Dolly just had some bad luck

Twenty years ago, scientists managed to clone a mammal for the first time; Dolly. The problem was, Dolly died only six years later, from what scientists thought were side-effects of cloning. Kevin Sinclair has discovered that this wasn’t the case.

Dolly

Cloning some sheep
But how do you actually clone a mammal, or to be more specific, a sheep? To create Dolly the sheep, scientists did the following. First, they took a few cells from an adult sheep. Through some complicated processes, they managed to change those cells into stem cells. This is very important, because stem cells can evolve into all types of cells. Whilst they can become skin cells, liver cells or bone cells, the cells the scientists took from the adult sheep could only stay what they already were; udder cells in this case. Not wanting a sheep entirely made out of udder, you would need to start with a stem cell. But, since the stem cells were made from cells from the adult sheep, Dolly had the exact same genes as that adult sheep and therefore looked exactly the same. 

Poor Dolly
Stem cells also seem to have a downside. When you take the cell from a four-year-old sheep, the stem cells will also be four years old. Because of this, the new sheep will already be four years old when it is born. Because of this, the sheep will age much faster and die at a young age, like Dolly did. She died when she was six years old, while sheep can normally live for fifteen to twenty years. But now, Kevin Sinclair and his team have discovered that Dolly didn’t die of old age caused by cloning.

But they’re all right!
The method they used to find this out was actually quite simple. They made four more clones from the same stem cells Dolly was made from. This way, these four sheep were clones of the original adult sheep, but also of Dolly. They did this about eight years ago, so now the sheep are eight years old. Unlike Dolly, they didn’t die of old age early, defying the expectations of the scientists. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with them. The scientists checked the sheep’s blood pressure, their joints and bones and other things. They didn’t seem to find anything that indicated that the sheep were aging faster than normal (not cloned) sheep. This means that Dolly probably didn’t die because she was cloned, but because of other reasons.

What went wrong?
But why did Dolly die? Scientists aren’t completely sure yet, but they have theories. It may be possible that something went wrong with Dolly when she was still in her mother’s womb, which caused Dolly to age really fast, but this new research has proven that this doesn’t need to happen when you clone a sheep. This means that cloning is much safer than we thought and this discovery has cleared the way for further research about cloning. 

Click here to read more about biology.

Sources:

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(schaap)

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schaap_(dier)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spry-dolly-siblings-could-make-clone-skeptics-sheepish/

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160726/ncomms12359/full/ncomms12359.html

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/07/27/dolly-the-sheep-died-young-but-her-clones-just-turned-nine.html

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160726/ncomms12359/fig_tab/ncomms12359_F1.html

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/69/Dollyscotland.JPG/350px-Dollyscotland.JPG

Finding the faintest light

We can’t see as well in the dark as, for example, cats can. But what’s the smallest amount of light we can still see? Jonathan Tinsley and his team found the answer.

The faintest light bulb

Tinsley and his team found out that we can actually register the tiniest amount of light possible; single photons. But what are photons? To answer this, we first have to take a look at light itself. Light is, quite simply, a form of energy. But there’s something strange about it; light cannot just have any amount of energy. The reason for this is that a light source, like a light bulb, can only emit whole photons (a photon is like a little packet with a specific amount of energy in it). In other words, if you had a light bulb connected to an extremely precise dimmer, you would only to able to add whole photons when you turn the light up and you would only be able to take away whole photons when you turn the light down. Because of this, if you were turn the dimmer all the way down, the light would either be off or emit just one photon at a time, there’s nothing in between. And now, it turns out we can actually see light with the lowest energy possible; just single photons.

Did you see it?
In the 1940s, scientists already found out that our eyes can detect very low amounts of photons; between five and seven. This is extremely little if you keep in mind that the average light bulb emits two hundred duodecillion photons (that’s a two with 41 zeros) per second. And now, seventy years later, Jonathan Tinsley and his team have discovered that we can register individual photons. The scientists discovered this with an experiment where they asked some test subjects to take part in a sort of game. When the people that participated in the experiment pressed a button, the machine either shot a photon or did not shoot one. The test subjects then had to say if they saw the photon and also how confident they were about whether they saw it or not. After a lot of button pushing, Jonathan Tinsley and his team found that the human guinea pigs were right fifty-two percent of the time. This means that did a little better than if they were just randomly guessing, which would result in getting it right fifty percent of the time. This two percent is, of course, not a significant difference. And that’s where the confidence comes in. The times when the test subjects were really confident about whether or not they saw a photon, they got it right sixty percent of the time. The reason for this is that the photons don’t always create a signal that your brain can actually register. So sometimes there were some photons that the test subjects couldn’t see, but sometimes they could. But what can we learn about our eyes from this?

