It’s not that teenagers aren’t trying to learn. (Well, OK, some of them definitely aren’t trying.) But the distractions that come with being a teenager are exacerbated by the fact that teens just don’t learn as quickly as either young kids or adults, and a new study of mice that appears in Science points to specific brain changes that might help explain why.

Seeking to study spatial learning during puberty, the team devised a relatively complex task (at least for a mouse) that requires learning how to avoid a moving platform that delivers a very mild shock [TIME]. While the prepubescent mice picked up on what to avoid pretty quickly, as did adult mice, pubescent mice took considerably longer to figure it out. The key to these differences was what study leader Sheryl Smith saw in the brains of these mice.

Building on their own previous work that showed a spike in the number of chemical receptors in the brains of adolescent mice, Smith and her colleagues looked for that effect in the hippocampus, the brain region associated with learning. Sure enough, pubertal mice had seven times as many of the receptors as infant mice. In adulthood, the number of these receptors fell back to an intermediate level [New Scientist]. Smith thinks those extra receptors could be inhibiting learning by interfering with activity in the hippocampus.

While people often complain of being too stressed to learn, you need a least a little bit of pressure, and it seems the pubescent mice weren’t stressed enough. When Smith’s team gave the mice a stress steroid called THP, that reduced the learning problems. Typically THP is produced in response to stress, and has a calming influence. But in the strange brains of the pubescent mice, THP did the opposite—it slightly increased their stress levels and closed the learning gap.

It’s too early to say how well this might work on humans, since our teenagers, compared to pubescent mice, are an even more complex puzzle. It’s possible that “they’re just being difficult, it’s their hormones, or they’re doing it on purpose,” she said. “There are so many things going on in humans that we wanted to break it down in a mouse study where we could look at what’s going on in the brain” [HealthDay News].

Related Content:
80betas: How Ritalin Works In the Brain: With a One-Two Dopamine Punch
80beats: Why ADHD Kids Have Trouble Doing Homework: No Payoff
DISCOVER: Girls Hit Puberty Earlier Around the World

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Futurama comes back in June on Comedy Central!

Squa.

Wheeee!

Tip o’ the brain slug to my pals at io9.

After months of party wrangling that culminated in a Sunday night political spectacle, President Obama has finally managed to push through far-reaching reform to the country’s health care system. The House voted 219-212 for final approval of the legislation, and on Tuesday the President will sign the bill into law.

The new law would require most Americans to have health insurance, would add 16 million people to the Medicaid rolls and would subsidize private coverage for low- and middle-income people, at a cost to the government of $938 billion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office said [The New York Times].

Here’s a primer on what some of the biggest changes will be in the current health care system. While some changes won’t come into effect till 2014, there are some things that will affect your insurance this year.

Immediate Changes (2010)

These are the changes that Obama and team call the “early deliverables,” because they would kick into effect as early as six months after the bill is signed into law. Here are a few.

• The uninsured can finally get coverage: Adults who have been denied coverage because of preexisting conditions will be able to sign on to a federally subsidized insurance program that is due to be established within 90 days. This stopgap insurance program, whose coverage isn’t expected to be comprehensive, will expire once new insurance exchanges start operating in 2014.
• Coverage for everyone: Insurance companies will not be allowed to drop people from coverage when they get sick, nor can they make health plans vastly more expensive for people with preexisting conditions. Lifetime limits on the amount of health care an insurer will pay for will be eliminated, and annual limits will be restricted.
• Coverage for kids: For parents with a sick child, there’s some relief—companies won’t be able to drop kids under the age of 19 from coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Parents can also keep their kids on a family plan till they turn 26 or get a job that offers them benefits.
• Closing the doughnut hole: An estimated 4 million Medicare beneficiaries who hit the so called “doughnut hole” in the program’s drug plan (the gap in coverage which currently begins after $2,700 is spent on drugs) will get a $250 rebate this year. The cost of drugs in the coverage gap will then drop 50 percent next year, and the hole will be closed entirely by 2020.
• Tax credits for small businesses: For small businesses with fewer than 25 employees and average wages of less than $50,000, the government will provide a tax credit of up to 35 percent of the cost of healthcare premiums so that they may provide coverage to their employees.

Short-Term Changes (2011-2014)

• Free annual wellness visit for Medicare beneficiaries: Medicare beneficiaries will get a free annual wellness visit, and the new health plans will be required to cover preventive services with little or no cost to patients. Medicare will also provide 10 percent bonus payments to primary care physicians and general surgeons.
• New Medicaid program for poor: A new Medicaid plan for the poor will allow states to provide more home- and community-based care for disabled people who would otherwise require institutional help.

Long-Term Changes (2014 onwards)

• Get insurance or face penalties: Beginning in 2014, all Americans would be expected to get insurance or face penalties. The fine depends on household income, but there’s also an upper limit; a family would pay a maximum of $2,085. Extremely low-income people will be exempt from the fines.
• Large employers must provide insurance: Big employers are also expected to provide coverage to workers or face fines. Businesses with 50 or more workers who do not provide coverage will be fined $2,000 for each uninsured employee.
• Extending Medicaid to cover low-income families: Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor and disabled, will be expanded sharply starting 2014; it will now offer care to people with annual incomes less than 133 percent of the poverty level ($29,326 for a family of four).
• Tax credits for low-income families: People with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level will receive tax credits on a sliding scale relative to their income to help them to buy insurance.
• Buying insurance on state exchanges: State-based insurance marketplaces called exchanges are expected to go into effect in 2014, where people can pick and choose the plan that works best for them. Once the exchanges are up and running, insurers will be barred from rejecting applicants based on their health status. The new policies sold on the exchanges will be required to cover not just hospitalizations, doctor visits, and prescription medicines, but also maternity care and certain preventive exams.

Related Content:
Cosmic Variance: Obamacare

Image: Pete Souza/ Whitehouse.Gov

I’ve said here before that the path of reality is razor-thin: there’s only one way to be right, but an infinite number of ways to be wrong.

The thing is, that narrow path is like a single, unbroken strand, but each path of unreality leads to every other. If you can chuck reality into the dustbin, then all manners of silliness seem equally plausible. You might think that believing in Santa Claus is a lot sillier than believing in homeopathy, but really they’re the same: they’re both fantasy.

For support in this thesis of mine, I present to you an article in the New York Times about how politicians who attack evolution legislatively are now also attacking global warming. This doesn’t surprise me at all, for two reason. One is that I’ve already written about dumb legislation in South Dakota and Utah trying to resolve away climate change, resolutions filled with nonsense and ridiculous assertions that fly in the face of what we know. That’s empirical proof that politicians are willing to try to legislate narrow partisan beliefs into reality.

But the other reason I’m not surprised is that, over the past decade or so in particular, we’ve seen the far right promote fantasy over reality. Abstinence-only education, creationism, global warming denialism, defunding stem cell research, the mocking of volcano research, fruit fly research, planetarium star projectors.

It shows to me that once you buy into one flavor of candy-coated nonsense, they all start to taste pretty good. But we have to be adults here, and understand that you can’t live on candy. In fact, too much makes you sick. And that’ll make walking that narrow path that much harder.

Everyone knows plants are special. They eat meat, respond to music, and of course perform the impressive feat called photosynthesis. And now, thanks to artist and smarty-pants Jonathon Keats they have entertainment. Keats has produced a documentary show just for plants. After making porn for plants featuring hardcore pollination, he has turned to more general themes. The above image is a sample of skies filmed in the United States and Europe, recently projected for a selected botanical audience at the AC Institute in NYC.

Image courtesy Jonathon Keats

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) continues through Thursday of this week, and the fallout continues today.

On Friday we reported that the bluefin tuna trade ban failed thanks in large part to Japanese diplomatic efforts, denying new protections to the endangered fish, but also noted that the question of opening the ivory trade had yet to see a vote. Over the weekend the convention voted down those ivory proposals put forth by Tanzania and Zambia, which would have allowed one-off sales of ivory from government stockpiles. The ivory trade was banned in 1989, but two sales have since been granted to nations showing effective conservation [BBC News]. However, fears that such sales encourage poaching led the meeting’s attendees to reject the new proposals.

