Beluga whale saves diver

A drowning diver was saved by a Beluga whale that pushed her back to the surface when she suffered crippling cramps.

The diver thought she was going to die when her legs were paralyzed by arctic temperatures during a free diving contest without any breathing equipment. Competitors had to sink to the bottom of an aquarium's 20ft arctic pool and stay there for as long as possible amid the Beluga whales at Polar Land in Harbin, north east China.

Mila, the Beluga whale, had spotted her difficulties and pushed the diver to the top with her mouth.

New Bald Bird Discovered in Laos

A rare bald songbird has been discovered in the rocky limestone cliffs of central Laos.

Dubbed the “bare-faced bulbul” because of its unusual feather-free head, the newly discovered species is the only example of a bald songbird in Asia and the first new type of bulbul reported in the last hundred years.

It’s not clear how such a distinctive-looking bird escaped detection for so long, but the creature’s preference for rugged terrain probably played a role. The rocky limestone-dominated regions of Laos are generally uninhabitable by humans but home to a variety of unique animals, including new species of rabbit and rat discovered in the last decade.

No one knows exactly why this particular bulbul went bald, but scientists suspect its featherless face evolved as a way to attract mates.

Original article here.

Jellyfish Are the Dark Energy of the Oceans?

The fluid dynamics of swimming jellyfish have provided a plausible mechanism for a once-wild notion: that marine animals, hidden from sight and ignored by geophysicists, may stir Earth’s oceans with as much force as its wind and tides.

Called induced fluid drift, it involves the tendency of liquid to “stick” to a body as it moves through water — and a little bit of drift could add up quickly on a global scale.

The idea that animals could play a profound role in water-column commingling was once considered absurd, but in recent years, this consensus has sprung some leaks. When added up, winds and tides don’t quite provide enough energy to account for the amount of water-mixing observed in the seas.

In 2004, a study found that a school of fish could cause as much turbulence as a storm. Other researchers soon suggested that ocean swimmers could account for the gap. Soon after that, ocean physicists measured enormous turbulence generated by a swarm of krill, a crustacean considered too small to have meaningful mixing effects.

One physical explanation for how tiny forces could avoid being swallowed by the friction of the sea was that the act of swimming created pressure differentials that pulled water along with a body.

Scientists have provided the first direct observation of this phenomenon. Using fluorescent dyes and underwater video cameras, they’ve made visible the invisible, producing videos of swimming jellyfish trailed by the water they came from.

If the video seems like an infinitesimal drop in the bucket compared to winds or tides, consider that most of the ocean — excepting the top 300 feet or so — is so placid that a couple hand-held kitchen mixers could stir a cubic mile of it.

Scientists believe induced fluid drift could be caused by any swimming animal. Their next task is to verify that it does, and to put numbers to how much water is moved by each animal, how it mixes, how the figures vary by body shape and size and population density.

Original article here.

The toucan beak isn’t just beautiful, it’s also an adjustable thermal radiator that the bird uses to warm and cool itself.

Researchers have discovered that the toucan can heat and cool its bill at an astonishing rate, changing its temperature by up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit degrees within a few minutes. Birds do not sweat, so they must cope with other mechanisms to deal with elevated temperatures.

Using a temperature-sensing video called infrared thermography, scientists have tracked the pattern of heat distribution across the toucan’s body under changing outside temperatures. When the bird got too hot, it released heat by sending blood to its highly vascular but uninsulated beak. In cooler weather, the toucan constricted blood vessels in its beak to conserve heat and stay warm.

Like most mammals, including humans, the toucan drops its body temperature to conserve energy while sleeping. In the time-lapse video below, a toucan heats up its bill while falling asleep, then cools it down after reaching the optimal sleeping temperature. Once it has fallen asleep, the bird also tucks its beak under its feathers, presumably to avoid unwanted heat loss. (The 48-second video compresses two hours.)



Original article here.

Close Encounter with a Giant Octopus

G-T-C-A and Scientists for Better PCR

From Wired's Top 10 Scientific Music Videos.

“Self-Irrigating” Desert Plant Discovered

A desert plant has apparently figured out how to water itself.

Ecologists had been puzzling over the desert rhubarb for years: Instead of the tiny, spiky leaves found on most desert plants, this rare rhubarb boasts lush green leaves up to a meter wide. Now scientists have discovered that ridges in the plant’s giant leaves actually collect water and channel it down to the plant’s root system, harvesting up to 16 times more water than any other plant in the region. It is the online known case of a self-irrigating plant.

The desert rhubarb grows in the mountainous deserts of Israel and Jordan, where there’s only about 75mm of rainfall each year. Even during the rainy season, the region’s light rainfalls often don’t penetrate the rocky soil of the desert. Plants with large leaves and a deep root system, like the desert rhubarb, typically can’t survive in such an arid climate.

But when the researchers measured the plant’s water absorption during a light rain, they discovered that water infiltrated the soil 10 times deeper around the desert rhubarb then in surrounding areas. Upon closer examination, scientists discovered deep grooves around the plant’s veins, which are coated in a waxy cuticle that helps channel water down to the root.

Original article here.

Mozambique's Mount Mabu a Treasure Chest of New Species

A scientific team in the Mozambican rainforest is discovering new reptiles, birds, butterflies, plants and more on Mount Mabu.

The dwarf chameleon pictured below is an entirely new species to science. The picture is of the first specimen ever collected, a few hours after it was found. The little chameleons were found everywhere among the foliage, where even those with an untrained eye could spot them.



Mount Mabu is an isolated mountain that rises more than a mile above sea level in Mozambique’s Zambezia Province. It is called an isolate, and isolates, like islands, breed unique species. The area has been isolated for so long that species adapt and evolve to suit that specific environment, occurring there and no place else.

Some of the finds have raised interesting questions. For instance, the new species of Forest Viper snake found on Mount Mabu suggests a link with the Congo Basin, some 870 miles away. Does that mean that at some distant point in the past the Congo forest stretched down to northern Mozambique? When did it recede? What climactic event drove it back to the north? Those are the questions these scientists are studying.

The mountain was found with the help of Google Earth, which the scientists used to locate all mountains over a certain height in the area.

That the forest is almost untouched by human presence is clear. There are no chopped stumps, few paths, and the big forest giants like the mahogany trees are only falling because of occasional rot. The trees rise like the pillars of a cathedral, and the forest floor is dark, damp and covered in leaf litter.

The sheer number of new species found in the forest is staggering. To date there are four new butterflies, at least one new chameleon, three species of snake, a new species of crab, five new species of plants, and a host of potential new species, including a shrew, snails, a pseudo-scorpion, frogs, catfish, bats and insects. It’s clear that Mount Mabu’s secrets are only beginning to be revealed, and the researchers believe there is much more awaiting discovery.

Below is a video highlighting some of the recent discoveries on Mount Mabu:



Original article here.

Ant mega-colony takes over world

Scientists have discovered that a single mega-colony of ants has colonized much of the world.

Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same interrelated colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.

Argentine ants were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of miles.

Original article here.

Zoom in on an Ant

Click the picture below to be taken to a page on Gigapan, a site that features incredibly detailed gigapixel photos that you can zoom in on. This ant is composed of 400 pictures in total, and it's magnified 400x using a scanning electron microscope: