Science Watch

An American woodpecker, believed extinct for 50 years, has turned up on film - alive and well and living in Arkansas.

The Ivory Billed Woodpecker was America’s largest woodpecker, but was believed to have died out. The destruction of its natural habitat for logging is one reason for its decline.

However, David Luneau of the University of Arkansas caught a fleeting image of a mysterious bird on his camcorder, while kayaking. Later identification shows it could only be the once extinct bird.

The brief footage can be found here: Ivory Billed Woodpecker sighting

This is great news, and what is even better is that the logging that once threatened it has long since finished.

Scientists hope that there may be breeding birds still alive in the extensive flooded woodlands, but need to find out just how many of America’s largest woodpecker remain alive and protect them - after all, the bird on the film could even be the last one of its kind, but hopefully not.

It’s not everyone who has a Great Wite Shark.

However, Monterey Bay Aquarium in California did have one - but after six months have finally decided to release theirs into the wild.

Fishermen had accidentally caught the female great white last year, and donated it to the aquarium, who tried hard to set aside a large tank for her use.

However, after damaging her nose against the glass walls, and killing two smaller sharks in the same tank, officials decided she was suffering stress and needed to be re-released.

The shark will be returned to the Pacific Ocean. A special transmitter will also be attached, which will stay with her for 30 days, recording her movements, before naturally falling off.

Source: California aquarium releases captive, but resolves to get another

Humans may not be the only ones to share a laugh and joke.

Research in America has found that other animals share similar brain patterns as humans laughing.

This includes chimps, dogs, and rats.

The suggestion is that the biology behind laughter was developing in animals before humans evolved.

And also that other animals may have some developed mechanism that is their animal equivalent to laughing.

Story: Animal laughs no joke says expert

No, seriously - a study of the atmosphere shows that there all kinds of crap in the air.

Not only that, but all this crap in the atmosphere could actually affect the weather.

A global study of the atmosphere found that for about 1 in every 4 bits of solid particle they found high in the atmsophere, was something from an animal or plant - like bits of fur, skin, algae, bacteria, or pollen, for example.

It’s now being estimated that around a billion tons of this gets into the atmosphere, every year.

Because there’s so much of this shit up in the atmosphere, it means that it must play an active role in weather formation, such as helping rain clouds form.

So now when it rains, you might be more thankful for an umbrella.

Story: Detritus of life abounds in the atmosphere

T Rex blood tissue has been extracted by Mary Schweitzer at North Carolina State University.

Cool. So does that mean we’ll Jurassic Park for real anytime soon?

Fortunately, and unfortunately, no - what they found is a squishy mushy mess of cells and their proteins.

DNA is needed for cloning dinosaurs, and DNA is even more fragile than most proteins. When cells die and start to break down, DNA goes pretty quickly.

Let’s face it, DNA is one big complex molecule and because of its complexity, once it starts to degrade the whole code becomes a relatively useless pulp.

Getting 68 million-year old dino cells is still pretty neat, though, as normally there’s little other than minerals where the dinosaur soft stuff once was.

However, scientists have found that it they crush up some of the fossil, they can sometimes get at actual dinosaur cells, preserved within a mineral shell.

The amount extracted can be tiny - but that’s a tiny amount that connects us to the monsters of the Cretaceous period, and provides much more detail for us to try and study them.

Will Jurassic Park - or its equivalent - one day come true? Almost certainly. But not today. :)

Story: Blood vessels recovered from T. rex bone

Weighing in at just one zeptogram, it’s a few xenon atoms.

Which is a billion trillion times smaller than a gram. Smoke that. :)

What scientists did was use a set of scales that involve a really really narrow wire in a magnetic field, to weight small clusters of atoms.

In this example, they measured a group of xenon atoms.

Why, though? Isn’t this pointless?

Well, actually, this is pretty important in medicine - what they are trying to do is be able to weigh individual proteins.

This would be really useful because a lot of the stuff that makes up our bodies is built from the same material.

Which means when you are working with a really really tiny sample of tissue from someone, it can be really hard to work out which building blocks of the body you’re working with. And very hard to tell how much of it there is.

By being able to measure proteins individually, they can make really precise measurements when trying to study new medicines, and how they can best help our bodies, for example.

The next step is to improve the technique a thousand times. Then instead of measuring in terms of zeptograms, they’ll be measuring in yoctograms. :)

Source: World’s most sensitive scales weigh a zeptogram

Once upon a time there was this big red giant - only it wasn’t a normal giant, it was a star blowing itself to pieces.

And it wasn’t once upon a time - it’s happening all around in the universe.

Scientists have known for a while that the sun will change. After a few billion years, it’ll grow really big, into a type of star known as a red giant.

How big would the sun be as a red giant? Well, the edge of the sun would be touching the earth - that’s how massive it would become. Not for a few billion years, though.

Anyway, normally when astronomers are searching for other planets that may have life, they look for places that look like how our solar system is at the moment.

But a group of astrophysicists from the US and Europe say they should also be looking at solar systems that have red giants.

Why? Because if they have any planets on the far outskirts of a red giant, they could have great conditions for developing life.

So when our sun becomes a red giant, it won’t be good for the earth - everything on this planet will be dead.

But other places in our solar system may develop just the right conditions for life because of it.

There are plenty of moons in the solar system with water on them, such as Europa, Callisto, and maybe even Titan - when they start to melt, they may just start to form seas that could support life.

So it’s worth looking for planets around other stars that are not simply just like our own sun. As it is at the moment.

Source: Dying stars could make frozen planets habitable

Bird Flu is really serious - it’s already a killer disease, but doesn’t spread easily.

But scientists think at any moment it could swap genes with normal flu, and turn into a killer disease that sweeps the world, killing millions.

The USA is about to begin trials of a vaccine that could be used to stop people dying of such an outbreak.

Trouble is, some scientists are saying that the vaccine trial won’t work, because too little vaccine is going to be used.

To be fair, this is only the first in a series of trials - but when if Bird Flu gets airborne around the world, everybody better hope there is plenty of good vaccine around.

Story: US flu vaccine trials may be effort wasted