EurekAlert! Staff Picks

My general interest in volcanoes drew me to the image of a lava field featured in this Natural Science Institute of Iceland release, but as it turns out the ecological research on display in it's associated release was just as interesting. NSII researchers studied plant life on the volcanic island of Surtsey, famous for it's relatively recent arrival from an eruption in 1963 and associated status as an untouched piece of land where biologists and ecologists could study how life spreads in real time. What the NSII ecologists found though challenges some long-held beliefs in the field with the finding that many of the plants found on the island lack the traits commonly associated with long-distance dispersal. Instead, the researchers cited birds as the primary mechanism by which plants reached the island. Study author Dr. Pawel Wasowicz quoted in the release put it best: "Life does not move in isolation - it follows life", which is certainly something to consider in an age where human activity has a very real impact on where other life goes.

I'm always interested in the intersection of science and culture, which drew me to this University of Hawai'i at Manoa release about a team of researchers that linked references in traditional Okinawan songs of the Ryukyu Islands to modern knowledge of the region's geological and climate history. And their efforts were fruitful: a collection of 18th century Ryukyuan music describes wind and wave patterns that closely match 21st century scientific records. They even found mention of a particular 18th-century volcanic eruption on an isolated island!

The researcher's interest in the topic was not just idle fascination however: all of the paper authors are actually long-time practitioners of classical Ryukyuan music themselves! I really like that concept: if there's something you're interested in and passionate about and you have the scientific know-how, there's nothing stopping you from putting it into a scientific context!

When I read this ESO release about observations of a "rogue planet" forming 620 million light years from us, I'm remind that among the many reasons I'm not cut out to be an astronomer is the sheer existential intimidation of it. Figures like "six billions tons per second" and "5-10 times the mass of Jupiter" are so unfathomably beyond our terrestrial scale of reference but when you put your eye to space they're just another data point. I don't know how I'd be able to deal with those constant reminders of just how incredibly small a place in the universe we occupy.

This story itself is also fascinating. The word "planet" probably brings to mind for most an image of our solar system planets making their collective run around the sun, but there's nothing in the definition that requires that sort of order. Some in fact are so chaotic and enormous that they could actually be mistaken for stars from the right angle!

It's been pretty common through most of my life for news about the rainforests to trend negative: threats from climate change, deforestation, that sort of thing. This release caught my eye then with the surprising finding that despite the ongoing threats to their overall livelihood...the average tree size in the Amazon forest has actually increased. And according to the researchers, the cause is actually the rising CO2 levels associated with the changing climate! Interesting and unexpectedly positive knock-on effect, though the researchers also note how impossible it would be to re-plant those massive and ancient trees in the event that are ever removed so we're not off the hook yet.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this release about a possible new hybrid species produced from the pairing of a blue and green jay. First, it's an example of an evolutionary process happening on a time scale we can actually see, with the two component species only coming into contact after 1950s. Even if we can only see the full process of evolution through collected evidence stretching back millions of years, it's cool to see a little sliver of the sort of occurrence that when repeated enough and for long enough constitutes the process of evolution. The researchers also explicitly indicate climate change as what moved the two populations closer together, so that adds some illustrative context into how our actions fit in to that process.

Beyond all that, the actual story of how the species was found demonstrates how much in science still comes down to luck and the right timing. The researcher saw a post online in a birdwatching group and worked with the poster to find and catalogue the bird. In his words from the release: "If it had gone two houses down, probably it would have never been reported anywhere.”

I mentioned in a previous edition of this newsletter that orangutans were my favorite of the great apes. My favorite sea animal meanwhile is the octopus. Guess I have a weakness for surprisingly intelligent but often-overlooked species.

That intelligence is very much on display in this release from Florida Atlantic University which covers the efforts of FAU marine biologists and their colleagues at Marine Biological Laboratory to detail the complex arm movements of octopuses (I prefer "octopi" but apparently that's not the technically correct term). And they were certainly thorough: 4000 arms movements and 7000 individual arm deformations across 25 different video recordings in different environments gives an exhaustive categorization of just how these fascinating creatures interact with their world.