While most conservation groups lobbied against the ivory proposal, another of their pet causes—offering more protection for corals against harvesters who sell them as jewelry—failed at CITES. The proposed restrictions would have stopped short of a trade ban but required countries to ensure better regulations and to ensure that stocks of the slow-growing corals, in the family coralliidae, were sustainably harvested [The New York Times]. The provision garnered 64 “yes” votes to 59 for “no,” but needed a two-thirds majority to pass.

Related Content:
80beats: Bluefin Tuna is Still on the Menu: Trade Ban Fails at International Summit
80beats: Is Ivory Season Starting, Just As Tuna Season’s Ending?
80beats:Scientists Say Ban Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Trade–and Sushi Chefs Shudder
80beats: Elephant-Lovers Worry About Controversial Ivory Auctions in Africa

Image: flickr / wwarby

Good news and bad news last night, as the House passed health care reform.

The good news is: the House passed health care reform. The work isn’t completely done yet, of course. The House had already passed a heath care bill, months ago, but this isn’t it; last night they passed the Senate’s version of the Bill, which had some glaring flaws. Under ordinary circumstances the House and Senate would get together and hammer out a compromise between their two bills. But in the meantime Republicans picked up an extra Senate seat in Massachusetts after Teddy Kennedy died, and they had promised to filibuster the compromise package. (Because, after all, what courageous moral stand could be worth invoking arcane parliamentary procedures more than the fight to prevent millions of people from getting health insurance, especially if that was the life’s goal of the Senator whose death allowed you to improve from having twenty fewer votes than the opposition to only having eighteen fewer votes?)

So Obama will sign the Senate bill that the House just approved, and then the Senate will consider a reconciliation bill also passed by the House last night. Under even-more-arcane procedures, the reconciliation measure can be passed without threat of filibuster. It requires only “majority vote,” a quaint notion in this highly baroque age.

It’s not an especially huge bill, whatever you may have heard, but it will have an impact. Here is a list of the major impacts, and an interactive graphic to figure out how you will be affected. The most important features seem to be:

• Establish health insurance exchanges, and provide subsidies for people below four times the poverty line.
• Guarantee insurance for people with pre-existing conditions, and eliminate “rescissions” that take away insurance from people who get sick.
• Push business to provide insurance for their employees, and self-employed individuals to buy insurance for themselves.
• Close the “donut hole” in the existing Medicare payout structure.
• Implement cost controls (mostly through slowing the growth of Medicare spending), thereby lowering the budget deficit by $130 billion over the first ten years, and by another $1 trillion over the next ten years.

Overall, it’s a relatively incremental bill, placing bandages over some of the more egregious wounds in the current system, while leaving in place the essential structure through which we funnel billions of dollars to middlemen while paying far more for medical care per person than any other country without getting better results. For 90% of Americans, coverage and insurance will continue as before. Basically, this brings us a little closer to where Western Europe was a century ago.

Still, a tremendous political accomplishment — maybe not from the perspective of what we were hoping for when Democrats took control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency in 2008, but certainly from the perspective of the last couple of months, when it often seemed like we weren’t going to get anything at all. More than anyone, credit for the accomplishment goes to Nancy Pelosi, who didn’t give up when things looked grim. From now on she won’t simply be known as the first female Speaker of the House, but one of the most effective leaders in its history. Here she is marching to the Capitol yesterday, arms linked with civil-rights pioneer Representative John Lewis from Georgia, carrying the gavel that was used when Medicare was passed in 1965. An historic moment.

Which brings us to the bad news. One of the reasons why Pelosi was marching with Lewis was to demonstrate support a day after this man who had marched at Selma was repeatedly called “nigger” by protesters outside the Capitol. Ugly by itself, but worse in context: it’s becoming harder and harder to have a meaningful debate in this country without participating in a race to the rhetorical bottom.

