling Commission banned blue whale hunting in the 60s, the worldwide blue whale population has been slowly but steadily increasing (though it's still a tiny fraction of what it once was). That seems to coincide with the pitch change.

It could be that whales used a higher frequency song when there were fewer whales because those songs traveled farther, hundreds of miles or more. With a sparse population, you'd need a long-distance call to find more mates or family members. With populations rebounding somewhat, the whales are able to use lower frequency songs with more success, since there's a greater chance another blue whale is nearby.

You may be wondering why higher frequency songs would travel farther, since generally low-frequency sounds are thought to be better for long-distance propagation. I asked the researchers about this, and scientist Mark McDonald explained that whales can sing louder at higher frequencies:

Across the frequencies of blue whale song, the underwater transmission losses are nearly the same regardless of frequency. It is absorption which is the primary cause of frequency dependent transmission losses, rather than dispersion in this case, and the absorption loss only begins to become significant when ranges reach thousands of kilometers. Theory tells us the whales can produce higher amplitude songs at higher frequencies, based on given lung volume.

I was also curious if this was an example of evolution in action, with subsequent generations of whales exhibiting a change in pitch due to natural selection, or if it was a behavioral change, with blue whales choosing to use a lower pitch song. He replied:

We presume it is a behavioral change, but we don't really know why the whales are changing their song frequency. We don't find our own best hypothesis entirely convincing.

Which is a pretty excellent example of science in progress. If only we could figure out what blue whales were singing about, so we could just ask them.

The pitch of blue whale songs is declining around the world, scientists discover [via EurekAlert!]

Photo: NOAA.

The premise of FlashForward is that everybody in the world blacks out at the same time, and for a few minutes they see what's going to happen to them six months into the future. Hence, the "flashforward" of the title. Because everybody is blacked out during this flashforward, of course, chaos reigns. Planes and cars crash; people die. It's a strange and intriguing disaster, and now characters on the show are hinting that it was caused by a physics research facility in Palo Alto, clearly modeled on an actual facility associated with Stanford University in Palo Alto. On the website for the Stanford Linear Accelerator, SLAC for short, you can find an informative FAQ responding to FlashForward's science flailing.

They explain that plasma-wakefield acceleration experiments have gone on at SLAC, but only with electrons. They write:

SLAC does have a cutting-edge plasma-wakefield acceleration program that is creating the next generation of particle accelerators. However, it works by accelerating electrons (and their anti-matter cousin positrons) rather than the much heavier protons. At this time, there are no experiments that attempt to accelerate protons using plasma wakefields.

In addition, no matter what you did with these experiments, you wouldn't get a flashforward:

Plasma-wakefield acceleration is just an advanced technique to boost particles to high energies, something that particle physicists have been doing for decades. Even the most speculative theories rooted in real physics make no prediction that anything like a flashforward could occur.

"Although we can use particle accelerators to essentially look backward in time to recreate the conditions of the universe soon after the big bang, there is no known way to look into the future," says Mark Hogan, chief experimental scientist for the plasma wakefield program at SLAC's FACET.

In other words, FlashForward is full of crap. These scientists are too nice to say that directly, so I'll just say it for them.

via SLAC and Symmetry Breaking

Holbo is a philosophy professor when he isn't concocting weird tales of squid, and it shows. The book starts with his whimsical musings on the scientific names for "owl" and "squid," and then abruptly becomes a meditation on why squid and owl are considered "binary." Why can't they change places? It's a little like reading a Victorian children's book and suddenly discovering that in fact you're buried knee-deep in an essay on language and deconstruction. Which isn't to say it isn't completely fun and silly. I've excerpted a few pages from his book, which you can see all of on his Flickr stream, and buy a copy of at Blurb.

For 10 million dollars, the coastal area belonging to Wisconsin's Concordia University went from eroding wasteland to a beautiful park. According to landscape architecture firm JJR:

Concordia University came to JJR with a clear problem: It was literally losing acres of its waterfront campus to Lake Michigan due to a continually eroding, 130-foot high bluff that steeply dropped down to the Lake Michigan shoreline. JJR's master plan and final design focused on stabilizing the bluff and providing armored shoreline revetments and beaches to halt the continued erosion caused by the severe Lake Michigan wave environment. This project also included recreational and environmental enhancements down the face of the bluff itself.

Read about more runners-up for 2009's best engineering projects via the American Society of Civil Engineers and Popular Mechanics.