It’s not perfect
Between light entering your eyes and your brain registering the signal created by that light, there are quite a lot of steps. With every step, a bit of the signal gets lost and a little bit of noise is added. This means that everything you see gets a bit blurred and muddied. Fortunately, it has such little influence on what you actually see that you rarely notice. And now, the photon experiment gives us some new knowledge about this blurring and mudding. We now know that this blurring effect is so small that even photons don’t get affected by this. The results of this experiment aren’t, however, completely watertight yet. The tests were only done on three people, which were all men in their twenties. Future experiments can tell us if women and people of other age groups can also see photons. These experiments will tell us even more about our eyes.

Click here to read more about biology.

Click here to read more about physics.

Sources:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160719/ncomms12172/full/ncomms12172.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimmer

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_numbers#English_names_for_powers_of_10

http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/grb-photon-race.jpg

http://all4desktop.com/data_images/original/4243807-eye.jpg

Want to keep the wolves away? Just use a fence

The population of caribou in Alberta is rapidly declining. Alberta’s government has a drastic plan to stop this decline, but scientists aren’t convinced.

Locking out the wolves

The government wants to put a fence around the area where the caribou live, and then remove all the wolves (the natural predators of the caribou) from that area. This would help the caribou population, as they won’t be preyed on anymore. Some of the caribou that live in the protected area, can then be moved to other areas, where the amount of caribou is still low. Using one or a few of those protected areas, we should be able to save the caribou population.

Caribou in distress

And although this is a pretty extreme plan, the situation calls for it. The Little Smoky herd, the first herd that the government wants to put a fence around as an experiment, has decreased in size by 35 percent between 2000 and 2005. But it gets worse, of the 51 herds of caribou in Canada, only 14 are self-sustaining. This means that, when we do nothing, the 37 other herds will die. One of the reasons for this is, like for many other species, lack off a habitat, a place to live. We are taking up more and more of the space they require to live and they are left with nowhere to go. Another reason is that the space between caribou and wolves is getting smaller and smaller. Caribou are adapted to life in deep snow and wolves are not, so they used to be pretty safe there, but not anymore. New paths, created by humans, aren’t covered by a thick layer of snow, and make it easy for wolves to get deep into the areas that used to be safe for the caribou. And although the fence seems to be a simple solution to the caribou’s problem, many scientists think it will do more harm than good.

That fence is going to hurt

Firstly, putting a fence in the forest where the caribou live is going to damage their already small habitat even more. Biologist Chris Johnson also sees the fence as a way for companies and factories to build more than only a fence in the forest, which will make the habitat of the Little Smoky herd even smaller. The fence is also proposed as an alternative of killing off all the wolves in the area around the caribou. Between 2005 and 2012, hunters killed 841 wolves in Little Smoky range, and although the amount of caribou did stop decreasing, a study done in 2014 showed no evidence that the hunting actually helped the caribou herd. Some people doubt however that the government will actually stop killing the wolves after the fence has been put in place. Since the wolves inside the fence will probably also be killed. Stan Boutin on the other hand, consider the fence a far less evil option than “full fledged, ongoing wolf control program”, as he says in Science.

There’s only one way to find out

All in all, while a fence still isn’t a perfect solution to saving the caribou, it is more wolf-friendly to keep the wolves away from the caribou than to kill them. And if the fence is successful in Canada, we can use it in other places, and to protect other species in the future. Many people are sceptical about it since it is unclear how it will affect the caribou’s habitat as a whole. But we can only find out about this with an experiment.

Click here to read more about biology.

