Million to one apple is half red, half green

A fruit grower was left stunned when he found a golden delicious apple on his tree split exactly half green, half red down the middle. The fruit's coloring is thought to be caused by a random genetic mutation at odds of more than a million to one.

Experts believe that the odds of finding an apple with such a perfect line between the green and the red are more than a million to one. In such cases, the red side usually tastes sweeter than the green side – because it has seen more sunshine during its growth.

Scientists note that this is known as a chimera where one of the first two cells has developed differently giving rise to one half of the apple being different. It is unlikely to be a stable mutation but it is worth checking next year to see if it recurs. There are instances of some striped apples and pears where the mutation remains stable.

Original article here.

Side note: This is the 300th post to the blog!

Butterflies Use Antenna GPS to Guide Migration

Scientists have finally located the 24-hour clock that guides the migration of monarch butterflies. Instead of being in the brain where most people expected, it turns out the circadian clock is located in the butterflies’ antennae.

Every fall, monarchs make an impressive 2,000-mile trek south, using the sun to guide them to the exact same wintering spot in central Mexico. But because the sun is a moving target, changing position throughout the day, biologists have long speculated that in addition to having a “sun compass” in their brains, butterflies must use some kind of 24-hour clock to guide their migration. Now, researchers have located this special GPS system.

The scientists had been studying the ability of butterfly antenna to sense odors when they uncovered something surprising: When they clipped off the insects’ antennae and tethered them in a flight simulator, the butterflies no longer flew in a uniform direction. Without their feelers, the butterflies lost the ability to navigate using the sun, as if they could no longer adjust their direction based on the time of day. This raised the prospect that the timing mechanism may actually be in the antennae.

The researchers tested their hypothesis by painting the antennae of half their butterflies with black enamel, which blocked all input from the sun, and the other half with clear paint that allowed the sun’s rays through. While the monarchs covered with clear paint kept flying south, the butterflies with blacked-out antennae started to drift consistently north, suggesting that their molecular clock was running about an hour off schedule.

The new finding not only changes how scientists think about butterfly antennae, but may also suggest a similar role for an antennal clock in other types of insects, such as bees and ants, that also operate elaborate navigation systems. Like butterflies, honeybees use a sun compass to find flowers and communicate their specific position to the rest of the hive, and they could be using a circadian clock in their antenna to adjust the sun’s position to the time of day.

Original article here.

Strange Animals Bred for Business Purposes

Breeders around the world covet certain animals for their economic potential. Some produce a lot of meat. Some are iridescent. Others fit well into small spaces. All of the animals featured below have highly unusual attributes that make each a potentially lucrative business proposition:

Giant Guinea Pig

Cuy meat is lean, protein-packed, and versatile. Cuys, or guinea pigs, reproduce quickly, offering a steady supply of meat. One Lima, Peru official said that guinea pigs will feed a family of up to eight people for only USD $3.20. Peruvians eat about 65 million guinea pigs per year. Scientists in Peru supersized the guinea pig, introducing a giant guy weighing about 2.2 pounds, twice the usual size.



Belgian Blue

Known as the Incredible Hulk cow, Monster cow, and Schwarzenegger cow, the Belgian Blue takes the world’s blue ribbon for buffness. The cow’s hereditary myostatin defect results in excessive muscle growth known as “double muscling.” As a result, the breed produces a large amount of lean beef.



Fainting Goat

Fainting goats are bred to fall over. A hereditary disorder, myotonia congenita, causes their muscles to freeze when they’re scared, often resulting in them collapsing on their sides. Their small size makes them ideal for small farms, where they won’t hop fences—or will scare themselves into collapsing when they try. According to oral history, the fainting goat was a good asset protector. Handlers would keep them with other (more valuable) animals, like sheep. When a predator came around, the fainting goat would collapse, effectively sacrificing itself so that the other animals could safely run away.



German Giant

The German Giant, one of the biggest domestic rabbit breeds on Earth, can grow to the size of a dog. Breeders covet giant rabbits for their looks, their fur, and their meat.



Minicow

German Shepherd-sized minicows cost only a few hundred dollars. They are tiny, meaty and fit in your backyard. Homesteaders can choose from Irish Dexter, Mini Hereford, or Lowline Angus cows.



Jersey Giant

The Jersey Giant chicken was originally bred as a replacement for turkey. The breed, originally crossbred from three other kinds of chickens, produces hens weighing an average of 11 lbs, and cocks of 13 lbs. The meat industry initially took to the idea, but then cast Jersey Giants aside because they don’t grow fast enough.



GloFish

Genetically engineered GloFish come in a variety of colors, such as Sunburst Orange, Starfire Red and Electric Green. These colorful zebrafish are the world’s first genetically modified pet. In 1999, scientists inserted fluorescence proteins from coral and jellyfish into a zebrafish embryo, resulting in the GloFish’s luminescent qualities. The idea was to create a fish that would fluoresce when it came near toxins, allowing it to detect pollution. When businesspeople caught wind of the glowing fish, they saw great potential for consumer sales.



Original article here

Spider-Man lookalike lizard

The vivid red-and-blue coloring of the Mwanza Flat-headed Rock Agama is almost uncannily like that of Spiderman, and comic book fans have been flocking to exotic pet shops to snap them up.

