Jupter berfore and after "losing" a belt. Click for a little larger version. Credit: Anthony Wesley via Science@NASA

I got a heads up on this a bit over  week ago from a reader (THANKS JOE!), and waited for a little more information, finally Science@NASA put out an article by Dr. Tony Phillips.

I’ve put it “below the fold” or you can go to Science@NASA (linked below) to read it, either way check it out.

If the clouds would cooperate I should be able to get a look at the planet.  I have a though time with planetary photography so that is probably out, but the absence of the band will be obvious in the scope.  I do want to mention too, I stand in awe of Mr. Wesley’s ability!  One of the things I was wondering about was the Great Red Spot; thankfully it’s still visible, in fact it may stand out even more because it’s surrounded in white.  Here’s an image of the GRS surrounded by “white”.  (again from Mr. Wesley).

What do I think?  I think it’s just ammonia cirrus clouds as is mentioned it the article, the GRS in the image linked above looks like it has a haze over it too.  Kind of weird to think of  ammonia cirrus, but Jupiter (and Saturn) have what are known as reducing atmospheres dominated by Hydrogen Chemistry as opposed to our oxidizing atmosphere dominated by Oxygen chemistry.  Generally when we are looking at the belts and zones of Jupiter we’re looking at zones of pressure, in the case of the white zones we are looking at the tops of clouds associated with low pressure, while the dark areas are “warmer” and we are looking down into the atmosphere to see the darker colored clouds of complex organics and polysulfides.  Of course the clouds are hiding a mantle of metallic hydrogen…now THAT’S  weird.

Before I get all carried away, be sure to read the article below or at the source: Science@NASA:

May 20, 2010: In a development that has transformed the appearance of the solar system’s largest planet, one of Jupiter’s two main cloud belts has completely disappeared.

“This is a big event,” says planetary scientist Glenn Orton of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. “We’re monitoring the situation closely and do not yet fully understand what’s going on.”

Known as the South Equatorial Belt (SEB), the brown cloudy band is twice as wide as Earth and more than twenty times as long. The loss of such an enormous “stripe” can be seen with ease halfway across the solar system.

“In any size telescope, or even in large binoculars, Jupiter’s signature appearance has always included two broad equatorial belts,” says amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley of Australia. “I remember as a child seeing them through my small backyard refractor and it was unmistakable. Anyone who turns their telescope on Jupiter at the moment, however, will see a planet with only one belt–a very strange sight.”

Wesley is a veteran observer of Jupiter, famous for his discovery of a comet hitting the planet in 2009. Like many other astronomers, he noticed the belt fading late last year, “but I certainly didn’t expect to see it completely disappear,” he says. “Jupiter continues to surprise.”

Orton thinks the belt is not actually gone, but may be just hiding underneath some higher clouds.

“It’s possible,” he hypothesizes, “that some ‘ammonia cirrus’ has formed on top of the SEB, hiding the SEB from view.” On Earth, white wispy cirrus clouds are made of ice crystals. On Jupiter, the same sort of clouds can form, but the crystals are made of ammonia (NH3) instead of water (H20).

What would trigger such a broad outbreak of “ammonia cirrus”? Orton suspects that changes in global wind patterns have brought ammonia-rich material into the clear, cold zone above the SEB, setting the stage for formation of the high-altitude, icy clouds.

“I’d love to send a probe in there to find out what’s really going on.”

Indeed, Jupiter’s atmosphere is a mysterious place which would benefit from exploration. No one knows, for instance, why the Great Red Spot is red—or what has sustained the raging storm for so many years. Neither does theory explain why the twin equatorial belts are brown, nor why one should vanish while the other remains. “We have a long list of questions,” says Orton.

This isn’t the first time the SEB has faded out.

“The SEB fades at irregular intervals, most recently in 1973-75, 1989-90, 1993, 2007, 2010,” says John Rogers, director of the British Astronomical Association’s Jupiter Section. “The 2007 fading was terminated rather early, but in the other years the SEB was almost absent, as at present.”

The return of the SEB can be dramatic.

“We can look forward to a spectacular outburst of storms and vortices when the ‘SEB Revival’ begins,” says Rogers. “It always begins at a single point, and a disturbance spreads out rapidly around the planet from there, often becoming spectacular even for amateurs eyeballing the planet through medium-sized telescopes. However we can’t predict when or where it will start. On historical precedent it could be any time in the next 2 years. We hope it will be in the next few months so that everyone can get a good view.

“I’ll be watching every chance I get,” says Wesley. “The revival will likely be sudden and dramatic, with planet-circling groups of storms appearing over the space of just a week or so.”

Indeed, says Orton, “anyone could be the first to spot the return of the SEB.”

Jupiter shines in the eastern sky before dawn: sky map. Point your optics at the “morning star” and … is that really Jupiter? Happy hunting!

Sexual fetishism in a quail (Coturnix japonica) model system: test of reproductive success.
"In the present study, the authors explored the reproductive consequences of fetishistic behavior in a previously developed animal model of sexual fetishism (F. Köksal et al., 2004). Male domesticated quail (Coturnix japonica) received sexual conditioning trials in which a terrycloth object (the conditioned stimulus [CS]) was paired with the opportunity to copulate with a female quail (the unconditioned stimulus). Approximately half of the male quail came to copulate with the CS object and were considered to have developed fetishistic behavior. Each of the male quail was then tested with a female quail, whose eggs were incubated to determine rates of fertilization. The CS object was present for 30 s before and during the copulation test. Fetishistic male quail were slower to achieve cloacal contact with the female quail and showed less efficient copulatory behavior. However, they fertilized a greater proportion of eggs than nonfetishistic male quail. These results are unexpected from previous studies of the relationship between reproductive success and copulatory behavior and are discussed in terms of how fetishistic behavior directed toward an inanimate object may modify male-female interactions." Photo: flickr/ingridtaylar Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Geese: the pack animals ...

A team of scientists led by Mark Raizen at the University of Texas at Austin had the gumption to take on Einstein. And according to their new paper in Science, they won. The point of contention? The lovechild of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics: Brownian motion.

Here’s how they did it.

Step 1. Learning the Moves

In the 1820s, Scottish botanist Robert Brown looked through a microscope at plant bits floating in water, and wrote [PDF]:

“I observed many of them very evidently in motion . . . [these motions] arose neither from currents in the fluid, nor from its gradual evaporation, but belonged to the particle itself.”

To make sure that the pollen wasn’t alive–actually swimming around–Brown tried it with coal dust. Dust had the same moves.

Today, we understand that Brownian motion, the random break dance of these tiny particles, comes from the water molecules bumping against them. In 1907, Einstein determined the properties of the liquid and the particles that would help describe their wanderings and the motion of molecules. But he also said that it was “impossible” to determine at any moment the speed and direction of a single particle during this dance.

Step 2. Water Into Air

The reason for Einstein’s doubt? The particles bumped around too quickly to ever measure their speed and direction:

He believed that it would be impossible in practice to track this motion, given the incredibly short timescales over which the Brownian fluctuations take place. [PhysicsWorld]

How quick is too quick? A very tiny glass sphere (think micrometers) in water would change direction almost every 100 nanoseconds (about the time it takes light to travel 30 meters). Raizen wanted to make the time between moves longer, so they didn’t use water. They put the glass beads on a dance floor with fewer partners, using a medium whose molecules are farther apart: air.

Step 3. Floating on Air

Pollen doesn’t float on air. Neither does a micrometer-sized glass bead. Raizen’s team needed something to hold the glass up. They decided that the answer was light particles in a pair of laser chopsticks:

In 1907, Einstein likely did not foresee a time when dust-sized particles of glass could be trapped and suspended in air by dual laser beam “optical tweezers.” Nor would he have known that ultrasonic vibrations . . . would shake those glass beads into the air to be tweezed and measured as they moved in suspension. [ScienceDaily]

They could control a glass bead’s motion to the precise point where it was still dancing the Brownian, but not too fast to follow. But the lasers allowed them to do more than suspend the glass: By looking at how the glass bead deflected the light while it was buffeted by air molecules and bounced about on the chopsticks, the researchers could determine what Einstein dubbed impossible, a bead’s instantaneous direction and speed.

Step 4. Future Directions

Understanding these discrete steps will help wherever Brownian motion rules: everywhere from cell guts to the scent of perfume wafting through apparently stagnant air.