Sources:

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1126/science.353.6297.333

http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/nature/eep-sar/itm3/eep-sar3caribou.aspx#danger

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Caribou.jpg

http://static.wixstatic.com/media/528f75_6944fb615bf1490683592f8f2677e3ec.jpg/v1/fill/w_337,h_311,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/528f75_6944fb615bf1490683592f8f2677e3ec.jpg

Taking a closer look at coral

When you want to take a look at something small, you use a microscope. But what if you want to observe something under water? You can’t use a normal microscope then. Andrew Mullen has a solution.

It’s pretty hard
There are a couple of problems you face when designing an underwater microscope. For starters, an air-filled tube, what a microscope essentially is, is going to float. So you have to attach something heavy to it so it sinks. There’s also the problem of getting the diver’s eye close enough to the microscope so he or she can look through it. Since the diver is wearing a diving mask, putting that against the microscope to try and take a look won’t work. The microscope also needs to be some distance away from the thing you want to observe otherwise, the microscope would damage it. And that’s not a thing you want if you’re studying delicate coral structures. Moreover, you also need some electricity to light up the thing you want to take a look at. However, this can be solved quite simply with a battery. A bigger problem emerges when you want to observe something in moving water. It’s very difficult then to keep the microscope still, and also not to float away yourself. Andrew Mullen and his team were able to tackle all these problems and design a good underwater microscope.

A solution to all your problems
Mullen’s microscope is completely adapted to work underwater. It is connected to a camera, so nobody has to look through it and have problems with their diving masks. But the microscope, which is called the Benthic Underwater Microscope (BUM), can also focus really quickly, so it can take quick, clear photos of the thing that’s being observed. This comes in handy in moving water, because moving the microscope around a bit isn’t a huge problem anymore. It also has LED-lights to shine light on the observed specimen. All the components sit snugly in a compact housing, so the microscope is very easy for a diver to work with. So easy that it can be operated by just one diver.

Magnify the coral!

consequences of bleached coral; dead coral

Andrew Mullen and his team use the microscope to take detailed pictures of coral. These structures are so delicate that it is impossible to take them out of the water and observe them on land. With the microscope, the scientists have found out how polyps, the little animals coral is composed of, digest their prey. They work together and digest it with combined movement of their tentacles. The microscope is also great for studying the bleaching of coral. This bleaching happens when algae that live on the coral die because of changes in the seawater, which are probably caused by climate change. The coral can’t live without the algae and dies too, leaving behind a ghost town of coral. So this new microscope will also come in really helpful in finding ways to protect the beautiful coral reefs.

Click here to read more about biology.
Click here to read more about phyics.

Sources:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160712/ncomms12093/full/ncomms12093.html

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbleking_van_koraal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyp

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2818.1972.tb01043.x/abstract

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1111/j.1365-2818.1972.tb01043.x

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160712/ncomms12093/images/ncomms12093-f2.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Coral-reef-bioerosion.jpg

It's not just armour

Turtles have shells to protect themselves, right? Now, Tyler Lyson and his team have found out that they actually use it for something else; digging.

A safe mobile home
A turtle shell is made out of the turtle’s ribs. The ribs have merged together to become one solid thing, instead of being separate bones, like a human’s. The shell is covered with keratin, the same stuff our hair and nails are made from. The keratin protects the turtle against parasites. And, although they can hide in their shells when there’s danger, turtles can never exit it, since the shell is literally part of their body. We can’t just crawl out of our ribcage either. You can also find out to what species a turtle belongs by just looking at their shell. Sea turtles have a flat shell for example, because it’s easier to swim with, while land turtles have a more dome-shaped shell. Tyler Lyson tries to find out how turtles got their shells in the first place.




That thing is useless!

The problem is, when turtles formed shells for the first time, around 260 million years ago, the shells didn’t really give much protection to the turtles. And on top of that, the new shell also restricted the turtle’s movement and breathing. So it wasn’t a thing that was really beneficial to the turtle. But why did it evolve then in the first place? Tyler Lyson has an answer. He thinks the first turtles used it for digging. According to his theory, the shell provides a starting point of the arm muscles that a turtle needs for digging. And later on, the shell became much thicker and started being actually useful as a form of protection. While the first shells were much too thin to provide that. Lyson got this idea after studying Gopher turtles, which also have strong muscles for digging connected to their shells. He found out that the first turtles’ and Gopher turtles’ shells have many things in common, and with that in mind he made this theory.

