The Ed's Up #92

With Sonar-Reflecting Leaves, Plant Lures Bats to Poo in it

"Imagine a bat flying through the jungle of Borneo. It calls out to find a place to spend the night. And a plant calls back. The plant in question is Nepenthes hemsleyana—an insect-eating pitcher plant that’s terrible at eating insects.When Ulmar Grafe from the University of Brunei Darussalam looked inside them, he saw seven times fewer insects than in other pitchers. Instead, he found small bats." (Image: Ch'ien C. Lee) 

How to Program One of the Gut’s Most Common Microbes

"If you want to turn a microbe into a gut ranger, you’re better off starting with a species that’s well-adapted there. And there are few better choices than Bacteroides thetaiotamicron—B-theta to its friends. Collectively, the Bacteroides genus makes up between 30 and 50 per cent of the microbes in a Western person’s gut. They’re exquisitely attuned to that environment and they’re excellent colonisers. And B-theta is arguably the best-studied of them. It was an early star of the microbiome craze. Now, Mark Mimee and Alex Tucker from MIT have hacked B-theta, creating a small library of biological parts that can be used to programme it."(Image: Justin Dolske)

More good reads

• Two pairs of identical twins were mixed up at birth and raised as two pairs of fraternal twins. Then they found each other. It’s the plot of Comedy of Errors, but in real life. By Susan Dominus.
• New horned dino Wendiceratops was named after professional fossil Wendy Sloboda, who then got it tattooed on her arm.
• A lizard mystery that remains unsolved, despite gluing magnets to their heads and fitting them with ping-pong balls. Wonderful story from James Gorman.
• What do you do with a cannon that shoots dead birds? “An approved bird is then loaded into a cannon device and shot into the engine” By Elizabeth Lopatto.
• Superb & sensitively handled investigation from Peter Aldhous on the silent monkey victims of the war on terror. Fantastic journalism, right here.
• Why have we failed to get cholera outbreak in Haiti under control? Rose George finds out.  
• Flyboard: When you want to do more than just to walk on water. By Ian Sample. 
• Meet the woman who can live on only 4 hours sleep. By Helen Thomson.

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