Check out this deft rap about life on other planets by Jonathan Chase, a.k.a. Oort Kuiper (yes, that Oort and that Kuiper). The delivery is subdued and literate, like Massive Attack-era Tricky, and the video incorporates clips from Cosmos, the classic PBS series narrated by Carl Sagan. Bonus points for cribbing footage from SETI and working in a cameo by Gregor Mendel.

The bar on science rap has been raised. Once a novelty act confined to late-night grad-school potlucks, where just finding something to rhyme with “plate tectonics” was a triumph; now you get spot-on lyrics backed by leaping basslines and 1950s samples.

Other recent triumphs of the genre include the cogent Large Hadron Rap (405,000 hits in less than a month) and the salt-soaked Cruise, Cruise Baby. Say what you want about the LHR’s backup dancers (I was under the impression that experimental physics required nanosecond-accurate timing) - but I learned more about the setup, mechanics, and ambition of the Large Hadron Collider from this rap than from everything I’ve read on the subject previously put together.

Hat tip: Knight Science Journalism Tracker [though Tracker, please note that's a British accent]

I spent last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology meetings at Cornell University.

Behavioral ecology, the study of what animals do and how it affects their lives, can be delightfully arcane. One research team designed a robot stickleback in order to learn how many fish it takes to persuade a school to change direction. (Early results suggest the answer is two.)

Another team found that African honeybee workers surreptitiously raise their own eggs rather than those of their queen overlords, in effect staging a bloodless coup.

Mitchell Baker, of Queens College, New York, had some amazing insights into pesticide resistance studying the formidable Colorado potato beetle. “If you leave them alone,” he said, “they will eat a field down to brown sticks.”

A pesticide, like an antibiotic, is supposed to kill any pest that’s not resistant to it. But when survivors get together to breed, one thing they all have to bequeath to their young is pesticide resistance. “Potato beetles can evolve resistance to anything you can throw at them, usually within three generations,” Baker said.

Resistance can have a downside for the beetle, though. It comes with a grab bag of handicaps. Through novel experiments at agricultural fields, Baker discovered that pesticide-resistant beetles hatch later, move more slowly, have compromised immune systems, mate less successfully, raise fewer young, die off during the winter at greater rates, and get cannibalized by their nestmates more often than non-resistant beetles.

Apparently, the genes that make a beetle resistant have such debilitating side-effects that it takes the application of deadly pesticides just for them to survive the competition. Baker’s research could point to ways to postpone widespread resistance by taking advantage of those weaknesses.

It’s tempting to view the world as a collection of species perfectly adapted to living together. But what I find fascinating about evolution are the compromises that constantly play out on any species’ scrap heap of talents. For potato beetles, pesticides are pulling resistance to the top of the pile. But change what’s killing them-a different pesticide, perhaps, or maybe hotter summers-and resistance will fall to the wayside in favor of something equally vital for the moment.

(Image: Colorado potato beetle; Scott Bauer/USDA/Wikipedia)

Don’t worry, that’s not a giant bug on the first tomato of summer. It’s a tiny bug on a chile pepper about the size of a caper. But don’t let its size fool you: that’s one of the hottest peppers out there, the chile piquin, which grows wild in Bolivia.

I remember sampling a few of these chiles at a dinner party in Missoula, Montana, some years ago. Scientists describe the taste as “pungent,” which is kind of like calling a bad pinot noir “cheeky” or Henry VIII “irritable.” My recollection goes more like this: a whiff of ozone, a grass fire ripping across my tongue, and then the lingering sensation of pavement that has just been peeled out on by a 17-year-old in his parents’ car.

This week, the host of that party - Joshua Tewksbury, now an assistant professor at the University of Washington - announced a breakthrough in understanding why chiles get so hot. Turns out it has little to do with punishing the taste buds of mammals; nor science’s next best guess, which involved singling out birds to carry the seeds to useful places.

Instead, the chemical warfare seems to be directed at a fungus, called Fusarium, that’s deadly to chile seeds. Spores get into the chiles through holes made by bugs as they feed. (Look closely, and you can see this bug’s straw-like beak plunged between its two front legs and into the chile’s skin.)