Digging the water
We can’t, of course, be sure of this. We can’t just go back in time and study the first turtles. What we can do is study its fossils and compare those to land turtles that live today. Tyler Lyson and his team did that, and they found that the bone structure of both turtles is quite similar, which supports Lysons theory. Also, the strong digging arms of land turtles also came in conveniently later, when they went into the water. The digging arms enabled turtles to swim around, and sea turtles evolved. All in all, Lysons theory is basically proven. So the next time you see a turtle digging; it’s just using its shell.

Click here to read more about biology.

Sources:

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1016/j.cub.2016.05.020

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1016/j.cub.2013.05.003

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunotosaurus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schildpadden#Schild

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Eunotosaurus_africanus.jpg

http://animalia-life.com/data_images/turtle/turtle1.jpg

Where did the butterflies go?

Butterflies are beautiful, but fewer and fewer of them can actually be seen. Where did the butterflies go? Why are they gone? Jeremy Thomas tries to find out.

Pretty wings

Butterflies are among the species that we keep the track of the best. Since 1979, more than 750 thousand kilometres of data about butterflies has been gathered in the United Kingdom alone. And that data has an alarming outcome; the amount of butterflies is declining. And this happens not only in the UK, the records in many other countries show the same thing. Butterflies are, however, not very important for their ecosystems, unlike bumblebees are for example. Bumblebees pollinate many plants, and without them, these plants can’t reproduce and will go extinct. Most butterflies don’t have such an important role. The main reason that we keep track of them is that they tell us how healthy their environment is. Because the number of butterflies flying around in a place, has a correlation with the health of this environment. In other words, butterflies are an indicator species. On top of that, butterflies are also very pretty and easy to spot.

A monarch butterfly

But I like that plant…
But what makes the butterflies disappear? It’s mainly caused by us, humans. Over the years, we’ve been using more and more land, mostly for agriculture, so many plants and animals have less place to live and have become more rare. The environment has become less healthy and with that, the amount of butterflies also declined. This happens since the butterflies have increasingly less space to lay their eggs, as the plants that they usually do that on are replaced by crops. This also happens because butterflies are pretty picky about where they lay their eggs. For example the monarch butterfly only laying eggs on milkweed plants, and many butterfly would rather not lay eggs at all than lay them on the wrong plant. The amount of butterflies is declining as they can’t find the right plants anymore. This harms these picky species especially, like the monarch butterfly. It still harms the butterflies that will lay their eggs everywhere, but to a lesser extend. There’s also a second, less noticeable problem for the butterflies; not only do they have lesser and lesser space to live, the places where the butterflies are still around have increasingly less plants that the butterflies like. These two reason combined have caused a steady decrease in the amount of butterflies through Europe and the rest of the world since 1900.

Butterflies forever
But what can we do about it? First of all, it’s important that we find out where the butterflies are having the most problems, as soon as we’ve located those places, we can help the butterflies. In Europe, many of those places have already been found, like Bavaria in Germany. We could plant back the favourite plants of the species of butterflies that are particularly rare, but this is quite expensive. A better option for now is to protect the places where the butterfly communities are still present. This will help ensure that rare butterflies can still live in those places and people can enjoy butterflies for many years to come.

Click here to read more about biology.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly#Ecology

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1126/science.aaf8838

http://butterfly-conservation.org/45/why-butterflies-matter.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly

http://www.whatdocaterpillarseat.info/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_indicator

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlinders#Ecologie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asclepias

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1126/science.1175726

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/kids/photos/animals/Bugs/H-P/monarch-butterfly-orange-flower.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xT6UsQwZyy0/maxresdefault.jpg

Graphene acts like a poster

Graphene, the weird material that already has all kinds of odd and useful properties, has a new one; it can rip itself into ribbons. James Annett discovered this by accident.