“It is certainly an important achievement to be able to directly measure the velocity of the Brownian particle at these short times,” says Christoph Schmidt of the University of Göttingen in Germany. “Technically it is now becoming possible to track individual particles with very high time and spatial resolution, limited in the end only by how many photons per second one can get to interact with the particle.” [New Scientist]

Related content:
80beats: Putting “Ears” on a Microscope Lets Reseachers Listen to Bacteria
Cosmic Variance: The Cell is Like Tron!
DISCOVER: Einstein’s Gift for Simplicity
DISCOVER: Einstein’s Lonely Path

Image: Science / AAAS

By now, more than 650,000 gallons of chemical dispersant have gone into the Gulf of Mexico to try to break up the oil. But after giving BP the go-ahead to use the chemical, and to inject it undersea, the Environmental Protection Agency changed course yesterday and demanded that BP switch to a less toxic dispersant. From the EPA statement:

While the dispersant BP has been using is on the Agency’s approved list, BP is using this dispersant in unprecedented volumes and, last week, began using it underwater at the source of the leak – a procedure that has never been tried before. Because of its use in unprecedented volumes and because much is unknown about the underwater use of dispersants, EPA wants to ensure BP is using the least toxic product authorized for use.

EPA gave BP until today to pick an alternative, and then another 72 hours after that to begin using the alternative in the Gulf. A couple weeks ago we covered the concern that Corexit—the dispersant BP has been using all along—could have toxic side effects, and that a less toxic (and possibly more effective) alternative could be available. With the EPA order, BP is finally moving in that direction.

U.S. Polychemical of Spring Valley, N.Y., which makes a dispersant called Dispersit SPC 1000, said Thursday morning that it had received an order from BP and would increase its production to 20,000 gallons a day in the next few days, and eventually to as much as 60,000 gallons a day [The New York Times].

The pressure came on the EPA to change its dispersant rules after the use of Corexit, manufactured by Nalco, came under fire in Congress.

BP’s dispersant of choice was a hot topic during a House Transportation and Infrastructure hearing Wednesday, as lawmakers repeatedly challenged the company’s decision to go with Corexit. Several questioned whether corporate ties between BP and Nalco prompted the choice. Nalco’s board of directors includes Daniel Sanders, the former president of Exxon Mobil Corp., and Rodney Chase, a nearly four-decade veteran of BP [Houston Chronicle].

Meanwhile, as BP’s solutions to stopping the leak and cleaning up the spill continue to struggle, a new savior has stepped up: Kevin Costner. Yes, the prince of thieves and builder of cornfield baseball stadiums is, in real life, an avid environmentalist, fisherman, and greentech entrepreneur. While making Waterworld in 1995, Costner was troubled by oil spills like the Exxon Valdez and started developing a system to cruise the surface of the sea and clean oily water. His business partner, John Houghtaling, says:

“The machines are essentially like big vacuum cleaners, which sit on barges and suck up oily water and spin it around at high speed,” Houghtaling said. “On one side, it spits out pure oil, which can be recovered. The other side spits out 99% pure water” [Los Angeles Times].

BP and the U.S. Coast Guard plan to test six of the massive devices next week.

Recent posts on the Gulf Oil Spill:
80beats: Gulf Oil Update: Good News for Florida, Bad News For Louisiana’s Wetlands
80beats: Scientists Say Gulf Spill Is Way Worse Than Estimated. How’d We Get It So Wrong?
80beats: Testimony Highlights 3 Major Failures That Caused Gulf Spill
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom
80beats: Gulf Oil Spill: Do Chemical Dispersants Pose Their Own Environmental Risk?

Image: Universal Pictures

In January 2004, the Mars rover Opportunity, along with its brother Spirit, landed on the Red Planet. Eight months later we were wowed by their longevity, as both the machines had crawled long past their expected 90-day lifetimes. This year Spirit got intractably stuck in the sand and NASA announced that its days of wandering were finally at an end. But not Opportunity: The less mechanically troubled of the twins, Opportunity continues to rove the surface of Mars, and this week it passed the duration record for time on Mars set by NASA’s Viking 1 lander when it died in 1982. As of today, Opportunity has been operating on Mars for six years and 118 days.