Like good scientists, Tewksbury and his research team went to great lengths to test their idea. They sampled wild chiles across 600 square miles of Bolivia. Chiles with more bug-beak holes contained more the spicy chemical capsaicin - and were infected with fungus less often. To clinch the deal, the researchers built imitation chiles and loaded them with differing amounts of capsaicin. Like the real thing, hot fakes were much more resistant to fungal infection.

So chile plants turn up the heat depending on the risk they face from fungi. Could something similar be at work in the evolution of culinary marvels like the four-star panang curry I had for lunch? Did humans start eating fiery foods, back in the days before refrigeration, as a kind of insurance?

(Image: University of Washington)

This week I’m blogging from a meeting of 1,000 ornithologists in Portland, Oregon.

At a symposium entitled “Avian CSI” I heard about sophisticated ways that biologists learn intimate details about birds from tiny pieces of recovered evidence. A team of Smithsonian scientists is especially good at identifying bird remains - even mere specks exhumed from the guts of a giant snake.

It turns out that Everglades National Park has a growing demand for experts in snake-meal identification. Wild Burmese pythons, most likely released by fed-up pet owners, have graduated from amusing 10-o’clock-news material into a growing, self-sustaining, and hungry population. Park officials have now captured and killed more than 600 of the snakes. Some contained a full complement of eggs ready for laying.

A host of remarkable birds call the Everglades home, including stunners like the roseate spoonbill, scarlet ibis, reddish egret, and the endangered wood stork and threatened limpkin. And necropsies of captured pythons have turned up plenty of feathers covered in fragrant python digestive slurry. But park officials had no idea which birds they came from. So they turned to Carla Dove and the “feather lab” at the National Museum of Natural History.

To clinch her IDs, Dove uses deceptively low-tech methods that hinge on experience and close observation. There are so many sources of DNA in a python’s stomach that genetic analyses are complicated. Instead, Dove painstakingly cleans feathers and bones, using a fume hood to suck out the most offensive of the smells. Sometimes, she said, she runs down the hall to dry her feathers with the hand dryer in the women’s bathroom.

She puts cleaned feathers under a microscope to analyze their microscopic structure, which differs reliably among different groups of birds. (Here, the distinctive barbules of a common backyard mourning dove.) Dove uses traditional light microscopes instead of electron microscopes because she needs to see into the sample, not just the surface. The final step is to compare python meals with the reference specimens in the Museum’s enormous collection.

So far, the team has identified some 29 species from the bowels of Everglades pythons. Victims include everything from the meatball-sized house wren to the 4-foot tall great blue heron. Rails, coots, and gallinules - slender birds of the marshes - are most frequently eaten, but at least one limpkin and one wood stork have vanished down python throats. One meal even included a magnificent frigatebird, a tropical seabird with a seven-foot wingspan whose closest roosting site is 10 miles away.

The work is fascinating, but Dove says she hopes people think twice before releasing the python they’ve grown tired of into the Everglades. Even so, she says, the population may already be too well established to bring back under control. But the work does point out the way museum collections can yield unexpected dividends.

“A hundred and fifty years ago, when people started this collection,” Dove said, “They could not have imagined the uses we would put these specimens to” - including identifying birds involved in airplane strikes as well as ancient DNA studies. “But they’re crucial to the work we do today. It’s a reminder that we need to continue these collections for purposes we may not have dreamed of yet.”

(Image: Burmese python by Roy Wood, National Park Service; mourning dove feather courtesy Carla Dove)

It often seems that good news about primates—and especially gorillas—is hard to come by. Last year, we reported the sad story of the endangered mountain gorillas of Congo’s Virunga National Park (Guerillas in their Midst), where several of the animals had been massacred. Later, rebel forces overtook the park, and even now much of the park, and the gorillas, remain off limits to the park’s rangers.

This week’s good news should put a smile on anyone’s face, though: a census of western lowland gorillas in Congo, released yesterday at the International Primatological Society Congress, found more than 125,000 in the northern part of the country, or what Steven Sanderson, the president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, calls “the mother lode of gorillas.”

Western lowland gorillas are found in seven central African nations, and estimates from the 1980s had numbered them at fewer than 100,000. With gorillas being lost to hunting, habitat destruction and the spread of Ebola, scientists had thought they would find that the population had been halved. Instead, they found population densities as high as 21 gorillas per square mile, some of the highest ever recorded.