There exist reasonable arguments against health-care reform; not arguments I agree with, but ones that at least make superficial sense. It costs money to provide insurance for the uninsured, and someone will have to pay. Asking healthy people to buy insurance will be a burden to them. There will be less extra money floating around if we cut down on unnecessary costs, which might impede the pace of medical innovation. (I didn’t say they were great arguments, just that they made superficial sense.) But these aren’t the arguments that are actually made most frequently. Instead we hear that the Democrats are abandoning the principles of representative democracy by passing legislation while they control both legislative houses and the executive; or that liberals won’t stop until they have swept away the last vestiges of personal choice in American life; or that the government wants to decide when to kill granny. Right-wing bloggers nod with approval at the idea that people are stocking up on guns, preparing for fighting in the streets. The race to find the most scary and overheated characterization of a pretty benign state of affairs is a fierce one.

The most depressing aspect of the situation is not the existence of crazy fringe elements — those will always be with us, on both sides of any issue — but of the reinforcing dynamic between the fringe and the supposedly respectable parts of the Republican party. It’s been clear for a while to most people (outside the White House, anyway) that Republicans in Congress made a clear choice that their own self-interests are served by preventing Democrats from passing any meaningful legislation, whatever that might mean for the good of the country. Speeches during House “debate” last night consistently played to the worst aspects of the protesting mob. One Congressman shouted “baby killer!” at Democrat Bart Stupak, who is staunchly anti-abortion, as he spoke to support the bill. [Update: it was Randy Neugebauer (R-Tex.).] Two protesters inside the House chamber were arrested for being disruptive — and “several Republican lawmakers stood up and cheered during the interruption.”

Lest you think this is simply concern-trolling from a liberal telling conservatives to be less intrusive, note that conservative commentators like David Frum are making the same point: the rhetoric has gotten out of hand, and it’s not good for anybody, except maybe the “conservative entertainment industry.”

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

I’m not sure what the end game is — whether it’s possible to step back to a more reasonable dialogue. Disagreement is good, and it’s important to have an active and engaged opposition party, no matter who the majority party might be. But whipping up hysteria at the cost of working together constructively isn’t in anyone’s interests. Obama campaigned on a message of hope and change and bipartisan togetherness, and I think that was a sincere message on his part; but it certainly hasn’t come to pass, and there doesn’t seem to be any indication that it will.

A sad but true fact:

Receiving a balloon animal is only Act 1 of an inevitable three act tragedy.

I am currently reading The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by one of our great science writers, Deborah Blum. She will, I hope, be a guest on Point of Inquiry at some point.

Blum weaves a masterful tale of how modern forensic medicine emerged during the era of Prohibition as a doctor-toxicologist team hunt down murderers who use arsenic, mercury, and cyanide, and try to protect the public health from threats like tetrahedral lead, wood alcohol, and carbon monoxide. Move over, CSI Miami–here’s CSI 1920s New York. Just amazing stuff; no wonder Blum is at around # 240 0n Amazon right now….

I sometimes make fun of NASA for being a bit stodgy, but in truth a lot of the folks there are pretty savvy when it comes to new tech and social media. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity were on Facebook pretty quickly, and a flood of other space probes followed suit. Twitter is well-populated by NASA people, including astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who has been tweeting tirelessly from orbit recently, posting one amazing picture after another of cities, landscapes, and even the Moon.

One thing NASA is careful about is archiving material. They are well aware of the importance of the work they’re doing, and public outreach is a critical aspect of it. That’s why I’m happy to see a new effort on the part of the space agency to archive all their social media outlets.

It’s just started, so it’s a bit sparse, but I can see this being very useful to future historians. It may seem silly to have an online record of all the official tweets from NASA people, but in fact there is a wealth of information there. And it’s not just Twitter; it’s also Flickr for pictures, and YouTube for videos. I can see this expanding to Facebook, too, and other social networks. There’s a brief intro to the archive on the NASA images blog as well.

NASA does a pretty decent job of being transparent to its stakeholders — that’s you, folks — far better than most other government agencies, despite being online in far larger proportion than them as well. And I know that I’ll be able to use this archive for blogging; it’ll make linking to NASA efforts a whole lot easier. Not only that, but I found a couple of new Twitter streams form NASA I’m interested in, too! So take a look at the archive and dig around. I just bet you’ll find something cool there.