By this March, Opportunity had driven more than 12 miles on the surface of Mars (on the far side of the planet from Spirit). But even a plucky rover needs breaks, especially now when the light level doesn’t allow constant driving. This image shows Opportunity’s tracks on a journey from one well-lit spot to the next, where it could recharge. However, the light level is increasing where the rover is located, so soon it should be able to take longer drives.

Click through for some more of Opportunity’s best images.

Don’t even bother lying. You want one too.

Also? WANT to go. Maybe TAM London will be around the same time…

Tip o’ the sonic screwdrivers to Enigmanaut and Steve Plegge.

This old English major’s heart is warmed by the news that the new synthetic cell carries a line from James Joyce, inscribed in its DNA: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

What would Joyce have thought if someone had told him that one day the synthesized genome of a goat pathogen would carry his words? I would hope that whoever told him would make sure that he did not think this moment marked his literary immortality. In fact, his deathless prose is probably being desecrated by the relentless erosion of evolution right now.

The scientists who produced the new synthetic cell copied the genome of a microbe, letter for letter, and then inserted the synthetic version into a host cell. To determine that their experiment worked, they needed a way to tell the genomes of their synthetic cells from the natural genomes that were their model. So they inserted “watermarks” into the artificial genome. These sequences of DNA (which spelled out the work of Joyce and others through the genetic code) sit in non-coding regions of the microbe’s DNA. As a result, these watermarks cannot disrupt any essential protein-coding genes or stretches of DNA that are vital for switching genes on and off.

It turns out that the genome of the synthetic cell is not identical to its original, even if you ignore the watermarks. Mutations slipped into its sequence during its synthesis. Yet those mutations caused no harm to the microbe, presumably because they didn’t disrupt an essential function encoded in its DNA. Once the synthetic cell came to life and began to grow and divide, it copied its entire DNA, including Joyce’s words. But as lovely as those words may be, and as important as they may have been to the scientists during their experiment, they mean nothing to the microbe. Every time an organism replicates, each spot in its DNA has a tiny chance of mutating.

In the growing colony of synthetic cells, now numbering in the billions, it’s almost certain that Joyce’s watermark has already been defaced by a mutation. The bacteria that carry these degraded versions of Joyce presumably do not suffer from these mutations, since the watermarks don’t matter to them anyway. So they can keep replicating.By contrast, the DNA in the really useful parts of their genome is changing very little over the generations, thanks to selection.

Inserting Joyce into the first synthetic cell was certainly a kind gesture, but not a timeless memorial. It would be fascinating to go back to the synthetic cell colony in a few years and sequence Joyce’s line again. I’d bet that it won’t even be recognizable anymore.

The fate of Joyce’s DNA points up something important about this project. There have been lots of headlines over the past day about how the scientists who made this cell were playing God. Yet our power, even over synthetic cells, is limited. Once this new cell came into existence, it started changing through evolution, slipping away from its original form. In fact, evolution is the great enemy of all scientists who want to use synthetic biology to supply us with medicine, fuel, and other valuable things. Once they engineer a microbe, they start to lose control of their handiwork. Life takes its own course from there. It is life, ultimately, that recreates life from life.

How many yakking people does it take to drive you freaking nuts? Not two. Not three. Researchers say it only takes one--if they're talking to someone else you can’t hear. Cornell University scientists monitored how well 41 college students could perform concentration exercises (like tracking moving dots on a computer screen) in different listening environments. They compared their skills while working in silence to working while listening to a monologue, a conversation between two people, or a half conversation—called a “halfalogue.” In a paper to appear in Psychological Science, they say that this last case, listening to only one side of a conversation, was the most distracting. We all like to eavesdrop, so getting only part of the story can be especially frustrating. The Los Angeles Times reports:
"We believe this finding helps reveal how we understand language in conversation," the lead author of the study, Lauren Emberson, said in a news release. "We actively predict what the person is going to say next and this reduces the difficulty of language comprehension."
Scene: your favorite coffee shop. Enter the dude on his cell phone. Emberson and her team believes this half-convo confusion is part of what makes overheard cell phone chats so annoying. One ...

As opposed to simply energy, the universe is also made of stuff. Not a whole lot of stuff, mind you, at least if you compare the matter we experience to the vast emptiness of space or the preponderance of dark matter. But enough.

