A Curious Hadrosaur With Super-Weird Teeth Has Been Unearthed in Japan

Artist’s illustration of Y. izanagii (center) with other hadrosaurs. (Masato Hattori)

DAVID NIELD
29 APRIL 2021

Meet Yamatosaurus izanagii, a new genus and species of hadrosaur (or duck-billed dinosaur) discovered on a small island off the southern coast of Japan in 2004, and now identified in a new study.

As well as expanding the dinosaur family tree, the fossil find is going to be useful for experts trying to track the migration patterns of hadrosaurs.

While early members of the hadrosaur family most likely wandered across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia to North America, the migration could have become a two-way street, with some later clades returning.

This has given rise to questions over the origins of some later day hadrosaur genera found in places like Japan. Now, features of the partial skeleton and its estimated date – 71-72 million years ago, just before dinosaurs became extinct – tip the scales in favor of these late-blooming branches of the hadrosaur tree also starting in Asia, instead of in the other direction.

The new species follows the 2019 discovery by the same team of another hadrosaurid called Kamuysaurus, found on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

"These are the first dinosaurs discovered in Japan from the late Cretaceous period," says paleontologist Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, from Hokkaido University Museum in Japan. "Until now, we had no idea what dinosaurs lived in Japan at the end of the dinosaur age."


"The discovery of these Japanese dinosaurs will help us to fill a piece of our bigger vision of how dinosaurs migrated between these two continents."

Part of the reason for the abundance and diversity of hadrosaurs was their chewing ability: the animals had hundreds of tightly packed teeth in their mouths, which were replaced from below as they wore down and fell out.

And it's the dental structure that makes Y. izanagii unique: the number and development of the teeth differs noticeably, and it probably evolved to feed on different types of vegetation to other hadrosaurs.

The right dentary of Y. izanagii distinguishes it from other known hadrosaurs. (SMU)

The researchers also noticed an unexpected level of development in the shoulder and forelimbs, marking an evolutionary step in the species from a bipedal to a quadrupedal dinosaur which could change how we interpret their evolution. It's another interesting variation in a dinosaur that dominated the Cretaceous period.

"In the far north, where much of our our work occurs, hadrosaurs are known as the caribou of the Cretaceous," says paleontologist Anthony Fiorillo, from Southern Methodist University in Texas.


The team behind the new study suggests that hadrosaurs could have crossed from Asia to present-day Alaska via the Bering land bridge, and then spread across almost the whole of North America. Japan was attached to Asia until around 15 million years ago.

And if you're wondering about the name, Yamato is the ancient name for Japan, while Izanagi is a god in Japanese mythology believed to have created the Japanese islands – starting with Awaji Island, where the new Yamatosaurus was found.

There's one more important point to take from the discovery and identification of Y. izanagii: the importance of teamwork. The original bones were uncovered by an amateur fossil hunter in a cement quarry.

"Japan is mostly covered with vegetation with few outcrops for fossil-hunting," says Kobayashi. "The help of amateur fossil-hunters has been very important."

The research has been published in Scientific Reports.

THE HADROSAUR IS ALBERTA'S OFFICIAL DINOSAUR

Extreme Poverty Will Be Reduced if We Tackle Climate Change Right, Study Shows


(Gaston Roulstone/Unsplash)

PATRICK GALEY, AFP
28 APRIL 2021

Ambitious climate policies could reduce extreme poverty in developing countries if governments opted for robust taxes on emitters that were then fairly distributed to help the poor, new research showed Tuesday.


Authors of the study said the results showed that policymakers were facing a false choice between climate change mitigation and poverty reduction.

Since fossil fuels and agricultural chemicals such as fertilizers are so heavily subsidized, any attempt to remove taxpayer support to these unsustainable practices frequently prompts fears of higher prices for consumers.

Industry lobbyists also argue that cheap sources of energy such as coal have a role to play in expanding access to electricity in developing countries.

Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) used computer models to predict how levels of global poverty might be affected by various interventions aimed at limiting global warming.

They found that the world was on course to have around 350 million people living in extreme policy - i.e. on less than US$1.90 a day - by 2030, far short of the UN goal to eradicate extreme poverty by the end of the decade.

The authors noted that this figure did not factor in the economic disruption caused by the pandemic, or the adverse effects of climate change.


They then modeled in ambitious climate policies consistent with the 1.5 °C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement, and found that this could increase the number of people living in extreme poverty by an additional 50 million.

But when they modeled in equitable redistribution of national carbon price revenues - which would see poorer, and therefore lower-polluting sections of society receive money accrued from richer polluters - they found that this could compensate for the other effects of climate mitigation.

They even found it could slightly reduce the number of people living in poverty - about 6 million fewer by 2030.

"Climate policies safeguard people from climate change impacts like extreme weather risks or crop failure," said Bjoern Soergel, a PIK researcher and lead author of the study, published in Nature Communications.

"Yet they can also imply increased energy and food prices. This could result in an additional burden especially from the global poor, who are already more vulnerable to climate impacts."
'Climate dividend'

Soergel said that governments could combine emissions prices with international redistribution of the revenues they generated - a sort of "climate dividend".

"The revenues are returned equally to all citizens, which turns poorer households with typically lower emissions into net beneficiaries," he said.


The authors suggested a scheme of international climate finance transfers from high-income to low-income countries to offset the additional burden poorer nations face in seeking to limit climate change.

Just 5 percent of emission pricing revenues from industrialized nations would be enough to more than compensate for the policy side effects of climate mitigation in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the study.

"Combining the national redistribution of emission pricing revenues with international financial transfers could thus provide an important entry point towards a fair and just climate policy in developing countries," said co-author Elmar Kriegler.

© Agence France-Presse

Serial Collapses of Ancient Pueblo Societies Carry a Stark Warning For Today's World

Puebloans Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde, Colorado. (Daniela Duncan)


TESSA KOUMOUNDOUROS
28 APRIL 2021

In the area where the Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexican borders now meet, ancestral Pueblo societies thrived and then collapsed several times, over the span of 800 years.

Each time they recovered, their culture transformed. This shifting history can be seen in their pottery and the incredible stone and earth dwellings they created. During 300 of those years, some Pueblo peoples, who also used ink tattoos, were ruled by a matrilineal dynasty.

As in the collapse of other ancient civilizations, ancestral Pueblo social collapses align with periods of changing climate - but Pueblo farmers often persevered through droughts, suggesting that there was more to their collapses than just environmental conditions.

So archaeologists took a closer look at what was happening in these societies, before 1400 CE, leading up to their times of upheaval. Using tree-ring analyses of wood beams for building construction allowed the researchers to construct a time series of the Pueblo societies' productivity.

Peak construction periods were clustered around good maize growing seasons, even though these times, on average, were not climatically better for growing maize than when there was a lull in said construction.

The new research found that while the societies often bounced back fairly quickly after construction lulled, there were distinct slow-downs in recoverythat coincided with increased signs of violent.

This sort of system slowdown can be seen in other regional collapses of ancient societies like the Neolithic Europeans, that had no link to changing climates. It's also a feature of complex systems as diverse as the tropical rainforest and the human brain.

"Those warning signals turn out to be strikingly universal," said Wageningen University complexity scientist Marten Scheffer. "They are based on the fact that slowing down of recovery from small perturbations signals loss of resilience."

Scheffer and colleagues suspect slowly accumulating social tensions - like wealth inequality, racial injustice, and general unrest - wore away at social cohesion until all it took was a bit more pressure from another drought to tip them over the edge. This appears to have happened to the Pueblo peoples around 700, 900, and 1140 CE.

However, during the late 1200s, a combination of drought and external conflict spurred the ancestral Pueblo peoples to permanently leave the region.

