Curio Cabinet / Nerdy Curio

We might want to come up with a less dramatic name for this. In a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers from the University of California in Irvine, U.S., argue that there may be conditions hospitable to life in the terminator of tidally-locked planets. The terminator is the line dividing night and day on a planet. On Earth, it makes its way around once a day as the planet rotates, but on tidally-locked planets, the same side of the planet always faces its sun. This means that the star-facing side of the planet gets extremely hot, while the other side gets extremely cold. But in the terminator zone there is perpetual twilight, and perhaps a stable enough environment to host life. Researchers determined this by modeling the climate on a tidally-locked planet. They found that the terminator can sustain a stable, life-friendly temperature, but there are other factors to consider. For example, a planet that has too much water might be perpetually covered in clouds that engulf the entire surface, blocking light. Life is unlikely to develop or flourish under those conditions, but with enough land, there could be what the researchers call “terminator habitability.” If life could exist in the terminator zone, it would vastly increase the number of planets that could potentially contain life, since around 70 percent of stars are M-dwarf stars which are often orbited by tidally-locked planets. Terminators? More like incubators.

[Image description: A digital illustration of a distant planet’s surface beneath a nebula and a rising sun.] Credit & copyright: Luminas_Art, Pixabay
 

So you’ve managed to get to Mars—now what? Getting to the Red Planet is one thing, but another head-scratcher that scientists have been trying to solve is how to feed the first humans who will land on Mars once they get there. According to a study presented during the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by researchers from the University of Arkansas, the answer may be a heaping bowl of rice. Researcher Abhilash Ramachandran and his team have demonstrated that it might be possible to grow rice in Martian soil. The biggest hurdle is the presence of perchlorate, a toxic chemical that is found on the surface of Mars. Researchers found that rice could grow in simulated Martian soil without any perchlorate, so they moved on to identifying varieties of rice that would be resilient against the chemical. What they found was that rice with the modified gene, SnRK1a was able to grow in soil with 1 gram of perchlorate per kilogram. While the plant only managed to grow a root and a shoot—a far cry from an abundant field of rice—identifying the gene responsible is a major step toward being able to grow food on Mars. The next step is to further experiment with SnRK1a to create a cultivar that is resistant to the toxic chemical. Some people might prefer organic to GMO, but you don’t have much of a choice when you’re millions of miles from the nearest grocery store.

[Image description: A photograph of Mars.] Credit & copyright: WikiImages, Pixabay
 

What secrets might lie in the mind of a fly? According to a paper published in the journal Science Advances, scientists at the University of Cambridge have managed to completely map out the connections in the brain of a fruit fly larva (Drosophila melanogaster). Before this study, scientists had mapped out the brains of a sea squirt and two species of worms. While A fruit fly might not seem more sophisticated than these organisms, they’re actually leagues apart. In contrast to just a few hundred neurons in the brains of the three previous specimens, fruit flies have around 3,000 neurons, 500,000 synapses (the connections between the neurons), and 93 different types of neurons. Fruit flies also display much more complex behavior, even demonstrating the ability to learn, a trait they share with humans to a limited degree. In fact, learning seems to be the predominant function of the brain even in the tiny fruit fly larva. After mapping out the connections between the neurons, researchers found that around 75 percent of them were linked to the learning center of the brain. There are also regions in the brain that are responsible for decision making and navigation, revealing that the humble fruit fly may have a more complicated inner life than previously assumed. While researchers are still a long way from mapping out more complex organisms, they stated that this could be a reference map. Of course, they’ll have a whole lot more to explain if they ever decide to map out a human brain!

[Image description: A fruit fly larva on a gray surface.] Credit & copyright: AndreasGoellner, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday, and the anniversary of the first successful telephone call back in 1876. Enjoy these curios all about phones and communication!  

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 smartphone with a map pulled up on screen, clipped inside a car.] Credit & copyright: DariuszSankowski, Pixabay

No, these dogs don’t glow in the dark, but they may brighten up your day. Scientists from the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Museum and Institute of Zoology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, published a paper earlier this month in the journal Science Advances. Their study reveals insights into how generational exposure to radiation can affect genetic markers in a way that hasn’t been possible to study before. Their main research subjects were the semi-feral dogs that live around the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl. When the city was abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster, many people fled in such a rush that they left their dogs behind. Since then, generations of feral dogs have made the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone their home.
 
The researchers looked at the 302 dogs that live in the area and mapped out their family structures, tracking the genetic differences between different family groups. Due to living with constant exposure to low-dose radiation, an elevated chance of mutations were expected. In wild animal populations, these have manifested as cataracts and other ailments leading to shorter lifespans. However, while the dogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are genetically distinct from other dog populations, it’s unclear whether that’s because of radiation or plain old isolation. That ambiguity is actually an encouraging sign that low-dose radiation may not pose nearly as much danger as previously thought, although caution should still be exercised. At the very least, a better understanding of how these dogs continue to be affected over the years could lead to more accurate risk-assessment for humans in similarly radioactive environments, like with long-term space-travel. These pups have a surprisingly propitious potential for posterity!

