The Ed's Up #61
Electric Eels Can Remotely Control Their Prey’s Muscles
The electric eel can (in)famously create its own electricity. More than four-fifths of its two-metre-long body consists of special battery-like cells, which can collectively deliver a jolt of up to 600 volts. But the way the eel uses that ability is even more shocking. Kenneth Catania from Vanderbilt University has found that this astonishing predator can use its electricity like a remote control, activating its prey’s muscles from afar. It effectively has a button that says “Reveal Yourself” and another that says “Freeze”. (Image: Ken Catania)
Fruit Bats Have Sonar Too (But It’s Not Very Good)
The fruit bats don’t use sonar (echolocation) in the way that their smaller relatives do. Or, at least, that’s what everyone thought. It turns out that they actually can echolocate, using clicks produced by their wings. They're just not very good at it. (Image: Anton Croos)
Scientists Instil New Cultural Traditions in Wild Tits
"These traditions are totally arbitrary. The blue and red doors are equally valid solutions and equally easy. But with each passing day, the birds in each population became increasingly likely to use the most popular option. They were conformists. They went with the crowd. Indeed, during the experiment, 14 birds moved to a population with a different colour preference, and 10 of them swapped to match their neighbours’ biases." (Image: Tbird Ulm)
How The Plague Microbe Gave Fleas A Chance
Between 1,500 and 6,400 years ago, a mild-mannered microbe started to change. It gained the ability to spread via the bites of fleas, and started causing more lethal symptoms. It became what we now call Yersinia pestis—the cause of plague. To spread via fleas, this microbe had to evolve. It went from killing them to choking them.
More good reads
- “My Great-Great-Aunt Discovered Francium. And It Killed Her.” This piece by Veronique Greenwood, about the false romance of self-sacrificing scientists, is one of the best of the year—a wonderful piece of assured, considered writing that readers will savour and writers should deconstruct.
- "Forty years ago, Earth beamed its first postcard to the stars." Such a great story by Nadia Drake. Don’t miss the ending.
- "Inside Yucca Mountain, incomprehensibly long time scales clash w/ human ones." Beautiful piece on radiation by Sarah Zhang.
- How addicts gained the power to reverse overdoses. Great piece by Carrie Arnold on naloxone
- Your memory is fallible, even if you're Neil de Grasse Tyson. Daniel Simons and Chris Chabris write about our memory problems in the NYT.
- James Watson feels that his racism has left him an outcast, forcing him to auction off his Nobel prize. Laura Helmuth and Adam Rutherford help me play my tiniest violin. I also endorse this series of tweets by Michael Hendricks on Watson, humanity, respect, and science heroes.
- Terrifying story from Ian Sample: 100 big biosafety breaches at UK labs, including sending out live anthrax.
- Science to the Rescue, Can Geoengineering Save the Earth? Erin Biba considers five possibilities.
- Emily Graslie goes to Peru and smells the wood for the trees
- A simple trick to improve your memory. Really interesting, by Tom Stafford.
- “As the ongoing Ebola outbreak approaches the one-year mark, there are signs of hope”. Erika Check Hayden is in Sierra Leone, tracking the epidemic. Nature is publishing her diaries.
- And apologies to Ann Finkbeiner for omitting the link to her excellent piece on cosmic anthropomorphism last week. Here it is.
Talks
- On 12th December, I'll be at Bath Spa University doing the Discovering Science Christmas Lecture about science writing.
More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.
You can also follow me on Twitter, find regular writing on my blog. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you can sign up yourself.
And that's it! Thanks for reading.
-Ed