Curio Cabinet

It seems they’re turning red meat into read meat. According to a paper published in Scientific Reports, scientists at São Paulo State University (UNESP) have identified genetic markers that are associated with higher quality meat in cows. Current, conventional practices can only do so much when it comes to producing quality beef. At the end of the day, and all else being equal, livestock producers rely on the breed of cattle to do the heavy lifting. Even then, quality can be inconsistent between individuals thanks to phenotypic variability. But the researchers at UNESP appear to have cracked the code while working with Nelore cattle, a breed of zebu which make up around 80 percent of the cattle raised for meat in Brazil. By collecting samples from 6,910 Nelore carcasses after slaughter and grading, they managed to identify specific markers that are responsible for marbling (the amount of intramuscular fat), subcutaneous fat thickness, and muscle development. One particularly interesting discovery involved a gene responsible for heat shock proteins, which can influence meat tenderness by affecting fiber degradation after slaughter. The tenderness of meat can vary greatly between individuals depending on how much the gene is expressed. While similar efforts have been made before, including by the researchers at UNESP, this study was uniquely able to produce results by taking a more comprehensive look at the biology of individual animals. As the first author of the study, Gabriela Frezarim, explained, "The group had already made significant progress using different 'omics' [genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics] approaches, but it became increasingly clear that no single technique is sufficient to understand the complexity of the biological systems that control variation in meat and carcass quality.” It’s like herding scientific disciplines together.

[Image description: A brown-and-black zebu cow walking on grass.] Credit & copyright: Mammalwatcher, Wikimedia Commons. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
 

Telling people apart is as easy as breathing. Researchers recently found that the pattern of a person’s breathing may be unique to the individual, much like their fingerprints. Currently, there are only a few surefire ways to identify someone: fingerprints, eye scans, and DNA tests. Soon, another option might be available in the form of breathing. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel hypothesized that a person’s breathing pattern might be unique to them, and tested the idea with the help of 100 participants. The participants were equipped with special devices that tracked their breathing throughout the day, measuring the frequency and duration of each breath, along with the amount of air passing through their nasal cavities. Over the course of two years, the researchers entered the data they collected into a machine learning program, which learned to positively identify a person through their breathing alone with an accuracy of 96.8 percent.
 
There may be another use for this type of analysis besides identification. Researchers found that a person’s breathing revealed not only their identity, but information about their physical and mental health. People of similar body mass indexes share similarities in the way they breath, and so do those who suffer from depression or anxiety. Those with depression tend to exhale quickly, while those with anxiety have shorter inhales and pause their breathing more frequently during sleep. According to the researchers, their next step is to find out if and how breathing can be used as a diagnostics tool. In the future, they hope that it may even be possible to change peoples’ breathing patterns for the better. As Noam Sobel, a co-author of the study said in a statement, “We intuitively assume that how depressed or anxious you are changes the way you breathe. But it might be the other way around. Perhaps the way you breathe makes you anxious or depressed. If that’s true, we might be able to change the way you breathe to change those conditions.” We’ll be able to breathe easy, then.

 
[Image description: The black nose of a dog with brown fur. The rest of the dog’s face is not visible.] Credit & copyright: HTO, Wikimedia Commons. The copyright holder of this work has released it into the public domain. This applies worldwide.

Make way for the only bugs that can be mistaken for stars. When fireflies light up the summer sky, it’s at least as impressive as a celestial lightshow. However, it seems that fewer fireflies (or lightning bugs, as they’re sometimes called) are showing up each year. Luckily, there are things that everyday people can do to help dwindling firefly populations.
 
Fireflies are soft-bodied beetles in the family Lampyridae. Although there are thousands of firefly species (around 2,400) the most common species in the U.S. is Photinus pyralis. These small beetles grow to be around .7 inches and feature bright orange heads atop black bodies. At the end of their abdomen is a whitish-yellow area from which the fireflies emit light. This is the firefly’s lantern, an organ in which the insect’s famous light-emitting chemical reaction takes place. The reaction relies on an energy-carrying molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) which helps a chemical compound called luciferin create light when it reacts with oxygen and the enzyme luciferase.
 
Contrary to popular belief, both male and female fireflies light up, but only the males of the Photinus pyralis species do so while flying. In fact, the males’ characteristic flight patterns, in which they swoop low to the ground then light up as they fly upwards, have earned them the nickname “big dipper fireflies.” Meanwhile, females land on tree trunks or other vegetation and signal to males if they’re ready to mate.
 