What was the secret of Congo’s success? The researchers cite the remoteness of some of the gorillas’ homes—such as the 6,000 who live in an isolated raffia swamp—a habitat full of food, and Congo’s management of protected areas. Not all of the gorillas live in protected areas, though, and the government of Congo is currently considering protecting more of them with the creation of a new national park.

But the primate conference also brings us bad news. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, the organization responsible for the Red List of Threatened Species, released a comprehensive review of 634 primate species and subspecies and found that nearly half are in danger of extinction (defined as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered). The situation is worst in Asia, where more than 70 percent of primates are threatened. The IUCN cites habitat destruction as the major threat, with others including hunting of the animals for food and the illegal wildlife trade.

The mountain gorillas might have been a sorely needed bright spot in this report. Researchers had been considering reclassifying them to endangered from critically endangered. However, they had to delay those plans due to the gorilla killings and ongoing violence in the region.

(Image: Kigali, a western lowland gorilla at the National Zoo. Credit: Jessie Cohen, National Zoological Park.)

H. Tracy Hall was the first guy to turn carbon into diamonds. He died last week at age 88.

The L.A. Times has the best obituary of Hall that I’ve seen. I got a kick out of all the tinkering he had to do before he hit on the right contraption for cooking up diamonds:

“Hall had built a pressure chamber that he called the “half-belt” that had been used to create high pressures in a 35-year-old Watson-Stillman press that leaked so much water from its hydraulics that he had to wear rubber boots while working with it.”

On December 16, 1954, he succeeded:

“My hands began to tremble; my heart beat rapidly; my knees weakened and no longer gave support. My eyes had caught the flashing light from dozens of tiny . . . crystals.”

Fifty years later, it’s still a thrill to create a diamond, a thrill we tried to capture in a story in the June issue of Smithsonian magazine.

One of the barriers to publishing a story about diamond growers is that almost everyone involved is touchy about secrecy. Private companies want to protect their supersecret recipes–some combination of temperature, pressure and vaporized carbon–from competitors, and nobody knows how far the natural diamond powers will go to protect their market.

Hall had his share of secrecy worries as well. He had been working for General Electric, but they didn’t support his early diamond experiments and gave him a measly $10 savings bond when he succeeded:

“Disheartened by the lack of credit, he began looking for another job, landing at Brigham Young University in Provo, where he planned to do high-pressure research. But the federal government had slapped a secret label on the apparatus, which effectively prevented Hall from using it.

“His solution was to invent another apparatus, called the tetrahedral press, that was even better and that circumvented all the patents held by GE. He published his research in a widely read journal, but shortly thereafter, the government slapped a secret label on that device as well.”

The official “shush” didn’t last long, though, and Hall started his own company and kept making diamonds.

His successors have started selling gem-quality diamonds in the past few years, and the natural diamond industry has responded by claiming that their diamonds are different.* As a DeBeers spokesperson told our author: “When people want to celebrate a unique relationship they want a unique diamond, not a three-day-old factory-made stone.”

But H. Tracy Hall knew, with the clarity of a chemist, that diamonds are diamonds, and diamonds are carbon.

*For more on diamond marketing, see this fun critique of the cult of the diamond engagement ring

–Laura Helmuth

Filed under “Hang on a sec”: a new scientific paper has called into question one of the most exciting paleontological finds of the 21st century. Soft tissue discovered deep inside a Tyrannosaurus rex legbone may be a recent “biofilm” (what you might call scunge if you found it on a dishrag), not remnants of the Toothy One after all. That’s the suggestion of a team led by Thomas Kaye, writing in the scientific journal PLOS One.

Avid Smithsoniacs and dino fans may remember bits and pieces of this story. In 2005, paleontologists Mary Schweitzer and Jack Horner were stuffing a T. rex femur inside a too-small helicopter on their way home. They cracked the bone in half to make it fit, and Schweitzer noticed a goopy residue on the 65-million-year-old insides of the bone (see the Smithsonian story). Then this April, Schweitzer and her colleagues isolated a protein called collagen from the sample, analyzed it, and found striking similarities to the collagen of modern birds.