I always love seeing research where scientists are attempting to replicate a particular natural feature or behavior through the lens of our technology. It impresses on me not just the ingenuity of the researchers and how far our tech has come but also the incredible designs of nature that are often so difficult to replicate in the first place. In this case it was an international team including New York University robotics researchers that worked to capture the "swarming" behavior of fish, birds and other tight-knit biological communities, taking inspiration from physics with the positive/negative charges of electrons matching the "positive" and "negative" charges of a robot swarm. We're still a long way from a 1 to 1 reproduction swarming in our robots, but in a time when "humanoid" robots are getting more attention it's interesting to see how researchers are approaching an entirely different type of robotic intelligence.

I absolutely love orangutans, easily my favorite of the great ape family. Very cool then to see a window into how their brains work in this University of Warwick release on a Nature Communications Biology paper. It can be easy to think of even relatively intelligent animals like apes as creatures of pure instinct, just doing whatever their biological programming commands, but as you can see in this release: orangutans learn and teach! They're not born with the skills that make them such fascinating creatures, they have families and different peer networks that they "graduate" to as their skills develop. Not all that different from how we learn things in the end.

I come from a family with a strong history of diabetes, so news about research on it tends to catch my eye more than most other medical news. When we think of the brain's relationship to diabetes, it tends to be in a more "abstract" sense, things like the willpower to avoid unhealthy foods or sugar addictions. Studies like these though highlight that the brain's role in diabetes isn't just in how it manifests in our behavior but in a real physical process with a role in managing our glucose levels. In a time when diabetes seems so much easier to manage compared to when I was a kid, I hope that studies like these continue to sharpen our understanding of how diabetes operates.

I'm fascinated with this Nagoya University release on a Science study where the mating behaviors of one species of fruit fly were transferred to another through editing just a single gene. Granted fruit flies are significantly less complex than humans, but it's still so interesting to me that we can "undo" 30-35 million years of evolutionary behavior through one experiment. Also an interesting companion to my pick from a couple weeks ago: a few million years after those diet changes and we're successful enough to make changes of our own to evolutionary behavior.

Interstellar is one of my favorite movies, and I include the ending sequence with the black hole in that despite it pushing the bounds of scientific accuracy a bit. That love draws me to a release like this on a iScience paper where a physicist looks at the prospect of sending a spacecraft into a black hole and says "yeah that could be possible with the right technology". That's the sort of mindset that makes astrophysics and space exploration so fascinating to me, the sheer scale of it all making that future focus almost a necessity even if it looks like science fiction.

One of the things I find interesting about evolutionary science is that evolution is not a perfect process, for example leaving behind obsolete traits like our tailbone for tails we no longer have. This study published in Science and reported by Dartmouth College shows a cool example of evolution moving in a different direction: some of our early ancestors "adapted" to their environment before the relevant traits had actually evolved, and evolution only caught up hundreds of thousands of years later! I find that a really fascinating example of how behavior, environment and physical changes all intersect in ways you might not necessarily expect.

I was happy to read this University of Florida release about a paper studying the impact of the citizen-science app iNaturalist on species research from all around the world. We've been collectively reckoning in recent years with the negative effects of social media and other "connective" technologies, so it's nice to see a clear example of a decentralized app having a positive impact.

Even during the height of the COVID pandemic when I'd always wear a mask outside the house, I can't deny that they were uncomfortable in some circumstances. I appreciate research, like this study from Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, that recognizes this possible impediment to mask usage and focuses not just on increasing their virus-blocking efficiency but also their comfort for the wearer. Hopefully research like this will make the future pandemics (*knocks wood*) just a little more bearable.

I love it when developments in different technologies (in this case robotics and 3D printing) intersect to allow scientists to create something they may not have considered before. "Electronics-free robots" might be a phrase that wouldn't make any sense to researchers from a few decades ago, but as described in this release, UC San Diego roboticists made it real with $20 worth of off-the-shelf 3D printing materials.

Mantis shrimp are just so cool! I love the idea that something so small can have such an incredibly complex biology. I also appreciate the potential applicability to human technology like blast shields and sound filtering in this study. This study really hammers (punches?) home the idea that while we humans have done pretty well for ourselves, it's hard for us to outdo nature.