the-BA : Science News Digest

This fly is deceased (photo courtesy of istockphoto.com)

In the science news this week: Scientists get a new view on space, Australian cane toads are stopped in their destructive tracks, and a robot may one day help paralysed people to walk again. Plus, how cows might point us in the right direction...

But first, a study on the escape behaviour of fruit flies, carried out by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), may explain why flies are so hard to swat.

It seems that in split seconds the flies could use visual information to plan an escape route directly away from the looming threat.
The researchers used high-speed videography to film a series of experiments with fruit flies and a swatter. They discovered that within approximately 200 milliseconds the flies can spot a potential threat and then make a series of postural adjustments to determine their escape path.

The fruit fly integrates visual information from its eyes, identifying the threat, with motor systems in its legs, allowing it to position legs and body optimally, jumping away to evade a direct hit.

Reported in the Independent, Professor Dickinson, who led the research, gave advice about the perfect swat. 'It is best not to swat the fly's starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter.'

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People who are paralysed from the waist down have, until now, been limited to moving with the aid of a wheelchair only, limiting their access and freedom to participate in daily activities such as shopping, moving about a house, and even simple things like conversation, being out of eye-line with others.

BBC online has reported that engineers have been working on a robotic suit called ReWalk, which consists of a backpack device and braces that fit the legs. The wearer just has to move their centre of gravity forward to activate the movement of the leg braces, and crutches are used to support the user as they walk.

The man behind the design, himself paralysed, is Amit Goffer. He is delighted the device is now going through clinical trials in Tel Aviv, and patients' reaction to its use in testing has been positive. The benefits are not just limited to access and the chance to walk. They allow patients to move more muscles and participate in life where walking is a common assumption. It is hoped that if the device passes clinical trials, paralysed people across the world will experience a better quality of life.

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A new NASA telescope has given scientists their first glimpse of the universe in gamma rays.

The new Fermi Telescope, formerly known as the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), was launched in June. The first information sent back after two months of calibration and testing are giving scientists a lot to talk about, the BBC reports online.

The telescope has been set to look for some of the most interesting and violent space phenomena such as black holes and cosmic explosions. These produce a large amount of gamma radiation which can be detected by this telescope, helping to pinpoint things that might be obscured when looking into space with other instruments such as Hubble.

There are two main instruments on the telescope. The Large Area Telescope (LAT) looks around the whole sky every three hours. It has produced a full gamma-ray map of the sky in 95 hours, something that had previously taken years of data analysis to achieve. The GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM) looks specifically for gamma-ray bursts, as the name suggests. These bursts are created when stars die or when neutron stars (the heaviest star around apart from a black hole) merge together.

Space scientists are looking forward to more stunning results during the craft’s lifespan.

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Palaeontologists in Morella, eastern Spain, have found remains of a 120 million year old dinosaur. It is thought that the dinosaur could be a new species of sauropod dinosaur.

Jose Miguel Gasulla, one of the leaders of the dig, explained in the Independent that all the bones are in their original skeletal shape, making this a very exciting find.

Remains uncovered so far are relatively intact and have revealed an adult dinosaur from the early crustaceous period. The dinosaur will have been up to 25m long and weighed up to 40 tonnes.

Palaeontologists are now trying to establish whether they have discovered a new species linked to the Brachiosaurus, or if it is directly related to others already discovered.

The massive bones are now being extracted one by one as they are uncovered. This has proved to be very delicate work due to fragile nature of the bones, which are filled with air pockets to make them lighter. Mr Gasulla explains that the air hols have developed within the bones to make carrying round a 6-8m long neck a little easier.

The Maestrazgo region where the dinosaur was found is rich in dinosaur remains and authorities have now funded a dinosaur museum, which is due to open shortly.

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The BBC reports that the cooler and drier southern areas of Australia may avoid the relentless invasion of the cane toad.

