Curio Cabinet

There’s something fishy going on in Minnesota’s lakes. In fact, several of them have become overrun with giant, non-native goldfish! The problem stems from misguided pet owners releasing the fish into wild waters. While these common pets tend to stay around 2 inches long when kept in aquariums, they can grow to a whopping 15 inches in the wild, and weigh up to four pounds. At that size, they can have a devastating effect on local wildlife.
 
After receiving complaints from local fishermen at Keller lake, the city of Burnsville, Minnesota announced on Twitter, “Please don't release your pet goldfish into ponds and lakes! They grow bigger than you think and contribute to poor water quality by mucking up the bottom sediments and uprooting plants.” Goldfish do indeed produce more waste than than the average wild fish, and their excrement contains high levels of ammonia. Ammonia can easily upend a wild ecosystem from top to bottom, killing plants and insects that native fish rely on for food and changing the chemical composition of the water itself, making it difficult for some wild fish species to breathe. As if that wasn’t bad enough, ammonia can cause certain fast-growing species of algae to bloom, making a slimy, green mess out of clear lake waters. Goldfish also eat a lot, often outcompeting wild fish who rely on the same insect populations to survive. As one might expect, all of these problems become more serious as goldfish increase in individual size and overall population.
 
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that Minnesota has become a breeding ground for these invasive fish. In November, 2020, more than 500,000 goldfish were removed from Big Woods Lake, near Minneapolis. Wildlife officials from the Carver County Water Management Organization have begun stocking some lakes with pike, which feed on goldfish. Hopefully, fish end up being part of Minnesota’s solution, not just their problem!

 
[Image description: two large, orange goldfish are held above a container of water.] Credit & copyright: City of Burnsville, Minnesota

 
Written by: Maria C.

It's Flashback Friday! To celebrate the discovery of the Hale-Bopp Comet on this day in 1995, enjoy this space-themed curio!
 
Who needs a dark side of the Moon when it can disappear altogether? Scientists have recently uncovered an explanation to the Moon's disappearance for a night in medieval England. On the night of May 5, 1110 C.E. a total lunar eclipse was documented in the middle of the night, lasting into the day time. According to researchers from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, the secret to the eclipse was in the trees and snow: ice core samples taken from glaciers date sulphuric aerosol particles from volcanic activity to 1110 C.E. In addition, tree rings dating from the same period reveal unusually ring thinning and cold weather for the year. Several accounts from the time note crop failures, famine, and other incidents of unfavorable weather. While previous research pointed to an eruption at Iceland's Hekla volcano as the cause of the lunar eclipse, the University of Geneva researchers point to a months-long eruption at Japan's Mount Asama in 1108 as the likely culprit of the blackout. Whatever the reasons, we bet the visible moon couldn't come back fast enough on May 6th.
 

Image credit & copyright: CoffmanCMU / Getty Images / iStockphoto
 

Written by: Esther P.

It's Flashback Friday! To celebrate the discovery of the Hale-Bopp Comet on this day in 1995, enjoy this space-themed curio!
 

In 2019, the International Space Station received a curious delivery: a dozen bottles of red Bordeaux wine from France. But before you go thinking astronauts threw a party without us, rest assured that the vin de table was purely for research—aging, to be exact. According to the director of the experiment, Michael Lebert of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the winemaking process's combination of yeast and bacteria makes it an ideal candidate for space study. Lebert and his fellow researchers closely observed the wine for over a year aboard the ISS, to see how microgravity and cosmic radiation influence the aging process. Conditions that affect the quality of wine on Earth are myriad. Temperature, humidity, light, as well as vibrations, can deteriorate the product during cellaring. To overcome that last variable, the wine bottles were packaged in special metal canisters before their shuttle lifted off, to prevent shattering and minimize jostling. In fact, this wasn't the ISS's first time receiving libations. Budweiser has previously offered up barley seeds to the station, working towards its goal of becoming "the first beer on Mars." A Japanese company also sent whiskey and other productions up in 2015. The first time wine was brought aboard the ISS was actually way back in 1985, when a French astronaut stowed a bottle aboard the shuttle Discovery. After the 2019 study, the dozen bottles of wine headed back to Earth to be compared with identical, but terrestrially-aged Bordeaux, while those aboard the ISS enjoyed their own stock. Bottoms up doesn't quite work in microgravity. Hmm, I wonder how the tannins come through when sipping space wine from a straw!
 

Image credit & copyright: Arctic-Images/Nick Purser/Getty Images
 

Play all you want, just don’t step on them! LEGO bricks have been inspiring young minds (and hurting bare feet) since 1932, but modern environmental concerns have made the all-plastic bricks less appealing to some. Luckily, in late June, the LEGO Group unveiled their first-ever prototype bricks made from entirely recycled plastic. Specifically, the bricks are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a lightweight plastic commonly used to make water bottles. A one-liter plastic bottle can now be turned into roughly ten standard-sized LEGO bricks.
 
