cafecuriosity

Nice Cup of Hot Chocolate

A confession - I am partial to the occasional cup of hot chocolate. However, I rarely spend any time at all, thinking about the journey the chocolate undertook to make its way into my cup. Echoes of a much longer and much, much older chocolate expedition caught my attention this week. Researchers announced they had discovered theobromine a chocolate marker in the shards of ceramic drinking cylinders unearthed at the Chaco Canyon settlement in New Mexico.

Across India By Frog!

What do you get when you combine an Indian and a Belgian biologist? Answer - a frog finding frenzy in the leafy forests of India's Western Ghats region! Proving that instant gratification doesn't come easy in the frog world, biologists Biju and Bossuyt spent 10 long years of field studies in the Ghat. From 2005 through to 2008, Biju and Bossuyt have added 18 new species to India's frog tally.

This month they published their discovery of 12 new frog species! In the process, they rediscovered the Travancore bullfrong (Philautus travancoricus) previously considered lost to science, having not been sighted for over 100 years. The Ghats, renowned for their biological diversity are under threat from clearing for plantations and housing.   http://www.linnean.org/index.php?id=428   Image: 1. Philautus akroparallagi, 2. New species, S. Bihu, www.frogindia.org

Frog Safe Haven Found In Columbia

While CafeCuriosity has been off exploring what triggers tourists' curiosity, an expedition to Columbia's Tacarcuna area of the Darian (a biological 'hot spot') near the Panama border has found curiosities of its own. Better known for its notoriously anti-curiosity drug cartels and endemic violence, the wild Darian region proved to harbor 10 amphibian species believed to be new to science

Froggy Wooing Wiles

Never underestimate the commitment of biologists exploring the secret life of frogs! Recently, researchers spent four months in the field working from 6 pm to 6 am, seven days a week tracking the sexual gymnastics of almost 100 frogs. The subject of their scrutiny was Bibron's toaflet (Pseudophryne bibronii), an unassuming toadlet, found along the Eastern states' forests, heathlands and grasses. It ranges from brown to black in colour and at just 30 mm long, is one of Australia's tiniest frogs. Six years of field trips has generated a lot of information about the petite frog, but the latest expedition produced a gem. Using DNA markers, the biologists discovered the female Pseudophryne bibronii were in the habit of distributing their eggs in the nests of as many as eight males - a new Australian record! While this doesn't say much for female frogs' expectations of their males' domestic skills, it does constitute a new behaviour undetected in frogs until now and represents a record for any vertebrate.  http://www.monash.edu.au/news/newsline/story/1346  Image: Male Bibron's toadlet on eggs, Monash University

Snow On Mars

After all the arguments and pontificating about whether there had ever been water on Mars, it is amusing to read the latest announcement by NASA/JPL that their Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from clouds scudding 4 kilometers above the landing site on the Martian surface. Sadly the snow evaporated before it hit the surface, ruling out robotically crafted snowmen. Adding to the water focus was news pointing to the presence of carbonates in soil samples analyzed by the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer and the wet chemistry lab aboard the Lander. Carbonates typically form in the presence of water, indicating ice deposits found previously by the Lander in the 'Snow White' trench may have melted in the past. As data continues to roll in, the debates continue and the rest of us can sit back, relax and enjoy the spell-binding images capturing the many moods of Mars.   http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-183   Image: Soil sample taken from Snow White trench by the Pheonix Mars Lander, NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University

Revealing Hidden Charms

One of the charming necessities of live as an impoverished artist is the economic imperative to recycle materials - particularly unsuccessful canvasses and boards. This poses a problem when the artist becomes eminently collectable and has spawned a new geek sport - peering behind layers of old paint for ghostly images of pictures past. Recently, one such team got lucky when they detected a woman's portrait behind Vincent van Gogh's 'Patch of Grass'. Drawing collaborators from the Delft University of Technology and the University of Antwerp, the team used synchrotron radiation induced X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a new technique that measures the fluorescence of each chemical element, allowing large areas of canvass to be mapped quickly and in great detail. Art historians suspect around 30% of van Gogh's paintings may have been painted over, so the hunt is on - for funding as much as hidden images!  http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=6383a391-d2c6-4341-bcd0-62cba4cff50b&lang=en   Image: Hidden portrait of an unknown woman behind Vincent van Gogh's Patch of Grass', Delft University of Technology