Kaye’s contradictory opinion comes from using an electron microscope to peer at similar residues he found in different fossils. Studying fossils of 17 dinosaur and mammal species, Kaye and his team saw evidence of biofilms, or slime left behind by bacteria that grew on the bone long after the dinosaur’s death.

Where Schweitzer’s group described the remains of red blood cells, Kaye’s team thought they were seeing iron-rich structures routinely built by bacteria. (The iron content and the structures’ characteristic shape might have made them look like red blood cells in some analyses, Kaye suggested.) Kaye found these structures time and again in his samples - even in a fossilized shell, which never would have contained blood at all. Worst of all, carbon dating suggested the biofilm was as recent as 1960.

Of course, there’s still the matter of the collagen’s similarity to chickens and ostriches - a detail Schweitzer was quick to point out to reporters. And Kaye didn’t sample the T. rex in question, leaving open the chance that Schweitzer’s find was the genuine article.

Personally, I’m leaning toward believing in the extraordinary. At least until the collagen results are explained (I mean, can anyone tell me if bacteria even make collagen?) Either way, it’s fascinating to listen to the well-constructed arguments on both sides. That’s what science is all about.

In a happy turn of events for the quake-stricken Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, three pandas gave birth to four babies over the weekend. The center’s future had looked anything but bright after the devastating earthquake in May, which toppled 14 panda houses, killed one panda, and killed or injured 100 people in the area. But all the emergency panda rations and psychological counseling seem to have paid off.

Though panda babies perennially rank among the cutest of all living things, glimpses on this Chinese news video suggests they do have an ugly-duckling stage. At one day of age, the pink squirmers bear an uncanny resemblance to naked mole rats. That said, it is heartwarming to watch a momma panda clasp one in its mouth and nestle the little nipper against her belly for a meal.

The three adults became mothers within 14 hours of each other: first, with twins, was 9-year-old Qiyuan (her name translates as Magic Luck), then 8-year-old Chenggong (Success), and 8-year-old Zhuzhu (Pearl), according to MSNBC. Pandas can live 30 years or more.

Giant pandas, which in the wild number only about 1,600, are notoriously difficult to breed. For years on end, researchers beat their heads against the wall at the sight of male pandas contentedly munching bamboo mere feet from an unattached female roommate.

Happily, recent advances, including the discovery that female pandas ovulate as infrequently as a few days every two or three years, have helped researchers boost panda birth rates in captivity - lending some hope that pandas will still be around to serve as mascots the next time the Olympics come to China.

(Image: China Daily)

p.s. In case you can’t wait for these newborns to grow out of the awkward stage, YouTube has plenty of archived cuteness.

Famed paleontologist Jack Horner is out in the dusty badlands of eastern Montana, aiming his chisel at ancient bone fragments that may once have belonged to a Triceratops. He’s working in 100-degree heat at the aptly named Hell Creek Formation, a chunk of bedrock that’s between 67 million and 65 million years old. And since the dinosaurs vanished in a puff of meteoric mayhem 65 million years ago, that means these are some of the last dinosaurs ever to live.***

Last year at this site, he and his team uncovered two Triceratops, one big adult and a younger, smaller one. In other years, they’ve found duck-billed dinosaurs (”hadrosaurs”) as well as the big kahuna, Tyrannosaurus. As someone who has looked for but never found a fossil larger than my thumbnail, I can’t imagine the feeling of brushing the rock chips off a giant, three-horned skull the size of an armchair.

Horner, a paleontologist at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, is perhaps most widely known as the inspiration for the velociraptor-battling Dr. Alan Grant from Jurassic Park.

Yesterday, Horner took a break from digging to make a video call over to the British Natural History Museum. On the other end of the line was the museum’s own paleontologist, Angela Milner and a crowd of curious museum visitors. The whole event went out live on the Internet (watch the archive here).

In case the webcast doesn’t quite fill up your curiosity, you can move on to the Smithsonian’s own animated Triceratops website, play a fossil-digging game (warning: the paper towels are a lot harder to handle than the rock hammer), or read about a recent Wyoming dig through the eyes of a young journalism student.