According to the LEGO Group, the company has been working to create “greener” bricks for years, but the latest prototype was the first to pass the company’s rigorous durability tests. In fact, LEGO tested over 250 different plastic formulations before successfully creating their latest prototype. Tim Books, LEGO’s Vice President of Environmental Responsibility, explained in a statement that, “The biggest challenge on our sustainability journey is rethinking and innovating new materials that are as durable, strong and high quality as our existing bricks — and fit with LEGO elements made over the past 60 years. With this prototype, we're able to showcase the progress we're making.” The LEGO Group hasn’t announced when their new bricks will hit store shelves, but their prototype is already exciting environmentally-conscious fans on social media. If only there was a prototype LEGO brick that was less painful to step on!
 

[Image description: Lego bricks made from recycled plastic are arranged into the shape of a water bottle. Beside them, polyethylene terephthalate granules, arranged into the same shape, sit next to an actual water bottle, against a blue background.] Credit & copyright: LEGO
 

Written by: Maria C.

You’ve heard it before: newfangled smart technology is rotting our brains and turning us into dullards. Only, according to a paper published July 1 in the journal Nature Human Behavior, that actually isn’t true. The paper, authored by three researchers from the University of Cincinnati, asserts that there is no evidence that smartphones or other smart technology is making people any dumber. In fact, such devices might actually improve cognitive performance in an interesting way.
 
It makes sense why so many assume that smartphones are bad for our brains. Who needs to memorize complicated math when your phone has a calculator, or learn how to properly read a map when GPS can do it for you? Surely, such convenience makes us lazy. But, according to Dr. Anthony Chemero, a behavioral expert and one of the paper’s co-authors, smartphones actually free up room in people’s minds by lessening the burden of tedious tasks. “Given what people do with their lives now, their ability to memorize things like fifteen-digit long division is just not very relevant," Chemero said, in a statement. "And [smart technology] can enable us to do other things with that mental energy.”
 
Previous studies, such as a 2019 one out of Macquarie University in Australia, have seemed to show that technology impedes cognitive function, but Chemero contends that such research is flawed. “There have been some scientific studies of human performance with and without smartphones, and they indicate that if people have their smartphone handy, they do less well at cognitively demanding tasks,” he said. “And [my co-authors and I] argue that this actually doesn't show that your phone makes you less intelligent; instead, it shows that you're more interested in your phone than in a difficult, annoying, boring task.” In other words, although smartphones may limit our attention spans, especially as they apply to tasks we find boring, they don’t really hinder our overall ability to think. “[The data] doesn't actually show that your smartphone is making you stupid...it's showing that people are just thinking differently—they're being intelligent in different ways,” said Chemero. At least I can rest easy knowing that my social media addiction isn’t technically sapping my brain!

 
[Image description: A person’s hand holding a smartphone with a map pulled up on screen.] Credit & copyright: Henry Perks

 
Written by: Maria C.

Slow and steady solves the mystery. In June, scientists from the University of Michigan published a study in the journal Communications Biology detailing how one snail species survived extinction against overwhelming odds. Their research involved affixing tiny computers to the shells and habitats of predatory rosy wolf snails and partula hyalina snails, in the South Pacific’s Society Islands, to figure out how the latter species managed to evade the former.
 
The trouble for snails on the Society Islands began in 1974, when the French government introduced the rosy wolf snail there in a misguided attempt to control the Giant African Land Snail population. Though it looks unassuming, the rosy wolf snail is a fearsome predator which moves significantly faster than the other snail and slug species that it hunts. It’s estimated that the rosy wolf snail is responsible for the extinctions of around 134 snail species globally, at least 50 of them in the Society Islands. So how did partula hyalina survive the rosy wolf snail’s prowess, when so many other species didn’t? Scientists suspected it had something to do with the levels of light that partula hyalina could withstand.
 
To find out for sure, they developed the Michigan Micro Mote (M3), a tiny, solar-powered computer about the size of a pencil eraser. They then glued M3s to the shells of rosy wolf snails and placed them by the leaves on which partula hyalina slept. Because the M3s charge via solar power, scientists were able to measure light levels based on how fast each M3’s battery charged. What they eventually found was that partula hyalina’s white shell reflected light, allowing them to live comfortably in bright forest edge habitats that would have cooked darker-shelled rosy wolf snails. Talk about living on the sunny side of life!
 

[Image description: a rosy wolf snail with a tiny black computer attached to its shell.] Credit & copyright: Inhee Lee
 

Written by: Maria C.