Images of the Concordia University project via JJR.

The Cassini spacecraft recently sent back images of Saturn's strange hexagon, which was last photographed 30 years ago by Voyager. So what is so unusual about it? In comparing the pictures now from the pictures 30 years ago, scientists have found that the shape of the hexagon has remained unchanged, making it an extremely long-lived weather pattern, perhaps akin to Jupiter's Great Red Spot.

Researchers are trying to determine what causes the weather pattern — which has a diameter more than twice as long as Earth's — how it gets and expels its energy, and how it maintains such a rigid shape. Fortunately, the improved images from Cassini and the fact that Saturn probably has a relatively simple weather model should help the researchers get a better understanding of the hexagon and how weather works on other planets.

Saturn's Mysterious Hexagon Emerges from Winter Darkness [PhysOrg]

Nobody knows. According to the Denver Post:

There by the trough - past the locked gate a quarter-mile from U.S. 350 east of Hoehne - was the calf. Its front legs and torso were gone. Its back legs were hanging by hide to a shattered pelvis and a meatless backbone. [Rancher Tom] Miller thought a pack of coyotes had torn into the calf the night before.

Then he saw the ears: sliced off the head in circular, surgical-like cuts. He noticed that there were no tracks. And no blood anywhere . . .

Colorado Brand Inspector Dennis Williams [said] "I've heard about it. It was weird, to say the least. Totally unexplainable. To me, it looked like that calf had been dropped from a high distance, the way its hips were dislocated and all its broken bones," Williams says . . .

"It's weird and unexplainable," says [rancher Mike] Duran, who lost a healthy 27-year-old Red Angus cow on March 8, her udder and rear end removed with what he describes as "laser cuts, like when somebody cuts metal with a torch."

Apparently cattle mutilations like these are found on a fairly regular basis in Colorado and parts of Mexico. Is this the creepy, meat-oriented version of crop circles?

via Denver Post (Thanks, Nick Lightner!)

Photo by Chuck Zukowski.

While the situation is quite weird - few icebergs this large have ever drifted so far from Antarctica - it will not end in an iceberg vs. landmass smackdown. As the huge sheet of ice drifts into warmer waters, it will break up and melt. In fact, scientists studying this phenomenon have seen other enormous icebergs, like the one pictured above, reach as far as New Zealand.

In this satellite photo, you can see where the enormous iceberg originated. According to CNN:

Named B17B, [the iceberg is] about 1,700 km (1,056 miles) off the coast of West Australia, according to the country's Antarctic Division.

"B17B is a very significant one in that it has drifted so far north while still largely intact," said Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist Neal Young, who spotted the slab using satellite images taken by NASA and the European Space Agency. "It's one of the biggest sighted at those latitudes."

Researchers aren't sure whether this iceberg migration is part of a natural cycle, or has been affected by recent climate change.

All I can say is that it sounds like the great setup for an action movie: Giant Landmass vs. Mega-Iceberg!

Satellite photo via AP/Australian Antarctic Division.

The magazine quotes Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who identifies it as the failure-prone Bulava ballistic missile, launched from a submarine. McDowell said the Russian Navy is in the right geographical position to launch it. He added that Russia has denied that it was their missile, but "this could be because another Bulava failure is a huge and embarrassing setback for their programme."

As for why the perfect spiral shape was created:

McDowell says the shape suggests the failure occurred well above the atmosphere. If it had occurred at lower altitudes, atmospheric drag would have caused the missile to fall quickly to Earth, creating a downward-pointing corkscrew pattern whose contrails would have been blown "this way and that" by wind, he told New Scientist.

The Bulava missile has three stages that fire in succession as it climbs up in altitude. "Probably what happened is that stages 1 and 2 did just fine and were discarded in turn, and then stage 3 started burning and almost immediately went wrong," McDowell says.

He says the third stage's nozzle, which directs the rocket's exhaust plume, may have fallen off or been punctured, causing the exhaust to come out sideways instead of out the back. "The sideways thrust sends the rocket into a spin, spewing flame as it goes," he says.

"If thrust was terminated right away, then you wouldn't see the spiral," he continues. "The unusual thing this time is that the missile was allowed to carry on firing for a bit after it went wrong."