Poking out a ribbon

Graphene is a material made out of carbon atoms, just like diamond, but also like graphite, the stuff that’s inside your pencil. But the carbon atoms are arranged in a special way. Graphene is a material that’s only one layer of atoms thick, and because of that, the atoms are arranged in a special pattern which gives graphene all kinds of special qualities. Just like diamond is really strong and transparent because of the way the carbon atoms are arranged inside of it and the graphite inside your pencil is really soft and black, graphene is extremely strong, about two hundred times stronger than steel, and it’s really good at conducting electricity. These things, combined with the fact that graphene is transparent, makes graphene a very useful material in among other, electronics. The screen of your smartphone has, for example, tiny copper wires woven into it. These copper wires could be replaced by wires made out of graphene, which would make your screen bendable, as graphene is really strong and could withstand the pressures of being bend way better than copper, which could easily break. But now, scientists have discovered a new property of graphene; it rips itself into ribbons when you poke a hole in it.

It wants to roll up

This odd property was discovered by two scientists in Dublin. James Annett was doing experiments on the friction characteristics of the material when he accidentally poked a couple of holes in the graphene sheet he was using. After that, he saw with a microscope that tiny ribbons had formed around the holes. Together with Graham Cross, he also found an explanation for the ribbon-forming; multiple layers of graphene are more stable than just the one layer. So if the graphene gets the chance, it rolls up like a poster that has spent too much time in his tube. The bindings that hold the carbon atoms together are very strong however. Because of this, you need to wiggle around a little in the hole in the graphene sheet to make the bindings looser, and longer ribbons form when the temperature is higher, since the binding are already looser when it’s hot.

Ribbons in your phone

Graham Cross also sees great ways to use this new property of graphene. He thinks the ribbons can be used in transistors, which are tiny switches controlled by electricity, and other electronics. But the problem is that it is quite difficult to influence how the ribbons form. This makes James Tour, an expert in nanotechnology, sceptical about the discovery. Boris Yakobson on the other hand, is thrilled by the new discovery, and he already has a plan on how to control the shape of the ribbons by poking even more holes in the graphene. So maybe you’ll have a bendable smartphone in your pocket in ten or twenty years, filled with graphene ribbons.

Click here to read more about physics.

Sources:

http://www.nature.com/news/graphene-sheets-tear-themselves-to-ribbons-1.20258

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1038/nature18304

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafeen

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3607191/Bendable-smartphones-coming-Devices-screens-graphene-flexible-worn-like-BRACELET.html

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.37788.1468422099!/image/WEB_graphene-nature-media_Graham-Cross.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_630/WEB_graphene-nature-media_Graham-Cross.jpg

http://pixel.brit.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/GrapheneEReader.jpg

How fish learned how to walk

385 million years ago, the first amphibians evolved from fish and set foot on land. But what drove them onto land? And how did they actually learn how to walk?

Land is pretty interesting

The first amphibians on land, that were also the first animals with a spine on land, evolved from fish with legs. These fish also needed lungs to survive on land and many other adaptations. But what drove these fish to start a life on earth? First of all, most of these fish with legs lived in shallow water. Because of extreme droughts more than 385 million years ago, the shallow water became more and more hostile to the fish; it became saltier and warmer. The fish didn’t like it and fled out of the water, onto the land. Moreover, a lot of bacteria and viruses made the life for the fish in the water even more unpleasant. But the land was also attractive to the fish with legs as there weren’t any competitors, like animals who eat the same food as the fish do, or threats, like animals that have the fish with legs as prey. This was of course because there weren’t many animals on land yet, only a couple of simple, insect-like lifeforms.

A mudskipper

Fish hopping around

Swimming and walking are two wholly different ways of moving, however. On top of that, soil close to the shallow water where the fish crawled out of isn’t the easiest to walk on, since it’s usually very muddy and a bit uneven. How did the fish pull it off to learn how to walk? That’s exactly the question that Benjamin McInroe and Henry Astley asked themselves. And as it turns out, the tail of these first amphibians was really important. Stephanie Pierce thought that with their tails and forelimbs, the fish-like creatures managed to hop around on the uneven, muddy soil. Much like mudskippers, fish that can also live on land, still do today. Benjamin McInroe and Henry Astley then made a computer simulation of the hopping movement, and they found out that it is indeed possible that these first animals on earth used their tail and arms to move around.

