the-BA : Science News Digest

Octopuses - do they have a favourite tentacle? (Image copyright: istockphoto.com)

In the science news this week: a bleak outlook for coral reefs, a method for determining the plumage colour of birds around at the time of dinosaurs and how bright bugs could lead the way to new drugs. Plus, a Rubik’s Cube challenge for octopuses...

Rapid deterioration of coral reefs over the past 10 years has left a third of the world’s coral species facing extinction, an international study has revealed.

Global warming, pollution and over-fishing are believed to have caused this grim outlook, and if coral reefs continue to deteriorate then the 25 per cent of marine species that depend on them will also be threatened, not to mention the estimated 200 million people that rely on coral reefs for food or income.

Not only is the scale of the problem causing concern amongst scientists but also its speed of deterioration. In the new study, 231 of the 704 reef-building corals studied were classified as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. However, only 13 of these would have been classified as any of the above before 1998. This indicates a twentyfold increase in the threat to coral reefs over the past 10 years.

Scientists are worried that the coral reefs’ deterioration will match the mass extinction, known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, that wiped out almost half of the coral reefs 65 million years ago.
(Read more in the Independent)
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A new, extremely sensitive analysis of rocks brought back from the Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 missions to the moon in the 1970s has revealed the presence of much higher levels of water than expected. The results, published in the journal Nature, increase the possibility that water deposits could be found on the moon.

The findings were a surprise because it is thought that the moon formed when a mars-sized planet collided with the infant Earth. Huge amounts of molten rock would have been thrown up by the impact, resulting in the formation of the moon, and volatile substances such as water would have been lost into space in the process.

‘Most people believed that the moon was dry,’ one of the researchers, Alberto Saal from Brown University in Rhode Island, told the Guardian. ‘People had tried to measure for 40 years and couldn’t see any evidence for water... they were not convinced we were doing something worthwhile.’

The team analysed the chemical composition of tiny grains of volcanic glass in the rocks, polishing them to get progressively closer to the centre. Crucially, the concentration of water was highest in the centre and decreased towards the outside – proving that the water was in the original rocks and not caused by contamination by return of the rocks to Earth.
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Scientists believe they could reconstruct the coloured plumage of long extinct birds, after they were able to interpret the colour patterns seen in 100-million-year-old fossil feathers, reported BBC News. Until now, fossil experts have had to guess at the range of hues used by ancient birds and some dinosaurs.

A team from Yale University analysed fossil feathers that displayed striking dark and clear bands, and compared them to those from modern birds. Microscopic analysis of the dark bands showed thousands of tiny, densely-packed flattened spheres. These had previously been interpreted as fossilised bacteria. However, the modern feathers were shown to have a similar granular structure that was caused by melanosomes, a particular cell that clusters into the dark areas of modern birds. The researchers concluded the ancient feathers consisted of black and white stripes.

Other studies of modern birds have shown that other colours are marked by distinct arrangements of melanosomes, leading the team from Yale to predict that they could also identify brown, red, buff and even iridescent colours from fossils.
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The Independent reported on how scientists are shining a light on the wonders of birdsong. A study has shown that the vocal muscles of a European starling can contract a hundred times faster than the blink of a human eye.

‘We discovered that the European starling – found throughout Eurasia and North America – and the zebra finch found in Australia and Indonesia, control their songs with the fastest-contracting muscle type yet described,’ said Coen Elemans, a biologist at the University of Utah. Scientists believe that these superfast muscles give the starling an extraordinary control over its voice, with the ability to turn individual elements of a song on and off at a rate of 250 times a second.

Similar superfast muscles have previously been found in the sound-producing organs of rattlesnakes, several fish and a dove, and their discovery in starlings has added weight to the belief that they are not as rare as previously thought.
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A new method of capturing the sun’s energy could increase the power produced by solar panels tenfold. The technique involves coating glass with a specific mixture of transparent dyes and could enable glass building to be converted into large energy plants.

A team of scientists from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have shown that when sunlight hits the treated glass, it is absorbed by the dyes and then transferred to the edge of the glass where it is captured by solar cells.

The idea has been around since the 1970s but was abandoned because too much light energy was lost as the sunlight travelled through the glass. However, using their expertise in optical techniques and their specific mixture of dyes, the team at MIT have managed to significantly reduce the amount of light energy lost.

Professor Marc Baldo, one of the team’s researchers, believes the main benefit of the technique is its cost, as solar cells only need to be placed along the edges of the glass: ‘For the same area of solar cells, you get much more electricity.’

Not only is the process simple to manufacture, by coating glass with a thin layer of the dyes, but it could also be used to convert windows in to energy plants. ‘The coated glass would let through about 10 per cent of the Sun to light up the room, and the remainder would be captured and funnelled to the edges to solar cells to generate electricity,’ said Professor Baldo. The team believe that the technology could be in production within three years.
(Read more at BBC News)
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The Times reported that mice have been used to produce human sperm for the first time, giving a novel new hope for infertile men.

The discovery means that men who are unable to produce sperm of their own may, one day, be able to use another animal as a surrogate sperm producer. However, the research by scientists at the Roger Abdelmassih clinic and research centre in Sao Paolo could prove to be extremely controversial, as it introduces a separate species into the process of human reproduction.

The process involves extracting stem cells from the tooth of a male donor and then injecting them into the testes of mice. Researchers found that these stem cells then ‘differentiated’ into cells that were producing sperm. The sperm could then be used to fertilise a donated egg and finally transplant into a prospective mother.
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Other news in brief:

Obesity and complications caused by it are known to have an adverse effect on female fertility. Now, two new British studies have revealed that they could also be reducing male fertility. Men carrying excess weight were found to be significantly more likely than those of a healthy weight to produce abnormal sperm or low volumes of semen, while genetically damaged sperm was more likely in those with diabetes.
(The Times)
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Many drugs affect more than one target in the body and cause side effects as a result of this. While these are often unwanted, they can hint at potential new uses. Now, a systematic analysis of drug side effects has been used to find out whether shared side effects might be a useful predictor of shared molecular targets among chemically dissimilar drugs. And the results look promising.

’With some more tests and refinement our method could in future be applied on a bigger scale,’ said Dr Peer Bork from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. ‘New drugs could routinely be checked in the computer for additional hidden targets and potential use in different therapeutic areas. This will save a lot of money and would speed up drug development tremendously.’
(The Telegraph)
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’A quick screen for insects with warning coloration on tropical plants may increase the efficiency of the search for compounds active against cancer and tropical parasitic disease by four-fold,’ according to Todd Capson of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama City.

He and Julie Henson, who was a student at McGill University when she carried out the work, found that beetles and caterpillars with bright warning colouration were significantly more common on plants known to have activity against a range of cancers and parasites carrying malaria, leishmaniasis and Chagas’ disease. In comparison, there was no significant difference in the numbers of plain-coloured insects feeding on plants with or without activity.
(The Telegraph)
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And finally…

Octopuses at 23 Sea Life Centres across Britain and Europe will be each be given a Rubik’s Cube and other food and toys to play with in the hope of determining whether they have a favourite tentacle for picking things up with – in the same way that humans are left or right-handed.

Marine biologists admit that there is little hope that any of the 25 participating sea molluscs will be able to solve the tricky puzzle, although they are known to have a capacity for learning – a five-month-old octopus at a German zoo in 2003 learnt how to open jars of shrimps by copying staff.

Claire Little, a marine expert at the Weymouth Sea Life Centre told the Independent: ‘Uniquely, octopuses have more than half their nerves in their arms and have been shown to partially think with their arms. Many animals have been shown to favour a certain arm so we will see if octopuses can be added to that list.’

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