UPDATE: Jonathan McDowell writes in to say:

The Russians did send out a 'notice to mariners' in advance warning of a rocket launch, and they have now (Dec 10) admitted that there was a launch of the Bulava and that the third stage failed. Hope that answers some of the comments on your page.

via New Scientist

Scientists studying the Red Planet have developed a few possible explanations for the presence of methane in Mars' atmosphere. Methane on Mars is being constantly depleted by a chemical reaction triggered by sunlight, meaning that the methane is also replenished at a significant rate. One theory, that methane was being carried into the atmosphere by extramartian bodies such as meteorites, has been taken off the table thanks to a new study by researchers at Imperial College London. The study found that the volume of methane released by meteorites upon entering the atmosphere is far too low to supply Mars' current methane levels. Other studies have ruled out another possibility, that volcanic activity has been producing the methane.

This leaves two frontrunner solutions to Mars' methane mystery. One possibility is that the methane is produced as a byproduct of a chemical reaction between volcanic rock and water. The other is that microorganisms are living on the planet's surface and that their metabolic process produces methane.

It's far, far away from indicating life on Mars, but it does narrow down the hunt for the methane's source. A joint NASA/ESA mission is scheduled to head to Mars in 2018 to look for the source of the methane.

Life on Mars theory boosted by new methane study [PhysOrg]

Today PLoS Biology published a study of fruitflies, a species where the male flies show a marked preference for mating with larger females because they are more fecund. The problem is that the males show such aggressive preferences that they basically badger the females constantly to mate. What this means is that the females are so harried that they have less time to search for food, which degrades their health. Also, among fruitflies, the mating process is itself damaging to the health of the females - fruitfly sperm is toxic.

As a result, the most-desired females become far less capable of generating healthy offspring. And the smaller, less fit females wind up bearing as many offspring as the fitter ones. In the end, the males' aggressive mating with the fittest females ends up preventing their species from evolving into a much fitter group.

Tristan A. F. Long, one of the authors of the study, said:

These larger females are disproportionately harassed and harmed, by males attempting to obtain matings. When these males are ‘choosy' with their courtship, there may be negative consequences to the species' ability to adaptively evolve.

What's interesting about this study is that it's one of the few to point out how male mate choice affects evolution of a species. Usually female mate choice is emphasized, except in species where females are dominant. Here we can see clearly that male mate choice is having a profound and not very salutary affect on the future of fruitfly fitness. The issue here is obviously not attractiveness, but instead the kind of fitness associated with being larger and more fecund. If larger, "attractive" females are harrassed into reproductive uselessness by the males, then any traits they possess that make them healthier (a trait for metabolic efficiency, for instance) won't be able to spread through the population as quickly as it might if males chose mates randomly.

via PLoS Biology

A research team led by Klaus Zuberbühler of the University of St. Andrews has been studying the calls of the Campbell's monkey, a primate found in the Ivory Coast. The team looked at how the calls of adult male monkeys vary in response to various stimuli. Campbell's monkeys have six different types of individual calls, each of which has a distinct meaning. What's surprising, however, is that these monkeys actually string together multiple types of calls to create communications with entirely new meanings. Zuberbühler and his team claim this is a form of syntax, suggesting that Campbell's monkeys have developed a sort of sentence structure. Other primates, such as chimpanzees, have shown an understanding of language, able to connect words and symbols with specific meanings, but haven't been able to combine those words into sentences.

The team has identified the meanings of the individual calls, as well as how they can be combined to form completely different communications:

The "boom-boom" call invites other monkeys to come toward the male making the sound. Two booms can be combined with a series of "krak-oos," with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. "Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo" is the monkey's version of "Timber!" - it warns of falling trees.

Combining the "boom-booms" and "krak-oos" with a third sound, "hok-oo," warns monkeys of the presence of other monkey groups. It appears that initially, the monkeys developed the calls to warn each other of specific predators, such as leopards and eagles, but their anti-predator vocabulary has evolved into something much more sophisticated.

Boom! Hok! A Monkey Language Is Deciphered [NY Times]

The always excellent New Scientist has an article synthesizing much of the research into same-sex sexual behavior in animals and the possible evolutionary explanations. They spoke with University of California evolutionary biologists Marlene Zuk and Nathan Bailey, who recently published a paper examining same-sex behavior in various species. Zuk and Bailey note that same-sex sexual behavior in other animals can't necessarily be equated with sexual orientation in humans, researchers have come up with similar questions as to why certain animals have evolved to include members who expend energy on same-sex liaisons.