The continued prevalence of matter has long been one of my favorite attributes of the universe, given that it allows for the existence of galaxies, and Guinness. However, it’s the source of confusion to physicists. In short, there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter present at the creation of the universe, which doesn’t make sense:

If matter and antimatter had come out even in those first moments, they would have instantly destroyed each other, leaving nothing but energy behind [TIME].

But they didn’t; as sure as I’m sitting here, matter won out. And this week, at the Tevatron particle smasher in Illinois, a new clue to the problem has emerged. In a study for Physical Review D, physicist Dmitri Denisov and his colleagues explain that in long-running proton-antiproton collisions (nearly 8 years of them), they saw a slight favoritism toward normal matter in a particular place:

“While colliding protons and antiprotons, which creates neutral B mesons, we would expect that when they decay we will see equal amounts of matter and antimatter,” Denisov says. “For whatever reason, there are more negative muons, which are matter, than positive muons, which are antimatter.” According to DZero member Gustaaf Brooijmans, a physicist at Columbia University, “We observe an asymmetry that is close to 1 percent.” [Scientific American].

The Tevatron team doesn’t know why this asymmetry is there; they just know that it doesn’t make sense based on the current understanding of the universe. And scientists love it when there’s a puzzle to solve. Says team member and particle physicist Stefan Soldner-Rembold:

‘Many of us felt goosebumps when we saw the result,” Soldner-Rembold said. “We knew we were seeing something beyond what we have seen before — and beyond what current theories can explain” [Chicago Sun-Times].

The physics can’t rule out that a new particle would explain this weirdness. And there’s an obvious place to look for it: Europe’s shiny new Large Hadron Collider.

If it turns out that a new particle is in fact responsible for the odd tendency of B mesons to favor matter over antimatter, it might be unmasked in the unprecedented high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. But don’t count out the workhorse stateside, which has a head start of many years—and reams of well-understood data—on its more powerful European counterpart [Scientific American].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The 11 Great Unanswered Questions of Physics
Cosmic Variance: Matter v. Antimatter 1: The Baryon Asymmetry
80beats: Ghost in the Machine? Physicists May Have Detected a New Particle at Fermilab
80beats: Rumors of the LHC’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
80beats: Physicists Shoot Neutrinos Across Japan to an Experiment in an Abandoned Mine

Image: Fermilab

Butterfly in the sky, researchers wonder how you fly. To this end, Harvard University's Hiroto Tanaka and the University of Tokyo's Isao Shimoyama have built a butterfly doppelganger by combining angelic plastic wings, balsa wood, and rubber bands. The exact model for this "ornithopter" is the swallowtail: Tanaka and Shimoyama mimicked the exact size and weight of a flesh-and-blood member of the Papilionidae family. They even made detailed plastic veins on their butterfly's polymer wings. As the BBC reports, a high-speed video of their model's flight allowed Tanaka and Shimoyama to calculate the forces on the insect's wings. Also, by constructing the butterfly themselves, they could determine the essential bug pieces for forward flight. They found, for example, that those pretty veins are a must, but that the creatures need not continually adjust their wings during flight as other insects do. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics will publish their complete paper in June. Given existing robotic caterpillars, is anyone thinking Transformer? Related content:
80beats: Monarch Butterflies Navigate With Sun-Sensing Antennae
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Caterpillars must walk before they can anally scrape
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Butterflies evolve resistance to male-killing bacteria in record time
DISCOVER: The Calculating Beauty of Butterflies (photo gallery)

It might seem like a tautology — and that’s because it is — but sometimes the only word you can use to describe an image from the Cassini Saturn probe is otherwordly:

[Click to engasgiantize.]

This otherworldy picture was taken on March 24, 2010. The big moon is Rhea, seen from 1.2 million kilometers (750,000 miles) away, and the little one below it is Epimetheus, from 1.6 million km (990,000 miles) away. Perspective makes them look right next to each other, but in reality the distance between them is the same as the Moon from the Earth! Saturn and its rings provide the backdrop for this stunning alien portrait.

To me, the most striking thing about this picture is the difference between the two moons. Rhea is a ball, a sphere, while Epimetheus is clearly a lumpy rock. Rhea is also clearly a lot bigger, even accounting for perspective in the picture; it’s about 1520 km (940 miles) across, while Epimetheus is 144 x 108 x 98 km (86 x 64 x 58 miles) in size.