[Image description: A shaggy brown dog lies alone in a grassy field near a stone wall.] Credit & copyright: AlexKantsur, Pixabay
 

Gravity doesn’t mean much in virtual reality, yet this digital world is struggling to get off the ground. When Facebook’s parent company rebranded as Meta in 2022, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was heading in a bold new direction; it would develop a virtual world called the metaverse, in which people around the world could interact and share experiences in an entirely new way. So far though, things don’t seem to be going according to plan. The company launched a virtual reality game, Horizon Worlds, to serve as an early proof-of-concept…but it has proved unpopular. Meta’s stock price even dropped almost 60 percent since Zuckerberg’s announcement, which seems like a sign that investors don’t see the metaverse overtaking traditional social media any time soon. This year, Meta is even dealing with some political problems. As research continues to show the negative impact of social media on kids and teens, the U.S. government has begun to show interest in limiting its influence over young people. Two senators, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, recently sent a letter to Zuckerberg asking him to quash his plans to allow kids as young as 13 to use the Horizon Worlds metaverse platform. “With a documented track record of failure to protect children and teens, Meta has lost parents’, pediatricians’, policymakers’, and the public’s trust,” the letter stated. Yikes. Not exactly the warm welcome that Facebook received back in the day.

 
[Image description: A man punches the air while wearing a VR headset in front of a purple background.] Credit & copyright: capondesign, Pixabay

The sky doesn’t need to be falling for things to get bad. Climate change is heating things up globally, but it’s also causing some unexpected localized catastrophes, according to an analysis of satellite data by scientists at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain, and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Weßling, Germany. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, shows that rising temperatures might be responsible for a phenomenon known as Long-Continuing-Current (LCC) lightning flashes, which are much more likely to start wildfires. Lightning is already responsible for igniting most wildfires, and rising temperatures are already leading to more lighting strikes on land, but LCC is particularly dangerous because, as its name suggests, it lasts longer after striking the ground. While typical lightning lasts a matter of microseconds, LCC can last between 0.04 seconds to around 0.3 seconds. The researchers behind the study estimate that for every 1.8 degree rise in temperature, there may be a 10 percent increase in the flash rate of LCC globally, leading to a rate of four per second by 2090. Already, LCC might be responsible for the majority of lightning induced wildfires, accounting for around 90 percent of the approximately 5,600 wildfires in the U.S., even though they make up only 10 percent of all lighting strikes. Is it getting hot out here, or what?
 

[Image description: Lightning flashes against a purple sky.] Credit & copyright: ronomore, Pixabay
 

This is cooler than any action movie explosion. A kilonova, or an explosion of two colliding neutron stars, has finally been described in detail by astronomers working at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, with their findings published in the journal Nature. Operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the VLT originally observed the kilonova back in 2017, causing a stir in the astronomy community. Chief among the reasons for the excitement is that the explosion is the first of its kind to be observed and described in detail decades after its existence was first proposed in 1974. It wasn’t until relatively recently, in 2013, that the existence of kilonovas was officially confirmed. The kilonova observed in 2017 resulted when the remnants of two neutron stars with a combined mass 2.7 times that of our sun collided after having orbited each other for billions of years. What resulted from that cataclysmic union was something that astronomers described as a “perfect explosion,” a sphere as bright as a billion suns (at least in its first days) with a magnetic field so powerful it could distort atoms. In addition, the material that was on the outside of the collision shot out in streamers with such intensity that it formed heavy elements like gold and platinum. The process behind this explosion and the inner goings-on of the kilonova are shedding new light into the fundamentals of physics, and the researchers say that it may lead to further insights into the nature of the universe. It’s so bright, it’s enlightening!

[Image description: A purple nebula surrounded by stars.] Credit & copyright: Placidplace, Pixabay
 

They’re unique as snowflakes, but science is just now discovering why. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have finally discovered the mechanism behind the formation of individuals’ unique fingerprints, according to a study published in the journal Cell. It’s a relatively small detail of a person’s overall makeup, but fingerprints are never identical between two people—not even between identical twins. Barring some genetic fluke, everyone has fingerprints in the form of swirling ridges, but it’s always been a bit of a mystery how and why they’re so distinct. That’s partly because fingerprints form during fetal development, the details of which are obviously difficult to fully document. But now, the researchers behind the study have identified the protein molecules that control the formation of fingerprint ridges and how they work. Every fingertip has three regions from which the ridges emerge: the tip, the middle and the crease at the joint where the finger bends, and these regions contain three different protein molecules—WNT, EDAR and BMP. WNT tells the skin to form ridges and form more EDAR, and EDAR in turn boosts WNT activity, while the odd one out, BMP, tells the skin when to stop producing ridges. Interestingly, these protein molecules also play a part in the development of sweat glands and the distribution of hair follicles, meaning that understanding fingerprint formation could lead to discoveries related to skin disorders. It’s just the fingertip of the iceberg.