This week’s kiss was sent by Sara Cody who writes:

This is my New Years 2010 kiss with my boyfriend Jeff at Times Square in New York City. This is actually a still from a video we took on our camera of the ball drop and our subsequent kiss after!

Thanks for this beautiful submission Sara! (Click on the image to make it larger)

Submit your original photograph or artwork to the Science of Kissing Gallery for consideration by emailing me at srkirshenbaum@yahoo.com.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This animation of a virtual flight over of the southwestern part of the Candor Chasma on Mars was made from HiRISE Digital Terrain Models (DTM’s).  Essentially DTM’s are made from two images of the same area on the ground taken from different angles, a stereo pair. The process of going from a stereo pair to a DTM is the hard part. Happily we have people who are up to the challenge.

The great thing about the DTM is the high resolution of the source imagery, the HiRISE images coming from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are normally between 0.25 and 0.5 m/pixel.  The derived terrain is about four times the source, so we are talking a vertical precision in the tens of centimeters. ¹

Source

Hat tip to Don, thanks Don!

¹ http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/HiBlog/tag/dtm/

A depiction of the equinox. Credit: Wikipedia

Tomorrow At 17:32 UTC (13:32 EDT) the tilt of the Earth on its axis is such that it is not noticeably tilted north or south.  This means folks at a given latitude in both the northern and southern hemisphere will get the same amount of daylight.

For those of us in more northerly latitudes it also marks the beginning of spring — YAY!

More importantly, tomorrow you will be able to balance an egg on its large end!!  Ok so you can also do that any other day of the year.  For some reason that equinox myth makes the rounds this time of year, sorry, there is nothing special about eggs and equinoxes.

You might think the equinox means equal amounts of day and night, but this is usually not the case.  The term for either of the two days in a year of equal 12 hr days and nights (or as close as it is possible to get) is an equilux.  Typically they are labeled the Vernal or Autumnal Equilux.

Want to check the date of your equilux?  Click here.  Mine is March 18, 2010.

So there you go, oh and if you are disappointed to find out there is nothing special about eggs on the equinox, here’s a tip that might save you some embarrassment in a couple weeks on April Fools Day:  You can tell if an egg is hard boiled or not by simply spinning it.  A hard boiled egg will spin nicely and a raw egg will not.  Try it.

It’s become one of our favorite rituals: Researchers come out with a paper pushing the science of invisibility cloaks a little further, inspiring everyone to go giddy with visions of Harry Potter and Romulan Warbirds. This week’s study in Science is another small step, but it’s a crucial one. Scientists in Germany have created the first rudimentary “invisibility cloak” in 3D.

Invisibility cloak mania started in 2006, when a Duke University team created the technology to bend light waves around an object; since the tiny object neither absorbed nor reflected the experiment’s microwaves, it was essentially “cloaked.” (The researchers used microwaves instead of visible light because microwaves have longer wavelengths, and are therefore easier to control.) The invisibility excitement struck again two years later when researchers refined their technique to hide a nanoscale object from visible light waves.

Now, researchers have created a cloak that not only works in infrared light wavelengths that are close to humans’ visual range, but also in 3D, too. Previous devices have been able to hide objects from light travelling in only one direction; viewed from any other angle, the object would remain visible [BBC News].

The team from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology didn’t exactly make the Statue of Liberty disappear. The “bump” made invisible is a spot in a layer of gold that’s 0.00004 inches high by 0.00005 inches wide. That hasn’t dampened lead researcher Tolga Ergin’s excitement, though. “In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it,” Ergin said. Developing the fabrication technology so that the crystals were smaller could “lead to much larger cloaks” [The Independent].

The sci-fi kind of cloaking will be harder to achieve, since visible wavelengths of light are shorter than infrared and thus harder to control. But Ergin’s 3D cloak is another step toward humanity’s ultimate dream: not being bothered by other humans.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: How to Build an Invisibility Cloak
DISCOVER: Invisibility Becomes More Than Just a Fantasy
80beats: New Version of Invisibility Moves Closer to Visual Cloaking
80beats: Light-Bending Scientists Take a Step Closer to Invisibility

Image: Science/AAAS

Over at The Planetary Society Blog, Emily has posted this bizarre image of the International Space Station, taken by another satellite in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum. If you want the whole story, then click it and see what she wrote!

