If you can’t find you limbs

We all know our five senses. But, we have many more senses than just those five. We have the sense of proprioception, for example, that helps you keep track of where your body parts are. But, what if you lack that?

Where’s my nose?

Proprioception is, the sense that allows you to touch your nose with your eyes closed, or type without looking at your hands. The reason for this is that your brain knows where your hands and nose are without necessarily having to look at them. And that’s what proprioception does. But what if you don’t have that sense? What if you’re blind, but instead of lacking sight, your proprioception did not work.

Hard to find that sense

Well, it’s quite hard to study that. Because the symptoms of lacking proprioception aren’t as clear as, say, lacking hearing. Another things is that the sense isn’t located at one point in your body, unlike, for example, your eyes. Eyes have a specific place and you know exactly what they do; they see. But with proprioception, the location isn’t really clear. The sense is working all over your body. So you know where all your body parts are hanging out. But this makes it really hard to study this sense.

9 and 19

Fortunately, Carsten Bönnemann and his team have found two people; a nine-year-old girl and a nineteen-year-old woman who totally lack proprioception. With their eyes closed, they can’t tell where they limbs are, or in which way their joints are being moved. With their eyes open, they can tell, but they can only do so if they actually see what’s happening. The researchers considered the situation of the woman and the girl to be so weird that they did a genetic test on both of them. The scientists discovered that both of them have an extreme mutation in a gene called PIEZO2. Scientists already linked this gene to our sense of touch earlier, which made Carsten Bönnemann and his team think that PIEZO2 plays an important role in proprioception.

Whoops, I didn’t mean to…

The discovery of this gene also has another advantage, especially when you’re a bit clumsy. Clumsiness has already been linked to your sense of proprioception not working perfectly. Since proprioception is linked to the PIEZO2 gene, this means that, if you’re clumsy, you may have a mutation in that gene. It doesn’t have to be extreme to the point that you totally lack the sense. But if it malfunctions a bit, this could also be reason enough for you to tip over glasses of water a little more often. So don’t worry, it’s not your fault, it’s just your genetics.

Sources:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/researchers-discover-gene-behind-sixth-sense-humans

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1602812

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

http://www.livescience.com/images/i/000/078/671/original/boys-nose.jpg?interpolation=lanczos-none&downsize=*:1000

http://joshuamhood.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/water.jpg

Gaia is mapping the stars

Spacecraft Gaia is going to map our entire galaxy. And with all that data, NASA scientists hope to compose a five-dimensional map of our galaxy, and discover the Milky Way’s past.

spacecraft Gaia

Where are the stars?
Three years ago, spacecraft Gaia was launched. Then the spacecraft, which basically is a giant telescope floating in space, needed the past three years to put together a draft of a map of our galaxy. The reason it took Gaia so long to only turn out a draft is that the spacecraft has already catalogued more than a billion stars for this draft. This is of course an incredible amount, but Gaia isn’t done yet. Our galaxy consists of over 200 billion stars, so the telescope has only catalogued half a percent of all stars. Gaia is going to further map our galaxy for at least another two years. In these five years, Gaia isn’t going to be able to map the other 199 billion stars, instead Gaia is going to focus on refining the data about the billion stars that the spacecraft already mapped.

Gaia's map so far

A look into the future and the past
Gaia has already mapped the position and brightness of over a billion stars, and also the distance and speed of the two million brightest stars. In the next two years, NASA scientists, who control the spacecraft, want to find the distance and speed of way more stars. They’re hoping for a billion. But that’s not all, they also want to map the speeds of the 100 million brightest stars in 3D. While the speeds of the other, dimmer stars are only in 2D, so only sideways. These data will enable scientists to create a five-dimensional model of our galaxy, and essentially predict the Milky Way’s past and future. This could teach us a whole lot about the Milky Way’s possibly violent past, as there are indications that the Milky Way has absorbed quite a lot of smaller galaxies in the past. Which would have caused violent collisions of which we still can see traces today.

