Malaria No More: Dream Big for Africa
Text DREAM to 85944 to donate $10 to Malaria No More and be entered to win a trip to Africa with NBC Smash star Katharine McPhee. Read the full details at http://www.malarianomore.org/Dream.
Malaria No More is a charity working to end the suffering and deaths caused by malaria – an illness that’s both easy to prevent and relatively easy to cure, as long as there is access to information, diagnosis and treatment. Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year in Africa.
As part of the global Roll Back Malaria Partnership, Malaria No More aims to bring the death rate from malaria down to near-zero by 2015. There’s a vaccine being developed right now to help stop the spread of malaria. But they need our help.
Text DREAM to 85944 to donate $10 to Malaria No More. You’ll be entered in the competition to win a trip to Africa with Katharine McPhee. Make sure you read the full details at http://www.malarianomore.org/Dream.
Related articles
- Malaria deaths reducing year on year (telegraph.co.uk)
- Malaria may kill more people than we thought (newscientist.com)
First Signs of Spring [Photo]
We found little flowers blooming over the road on our long walk yesterday.
Despite the current cold snap [do you see how many layers Mini-MI's wrapped in?] the plants have decided it’s sunny enough to get growing. Spose they know best.
Related articles
- Look to nature for early signs of spring (guardian.co.uk)
Science Says: Santa’s Reindeer Probably Girls
Just had a text from Vix asking me whether Santa’s reindeer are boys or girls so that she can answer the question posed in her 7 year old daughter’s note left out for the Fat Man.
The answer, fact fiends, is this:
Most male reindeer tend to lose their antlers by early December, so there’s a good chance that the majority of Santa’s reindeer are female.
We should probably have guessed this from their ability to take Christmas multi-tasking to an entirely new quantum level in delivering all those presents in one night. I am knackered and going to collapse on the sofa with the cheese board very soon. How do they do it?
Merry winter stuff, everyone.
Image of the Week: Habitable Exoplanet Classification by PHL
The PHL (Planetary Habitability Laboratory) at University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo, have made this lovely Trek-styled chart of classifications of habitable planets beyond our solar system.
You can see more on the PHL website.
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you must. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
Related articles
- Pack your bags: suns like ours may have lots of habitable planets (dvice.com)
- Gamers Help Scientists Discover New Planets (escapistmagazine.com)
Ants raise other insects to eat their meat!
There’s an African species of ant called Melissotarsus insularis (along with 3 other related species) that appears to farm or domesticate other insects to maintain a fresh supply of their meat, as if they were cattle.
These tiny ants live burrowed under tree bark – apparently they even have a pair of legs that point up instead of down, so that they can grip the ceiling of their tunnels as well as the floor. Various types of armoured scale insects share this habitat with the ants.
These scale insects don’t provide any honeydew for the ants to eat, and they don’t produce edible scale either. So… the best guess of researcher Scott Schneider at the University of Massachusetts is that the ants eat the scale insects’ meat! It may be that they chose scale insects without a hard, waxy scale on purpose, for easier butchering and consumption.
Nobody’s actually seen an ant chowing down on a scale insect’s flesh yet, but Schneider plans a follow-up experiment to measure stable isotope levels in the ants and use these observations to determine whether they are primarily vegetarian or carnivorous.
If that’s got you all mad science excited, you can read the whole Zoologger story at New Scientist.
Image [another species of Melissotarsus] credit: semant2006
Image of the Week: The Sombrero Galaxy by NASA
This is an old favourite infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope & NASA. I love the Sombrero Galaxy (M104); it’s so floaty-looking at these enormous distances that I like to imagine the texture of it close up.
Not very close, obviously, or I’d be inside it. And there’s a black hole in there and all sorts of cool stuff.
You can see more images at the NASA website.
And you can see more of the Sombrero Galaxy in the sky: look towards Virgo through a reasonable sized telescope.
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you must. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
Scientists find new species in your belly button
That scuzz that sometimes accumulates in your navel is home to a whole new world of charming little critters! And thanks to the Belly Button Biodiversity project collecting home-taken samples from volunteers, scientists can now tell us what’s lurking in our belly button fluff.
Reading the DNA of bacteria found in people’s navel debris to get an overview of the diversity of the belly button biome has produced some interesting results. One of the biggest problems with this is matching species found in your navel fuzz to species already described and recorded elsewhere. Identifying bacteria that precisely can be bloody difficult, and sometimes the best scientists can do is to pin it down to a larger taxonomic unit.
Quite a few previously unknown species have been found: over 600 so far can’t even be classified in terms of family (at least, not yet). But most of the bacteria in everyone’s belly button swabs came from the same small group of 40 or so different species, so chances are yours is the same as everybody else’s.
Image credit: Dena van der Wal
Shh… Even sleeping babies can hear you’re unhappy
You know those times when you’ve argued, wept, or otherwise stressed out while your baby was sleeping? Turns out if a baby can hear you, it still knows how you feel.
fMRI scans of sleeping babies aged from 3 to 7 months show activity in the middle temporal gyri, right lingual gyrus and medial frontal gyri when human voice sounds including crying, laughter and other neutral noises were played to them. Basically that’s the same as you’d expect to see in an adult listening to those sounds, awake.