Agamas make good pets as they become tame and docile if handled regularly. They can grow up to a foot long with a balanced diet of locusts, crickets, mealworms and waxworms.

Native to Kenya, the rock agama is unable to throw webs, but can change color – the brightly colored males will change brown at night or if frightened. They can also run on their hind legs can scale vertical walls like Spider-man.

Original article here.

UPDATE:
More pictures of the lizard can be seen here.

Gene Therapy Cures Color-Blind Monkeys

After receiving injections of genes that produce color-detecting proteins, two color-blind monkeys have seen red and green for the first time.

Except in its extreme forms, color blindness isn’t a debilitating condition, but it’s a convenient stand-in for other types of blindness that might be treated with gene therapy. The monkey success raises the possibility of reversing those diseases, in a manner that most scientists considered impossible.

The team injected their monkeys’ eyes with viruses carrying a gene that makes L-opsin, one of three proteins released when color-detecting cone cells are hit by different wavelengths of light. Male squirrel monkeys naturally lack the L-opsin gene; like people who share their condition, they’re unable to distinguish between red and green.

At first, the two monkeys behaved no differently than before. Though quick to earn a grape juice reward by picking out blue and yellow dots from a background of gray dots on a computer screen, they banged the screen randomly when presented with green or red dots.

But after five months, something clicked. The monkeys picked out red and green, again and again. At the biological level, scientists can’t say precisely what happened — the monkeys, named Sam and Dalton, are alive and healthy, their brains unscanned and undissected — but their actions left no doubt.

Read more about the implications of the findings here.

How to make a Band-Aid from Tree Fungus

If you're out in the wilderness without a first aid kit and need a band-aid, according to this tutorial you can make one out of birch tree fungus in a pinch.

The author notes that Birch polypore, also known as Piptoporus betulinus, makes a for a good emergency band-aid. Check out the link for details on how to properly identify the fungus needed and pointers on avoiding additional injuries while making the band-aid.

Original article here.

Insects Emit Universal Death Stench

Scientists have discovered that insects from cockroaches to caterpillars all emit the same stinky blend of fatty acids when they die, and this sinister stench sends bugs of all kinds running for their lives.

A biologist made this morbid discovery while studying the social behavior of cockroaches. When a roach locates a great new abode (like your kitchen cupboard), it gives off a chemical signal to attract its cockroach friends. To determine the chemical composition of these pheromones, the scientists and his team started crushing dead cockroaches and spreading around their body juice. Cockroaches avoided places treated with these extracts "like the plague."

The team found that their concoction repelled not just cockroaches, but ants, caterpillars, woodlice and pill bugs. And even though they’re technically crustaceans rather than insects, dead woodlice and pill bugs produced the same set of fatty acids as the other animals.

Insects and crustaceans diverged from each other 400 million years ago, so the researchers think their death mix represents a universal, ancient warning signal. Recognizing and avoiding the dead could reduce the chances of catching the disease.

The scientists hope the right concoction of death smells might protect crops against pesky invaders. For instance, a log treated with the fatty acids repelled wood beetles in a forest for a full month.

Original article here.

See-Through Glass Frog

The see-through skin of an inch-long glass frog reveals her eggs. Native to Venezuela, the frogs lay eggs in bushes and trees overhanging streams. Tadpoles hatch, then tumble into the current to be swept away.



Taken from gallery here.

How to Photograph a Bat

Bats fly very quickly and only at night. Taking pictures of them is therefore very difficult. Check out the pictures below to see what steps this photographer took to get these great shots:

High-Speed Video of Locusts Could Help Make Better Flying Robots

A new study may inspire aeronautical engineers to be more "flexible" with their designs. The study shows that the bends and twists in locusts’ flexible, flapping wings power the insects’ extraordinary long-distance flights.

Even though researchers have been studying how insects and other creatures fly for a long time, the aerodynamics and architectures of wings is still not fully understood. The new work uncovers the flight signatures of flapping, flexible wings.

The research focuses on the flight of the pestilent locust, an insect renowned for its efficient flying style. The four-winged insects are built to fly hundreds of miles at a time.

Researchers used high-speed cameras to capture the details of how wings of the locust Schistocerca gregaria deform as they flap by bending and twisting.

Data from the high-resolution flight images allowed the researchers to create a near-perfect mathematical model of how the flexible, twisting wings propel the insect through the air. With the model in hand, they could predict the shapes of the air currents around the flying locusts. Tiny packets of smoke released near a flying locust showed air swirls similar to swirls predicted by the model. Tweaks to to the model indicated that stiffening and/or straightening the wings caused flight performance to suffer.

The study provides sound experimental evidence that flexible wings add to flight performance. Figuring out the details of how locusts and other insects fly may help researchers design tiny robotic fliers (or "micro air vehicles").

The picture below shows patterns of air movement caused by a flying locust (middle and right columns) are similar to air patterns predicted by a computer simulation (left column). Air swirls beneath the locust’s wings as the wings move downward from the beginning of a stroke (top panels) to the end (bottom panels).



Original article here.