(Image: a Triceratops roams Michigan; Flickr image by Kim Scarborough)

***Unless you count birds as living dinosaurs, that is. Horner certainly does - see his suggestion, last year, about “discovering” the dinosaur bones in your Thanksgiving Turkeyosaurus.

You’ve still got a couple days this month to step outside, look up, and enjoy a tremendous yellow moon. One of my favorite features is that little belly-button of a crater at the bottom, called Tycho. When the moon is full, this crater and the long rays emanating from it always make me wonder if perhaps the whole orb is just a delicate paper lantern.

But if appreciating a real Moon involves too much squinting, or if the mosquitoes where you live simply won’t permit prolonged viewing, give thanks that you live in an era of unprecedented space exploration. Since last year, a Japanese probe called SELENE has been taking thousands of high-resolution images of Tycho. Now the scientists have pieced the images together into an animated video flyover of the crater in fantastic detail.

In these days of Google Earth and computer-rendered fighting pandas, it can be difficult to appreciate reality as anything more than a poor approximation of a movie. But the cliffs, plains, and pinnacles sweeping past in the video really are up there, rotating in space and baking under the glare of the Sun.

That pinprick in Tycho’s center, for example, is a mile-high mountain range complete with jagged peaks, old remains of landslides, and what looks like a totally manageable hike up one side. SELENE takes you on a 360-degree, eye-level tour and then, just as a flourish, spins out to the crater rim and zooms along the side like a NASCAR driver going into a turn.

Incidentally, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s SELENE homepage offers a refreshing and inimitably Japanese take on what a space agency’s website can look like.

(Images: Joe Huber/Wikipedia; JAXA/SELENE. Hat tip to Bad Astronomy, who is currently on something of a lunar bender owing to Apollo 11’s 40th anniversary and an actual time-lapse, color video of the moon crossing in front of the Earth).

Here’s a refreshing bit of good news to chew on next time you fill up your car: high gas prices are saving as many as 1,000 American lives each month.

After being stung at the pump, it seems, we’ve made up our minds to drive less and to drive more slowly. For instance, certain bloggers you may have heard of are driving their Volkswagen Gist - I mean Golf - only every other day, turning the car off at long lights, and generally avoiding gunning the massive 2.0 liter engine altogether.

And I’m not the only one taking it easy. The bottom line is more than 20 billion fewer miles driven so far this year. And as two medical researchers reported at a meeting last month, that means fewer cars to crash into each other, and less forceful impacts when they do.

The researchers found a 2.3 percent decline in fatalities for every 10 percent increase in gas prices. The amazing part is that it’s not some statistical quirk emerging from the last month or two of records - it’s a solid relationship that’s apparent from 1985 through 2006 - the last year for which statistics have been compiled (back when gas was a paltry $2.50 a gallon).

With America’s traffic toll hovering around 40,000 deaths per year, the researchers expect gas prices to do what seat belts, airbags, driver ed classes, and innumerable highway patrol speed traps haven’t managed yet: save another 1,000 lives per month. Do I hear $5 a gallon, anyone?

(Image: National Museum of Natural History)

Far more buzz circled around the second report: that we may be able to figure out what color dinosaurs and ancient birds were. This means that one day, paleontologist-artists may have to stop dreaming up rosy purples and outlandish greens to clothe their dinosaurs in (remember Mark Witton’s lovely pterosaurs a few posts ago?).

Is there any ephemeral detail that scientists can’t discover about long-dead creatures through clever chemistry? They’ve figured out the diet of an extinct seabird, learned about Aztec travels from records in exhumed teeth, and now they’ve put back together the stripes on a 100-million-year-old bird.

The evidence sat in front of them for years in the form of a powdery residue on some fossils. It was long thought to be the meaningless remains of carrion-eating bacteria, but Yale graduate student Jakob Vinther’s electron microscope revealed the powder looked exactly like the pigment-bearing sacs that occur on modern-day feathers. Nowadays, those sacs are full of melanin which give birds colors ranging from black to russet brown.

Though the work was done on fossil birds, the scientists report that similar residues from dinosaur scales and the hair of ancient mammals may reveal their colors as well. The researchers were also careful to point out that the residues didn’t contain any intact melanin (unlike the T. rex discovered in 2005 with actual protein still preserved inside a massive thigh). A hundred million years is a long time, after all.

(Image: J. Vinther/Yale)

Temperatures in Greenland were 63 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday. If it felt warm to the residents of Kangerlussuaq, imagine how it felt to the wool-draped musk oxen roaming the hillsides.

It wasn’t a record high temperature, but it’s enough to keep Greenland’s massive ice cap melting - a process that has accelerated in recent years and has scientists concerned about sea level rise and changes to ocean circulation.

Last year, melting on Greenland lasted a full month longer than the average over the previous 27 years. All that liquid has to go somewhere, and as you might expect, even on a 3,000-foot-thick glacier, it’s down. Rushing rivers carve incredible sheer-sided canyons into the ice. Or billions of gallons collect in frigid, Disneyland-blue lakes that nestle in low spots on the ice itself.

Ultimately, the water finds a way out - typically straight down, through a dark, twisting wormhole called a moulin that empties straight onto Greenland’s bedrock nearly a mile below the sunlight. And once it’s there, the water tends to lubricate the glacier, pushing the ice off the land like a hydroplaning tire. The glacier speeds up in its headlong descent into the sea.

I usually try to avoid scenarios that might involve being pushed by tons of water through an unlit tunnel to a frigid grave that no one will ever find. But Sarah Das, a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has been studying the phenomenon up close since 2005 - work that involved puttering around in a boat mere days before the plug gave way and the whole lake drained in a few hours.

This year she’s back, and we’re all invited along through Woods Hole’s Polar Discovery program. You can check in each day from your warm, dry home for photos of how the work is progressing, as well as a taste of the incredible ice-on-water architecture.

(Full disclosure: this is the same program that sent me to Antarctica last year - you may remember occasional Gist posts from Way Down Under including Scott’s memorial cross, penguin watching, and the plastics plight of the snow petrel.) This Greenland expedition will be nearly as cold and a whole lot wetter. I’m rooting for them.
(Image: Sarah Das/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Cheers to New Scientist’s Environment blog for keeping us up to date on current research in dingo urine. (If you’re pressed for time, watch the YouTube clip: 28 seconds.)

Turns out Australia has upwards of 50 million kangaroos hippity-hoppitying around the arid continent. Cute as they are, kangaroos are major pests on farms and rangelands. To get the general idea, imagine your garden variety rabbit or woodchuck, scale it up to about 200 pounds, and ask it what it wants for dinner.

Current kangaroo reduction measures include shooting, poisoning, supplying birth control, and distributing recipes online. (Herb and caraway crusted kangaroo escalopes on soft olive polenta, anyone?)

But all it takes is a whiff of fresh dingo urine to send a kangaroo fleeing. The YouTube still above shows a kangaroo just moments after taking a full dose straight up both nostrils.

Perceptive Gist readers may be less than astounded to find that kangaroos find the smell of urine objectionable. But apparently they only flee from dingo pee - human urine causes them no consternation at all, and coyote whiz produces only momentary pause.

The last remaining details to be worked out involve the, er, supply side. It turns out that high-quality dingo urine can be hard to lay your hands on. It has to be fresh to be effective, and apparently you can’t artificially bump up a dingo’s productivity without compromising the effectiveness of the result. Nature must be allowed to run its course, it appears.

As a result, dingo urine fetches around 350 Australian dollars per liter (about as much as a bottle of Cristal) and gets shipped around the country on liquid nitrogen to keep it fresh, New Scientist reports.

There were no details about how the wonder solution is collected.

But it’s fun looking at the progression of space suit fashion in this NASA slideshow (link is at lower left of page). You even get some glimpses of the future, both conceptual drawings and shots of astronauts testing out the new designs on a dusty Washington lake bed. There’s also the famous 1984 shot of the first untethered spacewalk - a prospect that still makes me shiver.

The slideshow doesn’t offer any pics of women in space (even though 40 American women have achieved escape velocity). If you hanker for a break from all the manliness, check out NASA’s tribute to Sally Ride, who last week celebrated her 25th anniversary as the first American woman in space.

On the fashion side, keep your eyes peeled for the next major development. On July 4, Mattel rolls out “Space Camp Barbie.” Who says we’re losing our edge in science and technology?

(Image: NASA)