The cane toad, Bufo marinus, was introduced to Australia in 1935 as a means to control beetle populations that were damaging sugar cane crops. Since their introduction the poisonous amphibian’s population has grown explosively and invaded large cities and world heritage areas. The species is now posing a threat to native wildlife by eating small animals and poisoning larger predators that try and eat them.

The recent study, carried out by Australian scientists and reported by the BBC, has shown that toads could only hop at 0.3km per hour at 15˚C but could hop at 2km per hour at 30˚C. This may save cooler areas, such as Melbourne, from invasion of the cane toads.

Previous studies had suggested that the toads would eventually invade Melbourne but so far the toads have been unable to reach these areas.

The Australian research team used their own computer software to determine the current climatic conditions and how the cane toad will move around Australia. They also predicted the effects that any future global warming may have. The study has shown that toads will struggle to move around, forage and spawn in cooler areas, and will suffer from dehydration further inland.

This kind of study has proved useful in predictions of cane toad population and movements and will now be used to predict the effect of climate on other populations such as butterflies.

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As you take a country walk or speed along on the train, you may have noticed a remarkable phenomenon in Britain’s fields – groups of cattle tend to point in the same direction.

Country folk have long debated the reason, but scientists at Germany’s University of Duisburg-Essen have shown that the beasts’ orientation may be influenced by the Earth’s magnetic field.

Studying more than 8,500 Google Earth images of cattle in 300 pastures around the world, researchers have shown that animals tended to point north or south.

The Earth has a magnetic field because of electrical currents generated in its molten iron core. In a way, it is rather like a bar magnet, with a magnetic north and south positioned near the geographical poles.

Other animals, including bats, birds and fish, are thought to use their sense of the planet’s magnetic field to help them migrate over long distances. This is the first research into domestic animals, whose group orientation had previously been thought to be a result of weather factors such as wind direction or sunshine.

Interestingly, the direction of the animals is altered closer to the equator. As Dr Sabine Begall told BA Media Fellow Jenny Carpenter at the BBC, 'In Africa and South America, the cattle [were] shifted slightly to a more north-eastern-south-western direction. But it is known that the Earth's magnetic field is much weaker there.'

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Exciting news from scientists in Oregon, USA, this week whose research has opened up the possibility of gene therapy for some types of hearing loss.

Hair cells are named for the tufty projections at their surfaces that detect and amplify sound vibrations in the fluid of the inner ear. Damage to these cells occurs with age, disease, and excessive loud noise, leading to hearing loss.

The hair cells cannot be replaced by the body under normal circumstances, but research carried out on mice without hearing loss shows that transferring a particular gene can trigger the growth of new hair cells. At this stage, however, scientists are hesitant to discuss how the treatment could be developed in humans. 'This is just the first step,' said John Brigande of the Oregon Health and Science University, reported in the Independent. 'We need to learn if we can restore hearing in deaf mice by gene transfer.'

In the Telegraph, Dr Mark Downs, the director of the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), gave the research a cautious welcome. 'Together with the very positive early signs from other potential treatments, such as stem cell therapies, it is no longer just a pipe-dream to talk about cell and drug based solutions to restore hearing,' said Dr Downs. 'There is a long way to go, but the journey towards new treatments is certainly under way.'

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Finally, next month’s switch-on of the biggest experiment in history has sparked a curiously popular piece of music.

The Large Hadron Collider, part of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, will be fired up in September. The experiment is expected to tell us about particles never detected before and perhaps about the moments just after the start of our universe.

Excitement is growing among scientists and in the media, but demand for a rap about the experiment, available on video download site YouTube, has been unprecedented. The video, which features former CERN press office intern Kate McAlpine, has been viewed nearly 450,000 times.

As CERN spokesman James Gillies told the Telegraph, workers at CERN 'love the rap. The science is spot on, and all the feedback that's come to me from physicists is positive. I think that Kate is a little bowled over.'

McAlpine’s next lyrical effort is hotly anticipated, although whether her less critically-acclaimed backing dancers will contribute their talents to another video is uncertain.