SciPak

Once-Rare Butterfly Is Benefiting From Climate Change

The brown argus butterfly has expanded its range in the last 20 years, as warmer conditions have turned seldom-used host plants into better places to lay eggs, researchers report. It’s often thought that one species’ dependence on others will limit its ability to relocate in response to climate change. The new study shows that the opposite can also happen.

Read more about this research from the 25 May issue of Science here.

[Image courtesy of Louise Mair. Click the image for caption information.]

Fragments of Rocks That Hit the Moon

Researchers have identified fragments of meteorites that hit the Moon in the ancient past. It’s been unclear whether the objects bombarding Earth and the Moon early in the Solar System’s history were primarily asteroids, comets, or an even mixture of both. The new study describes small meteorite fragments preserved in ancient lunar rocks from the Apollo 16 landing site. The results suggest that asteroids were probably the more common type of impactor.

Read more about this research from the 10 May issue of Science Express here.

[[Image © Dan Durda/FIAAA. Click the image for caption information.]

bioguru:

Pathway of Sound

The auricle of the ear serves to “capture” sound waves, which travel down the auditory canal and hit the tympanic membrane (ear drum), causing it to vibrate and send vibrations through the small bones of the middle ear: the malleus, incus, and the stapes. The stapes connects to the oval window, which is the “window” (duh) between the middle and inner ear. The vibrations pass through the oval window and into the perilymph of the boney labyrinth of the inner ear, and eventually to the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with endolymph and houses the Organ of Corti. The vibrations carried through the perilymph causes the endolymph within the Organ of Corti to begin vibrating. The tectorial membrane is disturbed by these vibrations and “tickles” the microvilli of the hair cells between the basiliar and the tectorial membranes. The microvilli bend in response, triggering an actional potential and an impulse that is carried by the cochlear nerve to the temporal cortex where, alas, the impulse is interpreted as sound!

Blast-Related Brain Injury in Military Veterans

Soldiers exposed to conventional and improvised explosive devices during combat are at increased risk for traumatic brain injury (TBI). Many of the neuropsychiatric symptoms of TBI such as memory loss, depression, difficulties concentrating, and the inability to carry out complex tasks are similar to those of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and both can lead ultimately to dementia. CTE is a neurodegenerative disease caused by brain deposits of phosphorylated tau protein and has been associated with repeat concussions such as those suffered by athletes playing high impact sports like American football. Working with postmortem brain tissue, Goldstein et al. now show that the brains of blast-exposed soldiers and concussed athletes have the same CTE pathology thus linking together two different forms of brain trauma and providing a common pathogenic mechanism that has also been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease.

Read more here.

[Credit: Master Sgt. A. Dunaway/U.S. Air Force; Click the image for more information.]

Anyone wishing to use the cover of Science Translational Medicine must contact AAAS to request permission to do so.

Barely Alive Deep-Sea Microbes

Buried inside 86 million-year-old red clay deep beneath the ocean, bacteria are surviving on tiny amounts of oxygen. These microbes are using so little oxygen they barely qualify as life, a new study reports. Roughly 90 percent of Earth’s single-celled organisms live buried below the seafloor. Researchers are using an experiment that has been running for 86 million years beneath the Pacific Ocean seabed to study these slow-moving microbes.

Read more about this research from the 18 May issue of Science here.

[Click the image for caption information]

Special Section on Human Conflict

Is Tennyson’s famous phrase about nature as “red in tooth and claw” an apt description of humans? Or, might we all someday live peacefully on this planet? An extraordinary collection of commentary articles and news reports in this week’s Science presents the latest thinking on human conflict as it has occurred in societies past and present, and in all corners of the world – and why some societies have managed to avoid it altogether. These articles are free to view, with registration, here.

[Image: Sang-Hoon KISH Kim/Sipa Press/Newscom; Click the image for caption information.]

Anyone wishing to use the cover of Science must contact AAAS to request permission to do so.

wnyc:

Census figures suggest tens of thousands people FLY to work each week. Check out Transportation Nation’s interactive map of the top routes to the biggest “super commuter” cities.

Rethinking a “Healthy” Vagina

A new study in the 2 May issue of Science Translational Medicine challenges two common pieces of wisdom about microbial communities in the human vagina. Contrary to popular belief, microbes are not the same in all women and can change markedly over time, the analysis of 32 Black and Caucasian women reports. The idea that each woman’s vaginal microbial community has its own character is at odds with current gynecologic care, which is based on the assumption that all women should respond to treatment in the same manner. See also the accompanying Focus by Witkin and Ledger, who discuss implications of the new research in health and disease.

[Matisse, Blue Nude (after French artist Henri Matisse, 1869-1954) CREDIT: Shutterstock/ImageZebra; Click the image for caption information.]

Anyone wishing to use the cover of Science Translational Medicine must contact AAAS to request permission to do so.

Earliest Known Maya Astronomical Calendar

A painted room in a Maya house in Guatemala shows numerical records of lunar and possibly planetary cycles, researchers report. The hieroglyphs are from the 9th century, making this calendar several centuries older than the records in the Maya Codices, which were written in bark-paper books. Predecessors to these books have not been found until now.

Read more about this research from the 11 May issue of Science here.

Image Caption/Credit: Numerical array. Image by W. Saturno, drawing by D. Stuart. [Image courtesy of Science/AAAS]

Dawn at Vesta

The cover of the 11 May issue of Science: Enhanced-color view of the “Snowman” craters (Marcia, Calpurnia, and Minucia) on the asteroid Vesta generated by combining imaging and topography data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. The 60-kilometer-wide Marcia crater (at bottom) is one of the youngest large craters on Vesta with a small central peak, as well as light and dark streaks on its walls. See the series of six Reports beginning on page 684.

[Image generated using Dawn Framing Camera images: Lucille Le Corre (MPS), David O’Brien (PSI), Vishnu Reddy (MPS/UND); PI of Dawn mission: Christopher T. Russell (UCLA); Dawn Framing Camera leader: Andreas Nathues (MPS), significant contributions from Ralf Jaumann (DLR)]

Anyone wishing to use the cover of Science must contact AAAS to request permission to do so.