Evolutionary biologists have come up with various hypotheses for why same-sex behavior has evolved in various animals. In some cases, same-sex behavior has emerged as a result of specific adaptations, such as to foster social bonding, or because certain genes for same-sex attraction hold another survival benefit when only one copy is present. In some cases, though, the behavior is incidental, such as in certain fish that cannot easily tell male and female members apart.

Below, New Scientist charts several of the possible evolutionary explanations for same-sex sexual behavior in various species:

Bailey believes that exploring the evolution of sexual behavior will give us a better understanding of evolution, including the development of our own species:

"Given its persistence in species in many different animal groups, including humans, viewing it as an evolutionary force in its own right promises to provide a much richer understanding of the evolution of reproductive behaviour," Bailey says. He suggests we could make some fascinating comparisons. Might male-male copulation in species as diverse as flour beetles and dolphins have similar, even predictable, evolutionary consequences? More daringly, could understanding the evolutionary consequences of same-sex interactions in animals help us understand our own evolution?

Homosexual selection: The power of same-sex liaisons [New Scientist]

The announcement comes from researchers at Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, who carried out an assessment of carnivorous plants in honor of the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth only to discover many potential additions to the officially recognized list. Kew's Dr Mike Fay explains:

Widely recognised carnivorous plants number some 650 and we estimate that another 325 or so are probable additions – so an increase of about 50 per cent.

Amongst that 325 are species of tomatoes, ornamental tobacco plants, potatoes and a mustard plant commonly known as "shepherd's purse." They are believed to trap and eat insects by trapping their bodies until they die, decay, fall to the ground and are absorbed by the roots of the plant... which is almost as circuitous as it is creepy. But at least we now know the danger of the salad bar.

Attack of the killer tomatoes [Independent.co.uk]

Trotta's concern is mainly focused on information from the European Space Agency's Planck mission, due to be released in 2013. The amount of information - called "a feast" by New Scientist - may overwhelm cosmologists, according to Trotta, who feels that the release of the mission's findings should be rationed to be more easily understandable. Stuart Clark, writing for NS, agrees:

Instead of giving out all the data at once, the supply should be rationed. Drip-feeding will allow the development of new hypotheses which can be tested as more of the Planck information is released. If we don't adopt this approach, we risk wasting the finest cosmology data set we have ever had, and remaining forever in the dark.

We're unconvinced that this is the right approach: Surely dripfeeding information risks avoiding the creation of new hypotheses if the right combination of findings can't be made, because certain information is still classified? Doesn't releasing everything at once simply speed up progress?

Why we shouldn't release all we know about the cosmos [New Scientist]

Contradicting a 2006 study by Swedish researchers, the new report claims that, judging by the evidence, either tumors take more than a decade to appear following cell phone usage, or that there is no link:

Radio frequency electromagnetic fields emitted from mobile phones have been proposed as a risk factor for brain tumours; however, a biological mechanism that could explain the potential effect of radio frequency electromagnetic fields in the risk of brain tumours has not been identified... The lack of a detectable trend change in incidence rates up to 2003 suggests that [either] the induction period for brain tumours associated with mobile phone use exceeds five to 10 years, the increased risk of brain tumours associated with mobile phone use in this population is too small to be observed, the risk is restricted to subgroups of brain tumors or mobile phone users, or that there is no increased risk associated with mobile phone use.

Of course, this could just mean that we all have tumors waiting to appear in the future, so don't break out the celebratory minutes just yet.

No cancer risk from increased mobile phone use [Guardian.co.uk]

In this awesome movie, where the butterfly flaps around in its cage with a floating chrysalis, you can see the future of elementary school experiments. This video is one in a series produced for elementary school classes whose students are growing their own butterflies - now, they get to compare their results with the insects' space-going counterparts.

Discovery News writes: BioServe Space Technologies and the University of Colorado [work with] students on the ground to follow the progress of the orbiting creatures. The school kids can then compare the development of butterflies in the classroom with their orbiting cousins.

Butterflies In Space experiment via Discovery News

According to Plastic Pals:

The Korea Institute of Science & Technology (KIST) held an open house Technology Exhibit, where some of their latest research and development projects were showcased . . . Mahru III, a humanoid robot co-developed by KIST and Samsung, copies the movements of a human wearing a special suit which senses muscle movements.

via Plastic Pals