Ichthyostega

Seals can’t walk

We know that these first amphibians didn’t use their hind legs to move around, like salamanders do, because a discovery made by Stephanie Pierce. She and her team studied fossils of the extinct Ichthyostega, one of the first animals on land with complete limbs. And they found out that it is very unlikely that this animal used its hind legs to move around. As the Ichthyostega had hind legs that pointed backwards, much like seals have. These legs are excellent for swimming, but useless for walking. So scientists had to come up with another theory about how these first amphibians moved; they hopped. And so, the salamander-like way of moving, with use of the hind legs, evolved at least a bit later.

Click here to read more about biology.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lungfish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertebrate_land_invasion

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1126/science.aaf0984

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1126/science.aag1092

http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/04/26/icb.ict022.full.pdf

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyostega

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudskipper

http://www.mudskipper.it/Reprod_file/B_pecIkebeB1.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Ichthyostega_model.jpg

Bad news for zika

Zika forms a problem in South-America, especially when you take the upcoming Olympics in Rio into consideration. Fortunately, Abeer Alkhaibari and his team have found a way to fight this disease, with a fungus.

An Aedes aegypti bug

It’s a nasty bug

Zika is spread by a bug called Aedes aegypti, which also spreads yellow fever, dengue and other nasty diseases. These bugs spread the diseases when they bite people for blood. The mosquitos need the blood to let their eggs grow, so only the female bugs bite. The male bugs only eat fruit, and don’t bite. But when a mosquito bites someone who has a disease like yellow fever, dengue or zika, the virus that causes the disease infects the bug too, because it drinks the infected blood from the person it bit. When the infected bug then bites another person, the disease gets transferred into that person. This is because the virus that causes the disease spreads through the whole body of the bug, and also to its saliva glands. When a bug bites you, it uses its saliva to keep your blood liquid while it drinks that blood. And a bit of that saliva, and with that the virus, ends up in your blood and you get infected too. Fortunately, zika isn’t really harmful when you’re not pregnant, but the Aedes aegypti can transfer other diseases, which are not that pleasant.

a larva infected with the fungus
(the oval things are the fungi)

Mold on the larvae

But now, Abeer Alkhaibari and his team have a fungus that can kill Aedes aegypti, or to be more specific, its larvae. This fungus is called Metarhizium brunneum. And although scientists already had discovered other fungi that can also kill the larvae, this fungus is particularly good at it. The reason for this is that the fungus can attack the bug’s larvae from two sides; from the guts of the mother bug or directly through the skin of the larvae. This makes it twice as dangerous for the larvae and Abeer Alkhaibari and his team also think that this is the reason that this fungus can kill off the larvae within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, which is much faster than other fungi.

Saving lives

The discovery of this fungus is, of course, great news for preventing zika, since we can hugely decrease the amount of bugs that can spread the zika virus with this fungus. But zika isn’t a really harmful disease if you’re not pregnant. The most you’ll get from it is something that resembles the flu. Aedes aegypti can transfer some other nasty diseases however, like yellow fever or dengue. Two diseases that are together responsible for around 55.000 deaths each year. If we can find a way to kill off the larvae of Aedes aegypti on a large scale, that could prevent a lot of deaths.

Click here to read more about biology.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropod_cuticle

http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1005715

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metarhizium_brunneum

http://www.denguevirusnet.com/aedes-aegypti.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_aegypti

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/dengue-transmission-22399758

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_fever#Epidemiology

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue#Epidemiologie

http://s3.india.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Aedes-aegypti1.jpg

http://media.eurekalert.org/multimedia_prod/pub/web/118850_web.jpg

One planet dancing with three stars

Our planets circles just one star, but Kevin Wagner and his team have found a planet that orbits a whacking three stars! How have they found this planet? They just looked.