Geeks across the galaxy, rejoice! Soon you’ll be able to release your inner Jedi and vanquish evil forces with your iPhone–or rather with the new “Star Wars: Lightsaber Duel” app, due to be released next month.

The new dueling app builds on an existing iPhone app, “Lightsaber Unleashed,” which was a one-person game that turned your screen into a glowing lightsaber, and made an official-sounding “whoosh” as you brandished your phone. But the new app is a two-geek affair that promises to enhance your lightsaber experience.

If you and a friend both have the app, you’ll be able to use Bluetooth to duel with one another–although it isn’t yet clear how the app declares a victor. Advertisements for the new app also declare that it will feature 11 new characters from the Star Wars series, which presumably means that you can decide whose lightsaber you want to wield, and whether you swear allegiance to the Rebel Alliance or the Dark Side.

Plus, for the many people who think lightsaber duels are pointless without dramatic accompanying music, here’s some news. The app has thoughtfully provided a selection of music to pick from as you duke it out.

THQ Wireless, the makers of Lightsaber Duel have also ramped up the graphics and animations and hope to have the product ready by April. There’s still no word yet on how much it would cost to download. The previous app was free.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Weird iPhone Apps, a compendium
Science Not Fiction: Star Wars: Taking “A Long Time Ago” Very Seriously
Bad Astronomy: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Science Not Fiction: The Return Of…Chad Vader
Science Not Fiction: If You Wait Long Enough, There *Is* Sound in Space

Image: THQ Wireless

On Monday, we reported that the United States and the European Union were spearheading an effort to ban the international trade of bluefin tuna at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Now that the week is ending, so are the hopes for the proposal that could have protected the vanishing fish. It failed by a wide margin, thanks largely to the diplomatic efforts of Japan.

Japan consumes around three-quarters of the globe’s bluefin tuna catch, with almost all of it served raw as sushi and sashimi, of which it is the most sought-after variety [Christian Science Monitor]. It can be an expensive delicacy there. In addition, the transformation of sushi from a luxury dish to a cheap food available at the corner store seems to be one of the factors that has led to quickly diminishing tuna stocks. The Japanese government, while acknowledging that the species is in danger, pledged to defeat the proposal or else opt out of complying with it.

At CITES, Japan rallied developing nations and fishing industry nations against the ban, and Libya called a committee vote that quashed the proposal before it even reached a vote in the full session. Privately, European diplomats expressed frustration that Japan, which consumes 80 per cent of the bluefin tuna caught, was able to cement opposition to the ban while the EU’s 27 member states were thrashing out their internal disputes [Financial Times]. The Christian Science Monitor, however, interviewed Japanese residents who say the fact that the bluefin is getting more attention than other troubled fish is partly because of building anti-Japan sentiment, pointing to the Toyota public shaming and the controversy connected to the documentary The Cove, which shone the spotlight on an annual dolphin hunt.

CITES meets every two or three years. Before this year’s meeting is out, the organization must vote on the proposal by Tanzania and Zambia to open up trade in elephant ivory. A ban on polar bear trade that the United States proposed already went down in flames. Finally, a proposal that simply called for more research into the illegal shark trade, in which fins are harvested for shark fin soup while the rest of the animal is left to rot, was also defeated.

Related Content:
80beats: Is Ivory Season Starting, Just As Tuna Season’s Ending?
80beats:Scientists Say Ban Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Trade–and Sushi Chefs Shudder
80beats: DNA Forensics Traces Sharks Killed for Their Fins
80beats: Human Appetite for Sharks Pushes Many Toward Extinction
80beats: Documentary on Endangered Bluefin Tuna Reels in Sushi Joints & Celebrities
80beats: Elephant-Lovers Worry About Controversial Ivory Auctions in Africa

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In leafcutter ants and honeybees, it’s survival of the fittest sperm. Biologist Boris Baer, for a study out this week in Science, investigated these two species because of their peculiar sexual practices: In one day, the queen acquires all the sperm she’ll need to fertilize her eggs over the course of her lifetime. But in the race to be the top genetics-spreader, the males have evolved a dirty trick. Their seminal fluids actually do battle within the female’s reproductive tract.