Frequency Hopping Frogs

Just when you think you know a bit about frogs, along comes China's concave-eared torrent frog Odorrana tormota to confound us! This little frog lives near noisy springs in central China. Like Felix the Cat, Odorrana tormota has a bag of tricks - if the background noise generated by rushing water drowns out the calls of prospective mates or rivals, it can modulate its ears to pick up different high frequency or ultrasonic frequencies at will, making it the only animal with this ability. Odorrana tormota does this by opening and closing its Eustachian tubes (tubes connecting the middle ear to the pharynx) varying their sensitivity to high frequency and ultrasounds. This will be quite annoying to textbook authors on frog anatomy who categorize frog Eustachian tubes as being permanently open. Using this acute hearing, male Odorrana tormota can localize sound and home in on females with an error of less than 1 percent! My wife was exultant - at last, a male that actually listens!   http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/08/0721frogears.html   Image: The concave-eared torrent frog Odorrana tormota, Albert Feng

Excitement of the Unknown

There's nothing quite like the unknown to fire our curiosity - even when it involves something as unsexy as microbial fungi! Undergrads from Yale's 'Rain Forest Expedition and Laboratory' course have mounted expeditions to Peru and Ecuador in the past two years. The results have been spectacular - the Peru expedition discovered 135 endophytes (fungal and bacterial microorganisms living inside plant tissue) some of which probably represent new genera. After six months studying this batch of specimens, one was found to have anti-oxidant properties, while another reduces inflation in human tissue and actually turns off programmed cell death. Now the science is cool (in a geeky kind of way) but what's really cool is that 15 untrained undergrads can wander into the Amazon forest and emerge clutching new species of life unknown to science (or anyone else)! It's a fabulous way to engage future generations in learning. How pumped do you think those kids are about science now?  http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=5943  Image: Yale undergraduate Sun Jin Lee with her discovery of an extract from a fungal endophyte that reduces inflammation in human tissue and programmed cell death, Yale University

Despite Our Ignorance Life Finds A Way

We humans have always been fascinated by our origins. The question, 'How did life begin?' has concentrated scientific minds long before the concept of 'scientist' had been established. The conventional scenario has early microbial life teeming in the Earth's warm shallow waters. The abyssal depths were thought too cold, too energy poor and too inhospitable to nurture life. Even when the first hydrothermal vents were discovered, they were thought to be exceptions to a rule. Now a USC geomicrobiologist has discovered there are thousands of times more bacteria living happily on the seafloor than in the overhead water. So, 'If these deep underwater basalt plains are bulging with microbes, what do they live off?' I hear you ask. It seems the microbes live off the very rocks forming the Earth's crust itself. Chemical reaction with the basalt seam (all 60,000 km of it) generates sufficient energy to overcome their carbon poor environment. It may even be that life first fired up in the calm, stable deep water before migrating towards the light. Now wouldn't that be an ironic reversal of a popular scientific theory!

Thriller writers around the globe were looking smug and saying, 'I told you so.' as news of the discovery of a new ultra-small species of bacteria (Chryseobacterium greenlandensis) that survived despite being frozen in a Greenland glacier for 120,000 years hit the news wires. These bacteria are so small they easily slide through standard microbiological filters. It is one of only 10 to have been found to date in glaciers and polar ice. 

http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/15317.html   http://live.psu.edu/story/31052   Image: 1. Microbial life ecosystem, Nicolle Rager-Fuller/National Science Foundation, 2. Scientists work with a 6m ice core section in Greenland, Mark Twickler, University of New Hampshire/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Paleoclimatology Program/department of Commerce, 3. Cutting core samples for analysis, Todd Sowers, Penn State University.

Australian Fossils Take the Stage

Diprotodon is my kind of Pleistocene megafauna. Picture a 2.5 tonne, 1.8 m tall wombat spread from the islands of Bass Straight to Far North Queensland and across to Western Australia. Conventional wisdom recognizedeight distinct species of Diprotodon which came in a bewildering range of sizes. It turns out however that male Diprotodons liked their girls big! University of Queensland researchers discovered Diprotodon females were two-thirds the size of their men folk! Moreover rather than those eight species, there were only one with the previous differences being explained simply by the size difference between the sexes!

Further south, Museum Victoria researchers found the world's oldest mother and baby. The placoderm fish fossil clearly shows the embryo attached to its mother by its umbilical cord. This discovery pushes back the date of a live birth by 200 million years. Found at the Gogo fossil site in Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley, the specimen dates back 380 million years, has exceptional detail and fittingly has been named Materpiscis attenboroughi after Sir David Attenborough who featured the Gogo fish site in his ground-breaking 'Life on Earth' series.

http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=14933   http://museumvictoria.com.au/About/MV-News/2008/Mother-fish/   Image: 1. Dr Price & Diprotodon fragments, University of Queensland, 2. Placoderm gives birth, Museum Victoria