"Societies that are cohesive can often find ways to overcome climate challenges," explained Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler.

"But societies that are riven by internal social dynamics of any sort – which could be wealth differences, racial disparities or other divisions – are fragile because of those factors. Then climate challenges can easily become very serious."

The ancient Pueblo peoples did find a way to thrive elsewhere, possibly by dramatically transforming their culture once more, and today their descendants live on tribal lands surrounding the empty places that were once the center of the Pueblo world. Their history provides us with a significant warning.

"Today we face multiple social problems including rising wealth inequality along with deep political and racial divisions, just as climate change is no longer theoretical," Kohler said. "If we're not ready to face the challenges of changing climate as a cohesive society, there will be real trouble."

If we want to avoid repeating history, we'd better pay attention.

Their research was published in PNAS (link not yet live at time of writing)

This Weird 'Horned' Crocodile Could Represent a New Branch on The Tree of Life

CLARE WATSON
28 APRIL 2021


An extinct 'horned' crocodile that once called Madagascar home has finally found its place on the tree of life, according to a new study of two skulls stored at the American Museum of Natural History.

Based on ancient DNA extracted from the museum specimens, researchers have posited that the horned crocodile was closely related to modern-day 'true' crocodiles which live throughout the tropics, but it sits on an adjacent branch of the crocodile family tree that split some 25 million years ago.

This rejigs scientific thinking about the horned crocodile's evolutionary relationships, which most recently had them pegged as relatives of dwarf crocodiles.

The study also suggests that the ancestor of modern crocodiles likely originated in Africa, and goes some way towards settling the long-standing controversy that has swirled about the horned crocodile's evolutionary history.

Voay robustus skull from southwestern Madagascar. (M. Ellison/©AMNH)

Heavy-built horned crocodiles, named for unusual bony protrusions atop their heads and known today as Voay robustus, roamed Madagascar alongside another, more slender crocodile, according to accounts from early explorers.

But while the Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) still inhabits the island to this day, and is the largest and most common crocodilian in all of Africa, horned crocodiles went extinct after humans arrived on Madagascar's shores, as early as 9,000 years ago.


"They blinked out just before we had the modern genomic tools available to make sense of the relationships of living things," said study author Evon Hekkala, a behavioral ecologist turned conservation geneticist at Fordham University in New York.

"And yet, they were the key to understanding the story of all the crocodiles alive today."

Understandably, horned crocodiles have been the focus of some intense study and debate amongst paleontologists. But after 150 years of investigations, researchers haven't been able to agree on where to place Madagascar's horned crocodile on the tree of life.

At first, horned crocodiles were described as a new species of "true crocodile" alongside the Nile crocodile. But then scientists thought they had more in common with shorter, smaller dwarf crocodiles.

An extinct crocodile skull analyzed for its DNA in the study. (M. Ellison/©AMNH)

Part of the problem is crocodiles are unusual beasts that look remarkably similar to their fossilized ancestors who lived some 200 million years ago. These physical similarities make teasing out the relationships between modern crocodiles and their ancient ancestors difficult.

"We've been trying to get to the bottom of the great diversity that exists among them," said Hekkala, who appears to have a knack for solving crocodilian mysteries using ancient DNA.


In 2011, as a graduate student, she discovered by genetic analysis that the Nile crocodile was actually two distinct species, not one – and the species differed by two whole chromosomes.

This time around, Hekkala and her colleagues mapped mitochondrial DNA extracted from the teeth of two V. robustus specimens and compared them against a few crocodilian reference genomes.

The horned crocodile skulls, which date back to around 1,300 to 1,400 years old, were collected on an expedition to southwest Madagascar between 1927 to 1930, and have been stored at the American Museum of Natural History ever since.

Mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to offspring, tends to stay much the same over generations, making it a useful tool for tracing evolution through maternal ancestry. But as ancient DNA fragments with age, it always depends on how well the DNA of a particular specimen has been preserved.