Better than the ocean floors
This galaxy-map will also help scientists understand the birth of stars better. Because with the data that will be gathered by Gaia, scientists can calculate the size and also the age of stars, which are essential for finding out how stars actually form. Another thing is that our own Milky Way is a bit like the earth’s ocean floor compared to the moon. We’ve got a better grasp of what’s happening on the moon than on what’s happening on the ocean floor. In a similar way, we know more about some other galaxies than about our own home. That is mainly because the Milky Way is so big, and we’re right in it so we can’t really take overview pictures of it. This makes getting a good, complete view of the Milky Way really hard, but Gaia is changing that. Within a few years, we’ll have the most detailed map of our galaxy yet. And we will, no doubt, have learned all new kinds of cool and interesting things about our own galaxy, thanks to Gaia.

Click here to read more about astronomy.

Sources:
https://www.scientias.nl/miljard-sterren-elkaar-ziet-er-zo/
http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/home
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/upcoming-galaxy-map-could-radically-transform-how-we-see-the-milky-way/
http://blogs.esa.int/gaia/files/2013/07/Gaia_mapping_the_stars_of_the_Milky_Way.jpg
https://cbssanfran.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/gaia_gdr1_sky_map_annotated_hd.png

Ants don’t just smell and count, they also look around

Ants are amazing navigators, they can find their homes even when their quite far away from their nests. This is really impressive, considering the small size of the ants. Scientists have finally found out how the ants can pull it off.

Counting and smelling

A desert ant

Scientists thought they knew all of the tricks ants use to find their way back home. Ants count their steps away from their nests, so they know exactly how far away they are from their home. Ants also have excellent smell, so they can smell other ants and follow them home in the case they accidentally lose count of their steps. This is also the reason ants like to move around in ‘trains’. By moving in trains, they can easily follow each other through their olfactory navigation. Though this method seems flawless, if you were to separate the front and back half of an ant train using a piece of cardboard, for example, the ants in the back half would get utterly disorientated. This would happen because they can’t smell their fellow ants anymore. If you remove the piece of cardboard, the ants will be able to smell their friends again and they can continue their journey back to their nest without any problems. However, a special species of ants called Cataglyphis desert ants are exceptionally good at navigating, better than these two methods can explain. This has left scientists puzzled over the mystery for ages, until now.

How flies see the world

Just use your eyes!
The answer isn’t really weird, or even surprising, desert ants simply look around to estimate distances and find out where they are. It’s the same principle as when you’re driving a car, trying to find your cousin’s new home in a labyrinth-like neighbourhood. Although this seems like a rather obvious answer for humans, it’s somewhat strange for insects like ants since insects have notoriously low vision. The reason for this is that they have so-called facet-eyes made from numerous smaller eyes. These work together to create one big picture. The problem is, insects’ brains aren’t that efficient at putting together all the information from the small eyes. This means that insects see the world in a distorted and pixelated way, which is why you can easily swat a fly with a fly swatter. Due to the holes in the swatter, the fly simply cannot see what’s coming for it. On the other hand, the desert ants can apparently see well enough to find their way back to their nest, even when their step counting and smelling methods fail.

Can the others see too?
Since Cataglyphis desert ants have three different methods of navigating; counting, smelling and looking around, they are some of the best navigators in the realm of insects. This is also due to the fact that they can find their way using each of those methods separately. Scientists already knew that flying insects such as flies, wasps or bees, use their eyes to navigate, but they didn’t know that walking insects, like ants could do the same. This opens all kinds of new, interesting research about the sight of all other kinds of walking insects, for example beetles.

Click here to read more about biology.

Sources:
http://sci-hub.bz/10.1126/science.aaf9754
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/video-blindfolded-ants-reveal-clues-insect-navigation
http://www.naturephoto-cz.com/photos/others/desert-ant-87673.jpg
http://8020.photos.jpgmag.com/2851044_245460_1a70698cf0_p.jpg