Why is Rhea round, and Epimetheus lumpy? Gravity. Rhea, being so much bigger, has a lot more mass, so its gravity is much stronger. Objects bigger than a few hundred kilometers across have enough mass that self-gravity becomes important in shaping them. A rock you might see lying on the ground is small and has very little gravity, so the important things that shape it are its chemistry, the crystal structure inside it, and its history (getting banged by another rock, erosion, and so on).

But as the mass increases, so does the influence of gravity. Eventually, gravity wins: it doesn’t matter what the composition is (metal, ice, rock) or the history (getting knocked around), because gravity is strong enough to shape the object into a sphere. Sure, other forces can be at play (for example, rotation can flatten an object out a bit), but gravity is the one with the biggest influence.

Gravity is an inward force, trying to draw everything into the center of the mass. That’s why big objects are spheres; anything large enough to stick up very far gets pulled down. Look at mountains on Earth: they can only get to a certain size before slumping. They can’t support their own weight! Olympus Mons on Mars is much bigger than any mountain could ever be on Earth, because Mars has less gravity.

So this is more than just a beautiful picture from Cassini; it’s an object lesson in gravity. And as science tells us over and again, size matters.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Venus, meet Japan. Today the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a rocket carrying several different missions bound for our boiling-hot sister planet. Here’s what they want to learn.

Atmospheric Tag Team

Akatsuki, the Venus climate probe, will arrive at the second planet from the sun in December. There it will team up with the European Space Agency’s Venus Express probe, using five cameras to peer down into the turbulent atmosphere and study Venus‘ maniacal meteorology.

One of the main goals is to understand the “super-rotation” of the Venus atmosphere, where violent winds drive storms and clouds at speeds of more than 220 mph (360 kilometers per hour), 60 times faster than the planet itself rotates [MSNBC].

The Venus Express’ own findings since it reached the planet in 2006 have bolstered the idea that Venus was once alive with plate tectonics, oceans, and continents—that is, it was once much more Earth-like than its current, sweaty incarnation. In fact, Venus may still be active.

Volcanoes?

It’s alive! It’s alive! (Maybe.)

Just last month, scientists working with the Venus Express reported seeing lava flows on the surface that barely showed signs of weathering. They’re young. The team argued that this is more evidence Venus is not just a shadow of its formerly active self, but could still be alive with volcanism.

The thick Venusian atmosphere is opaque to instruments that operate at visible wavelengths and so the Japanese probe carries five cameras that are sensitive in the infrared and ultraviolet parts of the electromagnetic spectrum [BBC News].

They’ll use these capabilities—infrared in particular—to scan the surface of Venus for any active volcanism.

Can We Fly This Solar Sail?

Japan’s H-IIA rocket also carried into space Japan’s solar sail project “Ikaros,” the Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun. As DISCOVER noted last month, when the sail (seen above) deploys, it will be 66 feet in diagonal distance, yet thinner than a human hair. Ikaros, named for the ill-fated mythological figure, actually has two propulsion systems. The “sail” part refers to its ability to use the tiny pressure of sunlight the way a sailboat uses the wind. But the craft is also equipped with photovoltaic cells to generate solar electricity.

The hardest part is just deploying such a large sail, project leader Osamu Mori says, which they will attempt in a few days. Ground tests of this feature proved… difficult.

“We even sent it high up in the sky in a big balloon, to spread the film in a near-vacuum environment. We experienced many failures, but we kept searching for the most reliable deployment method, and that led us to the model we’ve now built. I believe it will be successful” [BBC News].

Follow DISCOVER (@DiscoverMag) on Twitter

Related Content:
80beats: Japan’s “Solar Yacht” Is Ready to Ride Sunbeams Through Space
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80beats: Volcanoes on Venus Could Be Alive & Ready To Erupt
DISCOVER: One Giant Step for a Small, Crowded Country, on Japan’s moon aspirations
DISCOVER: Japan Sets Sail in Space

Image: JAXA

There is no action so stupid that you can’t persuade someone to do it by getting celebrity endorsement. Even the barmiest advice on everything from medical decisions to diets will have happy idiots queuing up to listen, if it comes from the mouth of someone who was once on TV. Such recommendations can be disastrous, but they can be beneficial if the people in question are wise and knowledgeable, from village elders to community leaders. This is all part of the same trend – the human penchant for apeing individuals with high status. And now, it seems that we aren’t the only species that does this. Chimpanzees have the same inclination for apeing those with prestige.