[Image description: A black-and-white photo of a fingerprint.] Credit & copyright: stux, Pixabay
 

If you’ve ever been alone in the woods and felt as if someone was watching you, you might have been on to something. Researchers at the University of Florence in Italy claim that some plants might be able to see, according to a paper published in the journal Trends in Plant Science. The possibility of plant sight goes back to the discovery of Synechocystis cynanobacteria, a strain of single-celled freshwater bacteria which is capable of photosynthesis. To maximize the amount of light they gather, the cyanobacteria use their own cell membranes like lenses to focus light. The lead author of the paper, Frantisek Baluska, posits that if such a mechanism exists in a simplistic life form like cynanobacteria, it could exist in plants as well. Baluska isn’t the first to bring up this possibility, either. Even as far back as 1907, botanist Francis Darwin suggested that plants may be capable of developing a sort of rudimentary eye. Others see the possibility of vision-capable plants as more and more likely, and point to plants that engage in mimicry as potential evidence. In particular, the vining plant Boquila trifoliolata has proven, in laboratory settings, that it can change the appearance of its leaves to match plants that are set near it—even if those plants are fake. Some scientists believe that this proves that B. trifoliolata doesn’t rely on sensing any biological components of nearby plants in order to change itself. More study is still needed…but next time you go out, maybe you should leave the TV on for your houseplants, just in case.

[Image description: An indoor sink surrounded by potted houseplants.] Credit & copyright: allen4uTW, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday, and the first day of Black History Month! Enjoy these curios celebrating the history and innovations of Black Americans. 
Imagine being a playwright, doctor, humanitarian, astronaut, and history-maker. In 1992, Mae Jemison became the first African American woman to go into space. Jemison grew up in a time when the Apollo missions were in full swing, with television broadcasts of the astronauts launching into space. But she also grew up in a time when there were no women, and very few African American people donning spacesuits and exploring the cosmos. Nevertheless, Jemison dreamed of going into space from the time she was a child. One of her earliest inspirations came in the form of Lt. Uhura, the African American, female communications officer aboard the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek. Jemison would go on to befriend Nichelle Nichols, the actress who portrayed the character, and she even had a guest appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1993, but before her own voyage into the “Final Frontier,” Jemison took some detours.
 
She excelled in academics and graduated from high school at the age of 16. Then, at Stanford University, she studied chemistry and earned a degree in African and Afro-American Studies. In between her demanding coursework, she managed to direct a musical play titled, Out of the Shadows, with music by Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder. After completing her undergraduate studies, she went to Cornell University to study medicine, squeezing in overseas humanitarian missions between semesters. She then joined the Peace Corp for a number of years before opening a private practice in 1983. That same year, Sally Ride became the first woman to go into space. Inspired by Ride, Jemison’s dream of going into space was renewed, and she applied for the astronaut program at NASA. NASA briefly stopped taking applications for new candidates after the Challenger disaster in 1986, but Jemison applied again in 1987. This time, she was accepted, and on September 12, 1992, Jemison finally embarked on her voyage on the space shuttle Endeavor. Today, she is an advocate for minorities in STEM fields and manages The Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, which she named after her mother, who encouraged her pursuits. She really takes “reach for the stars” to a whole new level.

 
[Image description: Mae Carol Jemison wearing her orange NASA space suit.] Credit & copyright: NASA, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

Feeling the sting of high gas prices? Go fly a kite! That’s what one company wants cargo ships to do with their new invention, which can help save on fuel costs. French energy equipment company AirSeas recently debuted the Seawing, a parafoil, or self-inflating, kite-like device, that can be retrofitted onto the fronts of ships to provide additional propulsion. It’s not quite a sail in the traditional sense. Rather, it catches the wind like a kite. When wind conditions are right, the parafoil is deployed automatically, rising into the air and pulling ships along. When the wind dies down, it retracts automatically, and no one needs to fiddle around with folding it up manually. The device currently comes in two sizes: 2,700-square-feet and 5,400-square-feet. A 10,800-square-foot version reportedly on the way. Used correctly, the Seawing can reportedly account for up to 20 percent of a ship’s total propulsion, greatly saving on fuel during long voyages. While this technology alone is far from enough to completely eliminate the need for fuel, it could still have a big impact in fighting climate change. Cargo ships primarily burn bunker fuel, which tends to contain more contaminants and release far more pollutants than other fuels. Around 100,000 cargo ships travel the world’s oceans every year, contributing greatly to rising greenhouse gas emissions. AirSeas already has several customers, including Japanese shipping company K Line, which plans to fit 50 of their ships with Seawings. It seems that catching air is really catching on.
 

[Image description: A cargo ship on the water, loaded with shipping containers.] Credit & copyright: hectorgalarza, Pixabay