The Ed's Up #86

Octopuses, and Maybe Squid, Can Sense Light With Their Skin

"Each chromatophore is an elastic sac of pigment, surrounded by a starburst of muscles. If the muscles relax, the sac contracts into a small dot that’s hard to see. When the muscles contract, they yank the sac into a wide disc, revealing the colour it contains. Kingston showed that these living pixels contain the same Rube Goldberg set-up that exists in their owners’ eyes... [This] strengthens the case that these animals really are detecting light with their skins, independently of their brains and eyes." (Image: Carnat Joel)

The Slow-Motion Symbiotic Train Wreck of the 13-Year Cicada

"Round about now, in various US states, a vast swarm of cicadas will start crawling out of the ground. These black-bodied, red-eyed insects have stayed underground for 13 or 17 years, drinking from plant roots. When they greet daylight for the first time, they devote themselves to weeks of frenzied sex and cacophonous song, before dying en masse. They’ll be picked off by birds, snagged by squirrels, and crunched under shoes and tyres, but none of that will dent their astronomical numbers—which is perhaps the point of their lengthy underground stints, and their synchronous emergence. But the cicada’s weird lifestyles have also left them with a different legacy. It involves the bacteria that live in their bodies, and it’s so weird that when John McCutcheon first discovered it, he thought he had made a technical error." (Image: Patchattack)
 

Book recommendation

RAT ISLAND, by William Stolzenburg. Against all odds, small groups of iconoclastic scientists, trappers, loners, and conservationists have been trying to save dwindling birds by eradicating rats from islands. This is the tale of how they triumphed against one of nature’s most destructive pests, and it is storytelling of the highest calibre. Every sentence is an exercise in craft. No clause is wasted.

Rat Island is a tundra-covered mass of volcanic rock midway between Alaska and Siberia. It is the site of a pivotal battle to resurrect the multitudes of seabirds that have been massacred by a plague of invading rats. Rat Island is also a metaphor, for an offshore world under siege by aliens—by rats and cats and foxes, goats and pigs, mongooses and snakes—predators of defenseless prey, destroyers of fragile habitats, ferried to the farthest reaches of the oceanic archipelago during the human settlement of the globe. These are the targets of a global island campaign headed by an unlikely alliance of conservation scientists and professional killers, who have come to defend some of the most endangered species and spectacular gatherings of wildlife on the planet—by killing their enemies wholesale.

 

More good reads

• “Tagged animals carry more than human technology; they carry human ways of visualizing the world.” Wonderful piece by Helen Macdonald
• When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when? Astonishing piece by Robin Marantz Henig
• David Dobbs weighs up the promises and hype of big genomics and introduces the term MAGOTs.
• 7% of all retracted papers between 1980 and 2011 were by one guy. Here's how science's biggest faker was caught. By Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus
• A much-publicised Science paper claiming that “short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage” turns out to be faked. Here’s the paper that outed the fraud, a look at what went wrong, and an interview with Donald Green—the PI on the study, who was not involved in the fabrication.
• How to Unlearn a Disease. Fascinating piece by Kelly Clancy
• Meet the athlete who built his own knee, because he just wanted to ski again. Superb story by Rose Eveleth
• A really interesting story about how rhinos conquered the world (and then lost it). Fun facts everywhere. By Chris Baraniuk.
• “The mythical stories we tell about our heroes are always more romantic and often more palatable than the truth. But in science, at least, they are destructive.” By Leonard Mlodinow on the oversimplification of discovery.
• An astonishing case of snake mimicry
• Tourists tend to take pictures of the same famous spots. Google is now using them to make timelapse videos.

 

More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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And that's it! Thanks for reading.

-Ed