What’s more intersting is that unhappy human voice sounds – crying etc – activate the insular cortex and gyrus rectus more strongly, again just like in fully conscious adults. So babies can hear us and interpret our mood from our voices even when they’re asleep.
Nobody’s really sure why this is. Maybe the babies are processing the sounds and learning as they sleep. Maybe they’ve already learned to recognise those sounds and associate them with maternal stress they experienced in the womb. Maybe they’re just evolved to be alert to any sign of danger while they sleep, and people arguing or crying around them could potentially do something dangerous.
Whatever the reason, I’m glad that science has finally supplied some evidence to back up all the anecdotes and old wives’ tales about not doing your freaking-out in the same room as your sleeping infant.
Source: New Scientist
Image credit: ECohen
Animal Intelligence: Crows learn who to mouth off at
This is awesome. New Scientist says there are crows on the Uni of Washington campus who were subjected to an experiment 5 years ago in which they were temporarily captured & released by someone wearing a particular mask. They learned to recognise the mask and flashmobbed anyone wearing it; they followed the wearer around, cawing at top volume.
Nifty thing is, only 26% of the crows did that 2 weeks after the start of the experiment. After almost 3 years, 66% of the crows exhibit the same behaviour when they see the mask. That includes birds who weren’t even born yet when the trappings happened – they simply learned who to ‘scold’ from their parents.
This struck me as amazing and even cute, but then I had to think: what if instead of following people and cawing at them, the birds had turned to terrorism? If we’re not the only species that can learn a behaviour from others around us, we’d better hope they never learn to copy the ways that humans react when we feel oppressed by sinister external forces.
As people and especially as parents, we need to remember the crows before we display prejudice, anger, hatred and aggression. Let’s not have our children grow up screaming at masks only we’ve taught them to fear, when they don’t even know what’s underneath.
Just a thought. Yours?
If you want to read the whole paper, it’s here.
Image credit: crowdive
Get sketched by robots!
This is so nifty I had to pass it on: until 9 July 2011 the Tenderpixel art space in Soho (London) is hosting Patrick Tresset’s artistic robot arms. One will sketch your face, the other just doodles at speeds dependent on how busy its environment is. Check out the vid…
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Catch me on the Front Side Bus
I’m massively happy to announce that I’m now the go-to girl for brains, robots, archaeology and freaks/feats of nature on Front Side Bus — if you haven’t checked it out yet, go there now. You’re missing all sorts of tasty science, gadget & geek news.
Here’s links to my first 2 stories for them:
Drugs in space = FAIL
Apparently, drugs – like paracetamol and antibiotics and stuff, not like crack & miaow – don't work so good in space. At least, I'm assuming they haven't tested crack & miaow miaow… I may be being terribly naïve there.
It seems the drugs lose their efficiency in space, rather than that people in space have less of a response to the drugs.
This makes me wonder all manner of things…
How bad could a migraine get in space? With no gravity acting on your circulation or your muscles, do you get cramp easier or less? Is an infection less nasty in space, so that the loss of drug efficacy would be balanced out? If you're stuck on the ISS with no decent drugs, what's the most useful thing in your medicine cabinet? Does homeopathy suddenly make sense in space?
I have no idea on all counts. Do you know? Is there a space doctor in the house?
Maybe I'll tweet @Astro_Ron and ask him…
7pm UTC/GMT Saturday: Supermoon
7pm UTC/GMT Saturday, the moon is its closest to earth this year – and on the night of the full moon :) one to watch…. http://ow.ly/4hDmA
Drinking a little bit when you’re pregnant is OK (but you’re not supposed to know that)
Image via Wikipedia
BBC News – Light drinking no risk to baby, say researchers.
Let me summarise this story in 3 quotes:
‘Drinking one or two units of alcohol a week during pregnancy does not raise the risk of developmental problems in the child, a study has suggested.’
This was a study of more than 11,000 five year olds, which is a decent sized sample and a reasonably long time to wait for any developmental problems to present themselves.
‘In fact, the children born to light drinkers appeared slightly less likely to suffer behavioural problems, and scored higher on cognitive tests, compared with women who stopped [drinking alcohol] during pregnancy.’
So light drinking might even be good for your unborn offspring.
‘The Department of Health said that its advice would remain unchanged to avoid confusion among pregnant women.’
Yes, because we’re so easily confused aren’t we. What they mean is “to avoid pramfaced chav trollops thinking they can neck a whole 3 litre bottle of Frosty Jacks.”
I had a drink every once in a while when I was pregnant. I didn’t worry about that because I always made sure it was only in very small & dilute quantities and I was never even remotely tipsy. I’ve also had the occasional drink since Mini-MI was born, even though I’m breastfeeding, because my NCT breastfeeding counsellor assures me that you can have a couple of drinks before the alcohol starts to come through in your breast milk.
There are more important things to worry about – poverty, neglect, abuse, lack of education. Stop tailoring advice to the dumbest common denominator. The women who drink shitloads during pregnancy are going to do so regardless of whether you advise abstinence or moderation. But there are plenty of women who avoid alcohol entirely during their pregnancies even though a small drink might help harmlessly reduce their stress levels, and there are more who had that small drink but felt unnecessarily guilty for it. The best advice isn’t always the same thing as the simplest advice. Sort it out.
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