To test out the idea, Baer and colleagues exposed the sperm of the bee and ant males to their own seminal fluid, and also to that of other males of the same species. The seminal fluid killed more than 50 per cent of the rival sperm within 15 minutes. “The males seemed to use the seminal fluid to harm the sperm,” says Baer [New Scientist]. When the team studied other organisms whose lifestyle didn’t depend on this kind of polyandry, they didn’t see the same effect.

However, in an interesting twist, it turns out that the queen is onto these devious males. In her sperm storage area, the spermatheca, the queen has a fluid she can deploy at the time of her choosing to put a stop to the seminal competition. “We basically show that there are two wars going on at the same time,” says Dr Baer. “The male would actually like to kill sperm from other males, but the female has other ideas” [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]. Baer suspects that she lets the competition run on long enough to eliminate the weakest candidates, then halts it before too much has been destroyed.

Given that we humans aren’t the most faithful lot, is it possible that we evolved something similar? Unlikely. “To my knowledge women do not copulate with 90 mates in half an hour, so whether there is much room that this has evolved in humans as well, I have my doubts,” says Baer [New Scientist].

And if you haven’t had your fill of sperm news, fear not—there’s more. Baer’s team studied semen warfare in the lab, but in a separate Science study, researchers show that they could observe it happening inside the insect, thanks to glowing sperm. While scientists first created such a thing a decade ago, now Scott Pitnick says his team has found a way to track them in real time. “It turns out that they [the sperm] are constantly on the move within the female’s specialised sperm-storage organs and exhibit surprisingly complex behaviour,” Prof Pitnick said. “It far exceeds our expectations, in that we can essentially track the fate of every sperm the female receives” [BBC News].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Most Incredible Things Ants Can Do (photo gallery)
DISCOVER: Sperm Cells Demonstrate Some Brotherly Solidarity
80beats: Revealed: The Secret of the Sperm’s Wild Dash to the Egg
Discoblog: In Competitive Sex, Male Butterflies Employ “Dipstick Method”

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Christian R. Linder

In the first part of this post, Researching at the edge of space, I talked about the scientific frontier about to be opened up by suborbital flights up to 100 km (62 miles) above the Earth’s surface. The possibilities for science are exciting… but at the meeting I attended about these rockets, there was something else going on. And as interesting as the science involved with this will be, there was something bigger on everyone’s mind. At the meeting, the electricity about it was palpable, and it was obvious what it was.

We are at the very threshold of easy, inexpensive access for humans to space.

At $200,000, a flight to the edge of space is cheap. That’s well within the budget for a lot of people on this planet. Not me personally (dagnappit) but I know people who can afford that. And hundreds of human beings across the world have signed up.

This isn’t make believe. No, this is quite real. So real, in fact, that Alan Stern and Dan Durda, both friends of mine, both astronomers, and both men with their eyes firmly planted on the skies, created this video. You really, really need to see this.

They also have a followup video about the training of the first class of citizen astronauts as well.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic will probably be the first company to launch private citizens into space. They have already sold 300 seats and have deposited $39 million in advance sales! At the meeting, Steven Attenborough with VG said that they expect Space Ship 2 to do a "drop test" (literally be hoisted up to 50,000 feet and dropped by an airplane for a test landing) in the fall of 2010, and undergo its first power tests by the end of the year.

Humans will then be loaded up and sent into space in 2011. That’s next year.

People always lament that we’re past the year 2000 and we still don’t have flying cars. Personally, I don’t trust 95% of the people driving on the ground, let alone in the air. But it doesn’t matter, because the future is here. It’s now. Next year, people will be flying into space. Into space.

This is beyond cool. This is fantastic!

No, scratch that. The base root of that word is fantasy, and this is as real as it gets. While a lot of people have been whining about how the future never comes, my friends and a lot of others will soon be strapping themselves into rockets and making the dreams of Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and millions of others come true.

Per ardua ad astra. Hodie.