We know that chimps can pick up new traditions from one another, with different groups enjoying rich and diverse cultures. Much of this understanding is thanks to work from scientists like Victoria Horner, Andrew Whiten and Frans de Waal at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Now, the same team have found that when it comes to passing on traditions, some chimps are more influential than others. Given a choice between two individuals, chimps tend to copy the actions of the older, higher-ranking one.

The Yerkes Center is, incidentally, a shining paragon of ape research. The chimps live in spacious outdoor enclosures, full of grass, climbing frames, swings, and toys to stimulate their mind. The researchers call each chimp by name and ask them to take part in studies, giving them the choice to interact with equipment.

So far, the center’s researches have focused on whether chimps pass on traditions to one another but they’ve now started to look at why a chimp might decide to copy another chimp’s behaviour. Horner gave two groups of chimps a chance to learn a new set of skills from one of two different tutors. In each tutor pair, one animal was a high-ranking older female who has successfully passed on cultural traditions before, and the other was a younger subordinate who had no such experience.

In the first group, Horner trained the older female to collect plastic tokens and put them in a spotted box in exchange for food. Meanwhile, she trained the younger female to do the same with a striped box. In the second group, the box assignments were reversed. Over ten days, the other chimps watched as their demonstrators enacted their token-collecting actions during 20-minute sessions.

When the onlookers were given tokens of their own, they were far more likely to stick them in the box favoured by the older, high-ranking female, whether it was striped or spotty. As groups, they opted for her choice on around 70% and 90% of the time. As individuals, they also showed the same favouritism.

This bias must stem from differences between the two tutor chimps, for neither action was harder than the other nor did either one earn a greater reward. The tutors demonstrated in parallel sessions for the same number of times at the same distance from their audience. And the dominant chimp didn’t make any more aggressive advances than the subordinate.

Horner thinks that chimps, like humans, gain “prestige” as they demonstrate their skills and knowledge, and with it comes a disproportionate influence over their peers. The effect is probably even more pronounced in the wild, when low-ranking individuals may be more concerned about aggressive rebukes from their peers and stay on the periphery of their groups. But for the moment, it’s not clear what exactly contributes to this prestige: age; social status; past successes; or a combo of the above? Having only studied two pairs of demonstrator chimps, Horner can’t tell which yet.

This might seem obvious but it’s never been tested before and it casts our knowledge of chimp culture in a different light. Groups of wild chimps certainly have cultural differences but equally, field researchers have found that the vast majority of innovations never spread. Chimps also get ‘stuck’ on familiar techniques. They’re reticent to adopt a new strategy, even if it’s more efficient.

Horner’s new results could help to explain why. It seems that in chimp societies, subordination is the mother of invention. Most innovations are the work of low-ranking individuals, trying to avoid competition from their superiors. Ironically, these individuals are the least likely to be aped by their fellow apes. Only if they rise through the ranks do they stand a chance of significantly passing on their new behaviours to their colleagues.

Reference: PLoS ONE http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010625

Photo: by Matthew Hoelscher

More on chimp behaviour:

• How chimpanzees deal with death and dying
• Culture shapes the tools that chimps use to get honey
• Chimps use Swiss army toolkit to rob beehives
• Cultured chimps pass on new traditions between groups
• Chimpanzee collects ammo for “premeditated” tourist-stoning
• Chimpanzees make spears to hunt bushbabies

Clifford over at Asymptotia talks a bit about a new discovery that might explain why there is so much matter and so little antimatter in the Universe. This is one of the biggest as-yet unexplained questions in all of science, and this new discovery — covered in the New York Times — may be a key to understanding it.

Matter and antimatter are arbitrarily named; had there been more of what we call antimatter made in the early Universe, we’d be calling antimatter matter and matter antimatter. Confused? Wait until you try to figure out if I’m evil because I have a beard in our matter Universe or if I would be evil if I had no beard in an antimatter one!

Not that it matters.