The genetic comparisons here suggested that the horned crocodile represents a "sister lineage" to 'true' crocodiles, placing V. robustus right next to modern-day Crocodylus, such as Australia's saltwater crocodile, on the evolutionary tree.

It was only with modern DNA techniques and the right computational setup that the research team could "actually fish out this DNA from the fossil and finally find a home for this species," explained study author and geneticist George Amato from the American Museum of Natural History's Institute for Comparative Genomics.

So, you could say this is a long-awaited homecoming for V. robustus.

"This finding was surprising and also very informative to how we think about the origin of the true crocodiles found around the tropics today," Amato added.

"The placement of this individual suggests that true crocodiles originated in Africa, and from there, some went to Asia and some went to the Caribbean and the New World. We really needed the DNA to get the correct answer to this question."

The research was published in Communications Biology.

Scientists Discover Psychedelic-Like Drug That Doesn't Cause Hallucinations

THAT'S NO FUN

(Victor de Schwanberg/Getty Images)


CARLY CASSELLA
29 APRIL 2021

Scientists have discovered a psychedelic-like drug that can produce rapid, long-lasting antidepressant effects in mice without the effect of hallucinations.

The molecule, called AAZ-A-154, acts on the same serotonin receptors in the brain as antipsychotic drugs (like clozapine) and psychedelics (like LSD), promoting neuronal growth and producing beneficial behaviors in rodents for weeks after a single dose.

Researchers say the treatment is comparable to the fast-acting nature of ketamine, which has recently emerged as a promising drug for conditions like depression, substance abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

However, some psychedelic drugs that are being investigated for their medical effects, such as psilocybin, routinely trigger hallucinations, which means they should only really be used as a treatment under the guidance and supervision of experts.

Finding a safe alternative without the risk of hallucinations would be extremely useful clinically, but the thing is, we still don't know if these hallucinogenic effects are needed to actually reshape the brain.

To explore this issue in greater detail, researchers from the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) genetically encoded a green fluorescent protein into a specific type of serotonin receptor responsible for triggering hallucinations, allowing them to observe the receptors being activated in living tissue.

Applying the novel sensor to 34 compounds with extremely similar structures but unknown hallucinogenic potentials, the team found one molecule in particular, AAZ-A-154, which exhibited a high selectivity for the receptor with few side effects.


When this compound was administered to mice, it produced antidepressant-like effects within 30 minutes and failed to cause any head-twitches, an indicator in mice suggesting the compound would cause hallucinations in humans. Even at relatively high doses, the results appeared to be the same, with cognitive benefits lasting for over a week.

According to the researchers, this is only the second non-hallucinogenic drug they've found that shows clinical benefits similar to psychedelics.

The other compound, Tabernanthalog (TBG), was engineered last year by some of the same authors, and while it increased the branching of mouse neurons in similar ways to ketamine, LSD, MDMA, and DMT, it appears AAZ-A-154 may have stronger and more sustained antidepressant effects in live animals.

Compared to existing psychedelics, a drug that people can take home, put in their medicine cabinets, and take on their own without supervision would be a much safer and more practical alternative, and TBG and AAZ-A-154 seem like promising new candidates.

So far, these compounds have only been tested in mice, so we still don't really know how they differ functionally to other psychedelic substances humans take with similar structures.


Far more research is needed to understand the underlying mechanisms, both at the molecular and cellular level, before we can even consider testing these compounds on our own species.

"Serotonin reuptake inhibitors have long been used for treating depression, but we don't know much about their mechanism," says UC Davis biomedical researcher Lin Tian.

"It's like a black box."

Now we just need to crack the lid and see what's underneath.

The study was published in Cell

Even Closed Oil Wells Are Still Spewing Methane Into The Air, Scientists Warn

(Cavan Images/Getty Images)


PETER DOCKRILL
29 APRIL 2021


The legacy of abandoned oil wells in the US isn't hard to see, even leaving gaping holes in the landscape that are frightening to look at. But their invisible aftermath is more alarming still.