Bioluminescent animals, which emit light via biological processes, are common in the ocean, but they’re fairly rare on land. Fireflies are by far the most frequently-encountered bioluminescent animals in the U.S., which has naturally made them beloved. Unfortunately, 18 species are now considered endangered in North America. While Photinus pyralis isn’t yet considered threatened, anecdotal reports seem to show that fewer of them are being seen year by year. Climate change plays a role, but much of the trouble also has to do with general human development, especially light pollution. While U.S. neighborhoods (where people commonly saw fireflies) used to be dark at night, the advent of energy-efficient streetlights and the popularity of solar-powered garden lights have left fireflies without enough darkness to put on a proper display. Like all beetles, fireflies go through a larval stage as part of their development. Firefly larvae are wingless, which leaves them more vulnerable to household herbicides and pesticides. Fireflies lay their eggs in leaf litter, which is often bagged up and thrown out in yards, dooming the eggs.
 
The good news is that there’s plenty we can do to usher fireflies back to U.S. neighborhoods. Reducing light pollution can be accomplished by simply ceasing to use garden lights and turning other lights off at night. Using fewer pesticides and leaving leaves alone in the fall are other, easy ways to help fireflies. Hey, less yardwork sounds pretty enlightened to us.

 
[Image description: A firefly on a green leaf.] Credit & copyright: Bruce Hallman/USFWS. Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal.

Well, at least you can’t accuse these legislators of being boring. Several states in the U.S. have introduced legislation to ban fabled “chemtrails.” This is a name used by those who believe that the white, cloud-like lines left by airplanes contain deadly chemicals. The true nature of these streaks in the sky is not nearly that insidious, but they’re not completely harmless either.
 
The latest state to hop on the anti-chemtrail bandwagon is Louisiana, where a state legislator introduced a bill to outlaw the lines left in the wake of airplanes. A decades-old conspiracy theory holds that these are actually the result of a shadowy effort to disperse harmful chemicals to the general populace, but the proper term for them is “contrails,” short for condensation trails. Contrails generally form at altitudes between 32,000 and 42,000 feet due to the water vapor released from jet engines. At those altitudes, the hot water vapor cools rapidly after exiting the engine and condenses, leaving visible streaks in the sky. Of course, the conditions for this to occur have to be just right, or else the sky would be covered in an endless criss-crossing of airplane flightpaths. Aside from the altitude of the plane, the air has to be cold and humid enough for the contrails to form.
 
While contrails aren’t the product of nefarious intentions, that doesn’t mean that they’re beyond reproach. According to some studies, contrails might actually be contributing to global warming in an unexpected way by trapping excess heat in the atmosphere, especially if they form at night or last until nighttime. Ironically, efforts to reduce carbon emissions and save money might be making it worse. Modern airliners are designed to fly at altitudes of 38,000 feet to save on fuel by reducing drag in the thinner atmosphere, and while that certainly saves on fuel, it means that contrails are much more likely to form. The warming effect of contrails is so pronounced that they may be contributing more to atmospheric warming than the carbon emissions from the engines themselves. It’s a matter worth looking into for legislators, but they might want to familiarize themselves with the science around contrails first.

 
[Image description: A white plane with four contrails against a blue sky.] Credit & copyright: Adrian Pingstone (Arpingstone), Wikimedia Commons. The copyright holder of this work has released it into the public domain. This applies worldwide.

It’s the comeback of the century. The European beaver has made its triumphant return to Portugal for the first time in centuries, and it’s not the only place where the endangered builder is reclaiming its old range. Like its counterpart in North America, the European beaver is a keystone species, reshaping its environment by building dams in waterways and digging channels to direct the flow of water. Yet for all its mighty endeavors, the beaver was, for centuries, at the mercy of a greater power: human hunters. The beavers were hunted to near extinction in most of Europe for their meat, fur and castoreum, an aromatic substance that comes from internal sacs near the base of beavers’ tails. Beavers were even eaten during Lent after the Catholic Church classified the mammals as fish.
 
Beavers had a lot going against them when it came to their relationship with humans. Their fur happens to be ideal for making felt, and has been considered a valuable commodity for centuries. Although castoreum has a distinctly unpleasant odor in its raw form (beavers mix it with their urine to mark their territory), it can be processed into an effective fixative agent to be used in the production of perfumes. Thus, the beavers were trapped and hunted until they became extinct in many European locales, including Portugal, where they were last seen around the end of the 15th century. Then, over 500 years later in 2023, one of the beavers was sighted less than 500 feet from the border, giving hope to conservationists. Indeed, the presence of European beavers in Portugal has been confirmed now, with telltale signs like dams and gnawing marks on trees. It’s a long overdue arrival for Portugal, and it’s also the result of a century and a half of conservation efforts around Europe. While their numbers are still much lower than they once were, they are now found in most countries on the continent, and conservation efforts continue to help bring back the creature that once helped shape the very land. It’s time for these endangered engineers to get back to being busy beavers.

 
[Image description: A close-up photo of a beaver with wet fur.] Credit & copyright: National Park Service photo, Asset ID: d34648d9-10ec-44bb-bfce-9d4c2b20ee18. Public domain:Full Granting Rights.