Science Watch

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

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

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