Spotting planets

Most of the time, exoplanets, planets that are outside of our solar system, are discovered with the transit method. This method uses the brightness of a star to determine if a planet moves in front of it, because if that happens, the star gets a little bit dimmer, and with that, scientists can find out the size, orbit time and other things about that exoplanet. Discovering an exoplanet through directly looking at it with a telescope is really hard. Because the light from the star is so much brighter than the light that comes from the planet, it’s hard to see the thing, particularly because it’s also very close to the star. So scientists use some smart tricks to block out the starlight, and they can observe the planet. With this particular exoplanet, it was even harder than normal to block out the starlight, since there wasn’t just one star, but three. But there’s also a large advantage of directly observing an exoplanet compared to using the transit method; when they directly look at it, scientists can find out what kind of atmosphere the planet has. And Kevin Wagner and his team have found out that this new exoplanet is a bit like Jupiter.

That’s an odd size

Planets like Jupiter aren’t very rare, in fact, it’s one of the most common types of exoplanets. And planets in star systems with more than one star aren’t that rare, but what makes this particular star system special is its size. This star system, which is called HD 131399, is way bigger than ours, which is quite weird, since planets usually don’t orbit that far away from the centre of a system with more than one star. This is because the gravity of ‘outer’ stars (B and C) make it impossible for a planet to form so close to those outer stars.

How did it end up there?

Kevin Wagner and his team have two theories about how the planet ended up in its orbit. One theory is that the planet used to orbit the centre star or the outer stars and was kicked out of orbit by another planet. Another states that the planet already existed before the three-star system formed and the planet accidentally ended up in its odd orbit when the three-star system came into existence. The problem with the first theory is that it requires another large planet to hang around in the star system, the planet that kicked our Jupiter-like planet out of orbit, and scientists haven’t found this planet yet. It could, however, be the case that we simply can’t detect this planet. But for now, this strange star-system remains a mystery. 

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Sources:

http://phl.upr.edu/library/media

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1126/science.aaf9671

http://astronomynow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/hot-jupiter_940x752.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanets

Big asteroid created Fear and Panic

Mars has two moons; Phobos and Deimos. Now, Pascal Rosenblatt and his team think that the planet used to have way more moons, as they publish in this week’s Nature.

Fear and Panic; Phobos and Deimos

Scientists used to think that Phobos and Deimos, Mars’s moons, are two asteroids that got stuck in Mars’s gravity. This also made sense, since the asteroid belt is close to Mars. Moreover, the moons have an irregular shape and are not made of the same stuff as Mars. These are also clear signs that Phobos and Deimos originally were asteroids. There’s only one problem. When an asteroid gets caught in the gravity field of a planet, its orbit is usually elliptical, oval shaped. This is because the asteroid is shooting through a bit before being pulled back by the planet, this creates the oval shape. But, Phobos’s and Deimos’s orbits are circle shaped. And Mars’s gravity is way too weak to turn an oval orbit into a circular orbit. The chances that the circular orbits happened by accident are so small that it is more likely that Phobos and Deimos formed in another way, closer to Mars.

A big boom results in some moons

Pascal Rosenblatt and his team believe that Phobos and Deimos are formed out of debris that was formed when a giant asteroid hit Mars. That debris then formed a ring around Mars, and with computer simulations, Rosenblatt and his team found out that a couple of moons were formed out of that debris. All those moons, except two, orbited too close to Mars and crashed into the surface. The other two moons slowly moved into higher orbits and eventually became what we now know as Phobos and Deimos. We have, of course, no way to check this. Since we can’t just travel back in time and take a look. But if Phobos and Deimos are made out of a little bit of Mars and a bit of asteroid, it would pretty much prove this theory right.

The Borealis basin is the orange area on the left

Solving our puzzle

But there’s also another thing this new theory can explain. If an asteroid collided with Mars, there must be a crater. Rosenblatt and his team might even have found this crater already; the Borealis basin, a crater that covers around forty percent of the surface of Mars. The collision that created this crater must also have created a lot of debris, out of which the two moons and more could have easily formed. And at the same time, this new theory about Mars’s moons is another piece in the puzzle that is our solar system, and we might even be able to solve the complete puzzle one day.

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Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Polar_Basin_(Mars)

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochelimiet

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2742.html

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1038/ngeo2742

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6JUeVSMTbcw/VBRRLmP5GBI/AAAAAAAAAMY/qksoMCv8EiA/s1600/Elliptical%2BOrbits.png

http://science.intellichristian.com/images/phocagallery/planets/mars/Mars.jpg