Across the US and Canada, there are millions of abandoned or inactive oil and gas wells left behind by their former operators, and often improperly sealed. These stranded reserves – sometimes called orphan wells – may have been deserted by humans, but they are not a spent force.

Abandoned wells, hundreds of thousands of which are thought to be undocumented, are estimated to spew vast amounts of heat-trapping methane emissions into the atmosphere, far exceeding the projections of environmental authorities such as the US EPA.

Conservative estimates suggest abandoned wells might represent up to 4 percent of methane gas emissions from oil and gas systems in the US, although the veracity of such estimates is debatable, given the relative lack of on-the-ground measurements.

It gets worse – in part due to the fractured nature of abandonment. Aside from outright abandoned wells, a sub-category of inactive wells known as 'shut-ins' can pose the same methane-leaking risks, but fly under the radar in official figures.

Shut-ins are idle wells that are not currently being used for oil production, likely due to market conditions, but which could be re-activated in the future. Despite all the growing concern over just how big the abandoned wells fiasco is, shut-ins, many of which are uncapped, have never been measured for their own contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.


In a new study by scientists at the University of Cincinnati, researchers sought to rectify that.

Biogeochemist Amy Townsend-Small and her research assistant Jacob Hoschouer visited the sites of 37 inactive wells located on private property in Texas's Permian Basin, the largest oil production basin in the US, which on the whole produces roughly 60 percent higher methane emissions than the national average for oil and gas production regions.

Part of the problem, the researchers found, is shut-ins. While many of the inactive wells measured for elevated methane levels showed either no leaks or little leaking, several were leaking methane in high amounts, up to a maximum of 132 grams per hour.

"Some of them were leaking a lot," Townsend-Small says. "A few sources are responsible for most of the leaks."

While the problem may vary from shut-in to shut-in, the high readings of the outliers pushed the average for all the inactive wells measured to 6.2 grams per hour – which is higher than the average output for abandoned wells in other western states (including Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming) but lower than counterparts in the Appalachian Basin in the US northeast.


If the same levels of leaking were found for all of Texas's roughly 100,000 wells, it would be about 5.5 million kilograms of methane released annually – around the equivalent of burning 150 million pounds of coal each year, the researchers say.

Again, though, we can't yet conclude too much from the existing data, since there are millions of abandoned or inactive wells in North America, and many more measurements need to be taken.

Once we do, however – if similar patterns of leaking bear out across all sites – there could be practical solutions to fixing most of the leaks by focusing on the worst offenders.

"If you want to make a big impact, you only have to fix the big leakers," Townsend-Small told Grist and the Texas Observer.

Overall, inactive wells seem to produce less methane emissions than active oil-producing wells, but these largely neglected and unmaintained sites also present other environmental problems.

In their expedition, Townsend-Small and Hoschouer observed evidence of polluted water pooling at five of the wells, with brine leaks producing ponds surrounded by dead vegetation and a strong gassy smell.


"I was horrified by that," Townsend-Small says.

"I've never seen anything like that here in Ohio. One was gushing out so much water that people who lived there called it a lake, but it's toxic. It has dead trees all around it and smells like hydrogen sulfide."

Ultimately, there's a lot more work to do, both in assessing the environmental and health impacts of what these tapped but unspent wells could represent to the planet and its people.

The Biden administration has already strongly signaled an intention to begin addressing the toxic legacy of abandoned wells, encompassed in a US$16 billion spending plan.

In addition to plugging the worst leakers and conducting more measurements at inactive wells, the researchers say regular inspections of shut-ins could help prevent neglected sites from becoming problematic emitters, and infrared cameras could be set up to identify leaks.

Ideally, of course, all of this would have been done yesterday. While carbon dioxide reductions have been the central focus of many climate initiatives, the unfortunate truth is that in the shorter term, methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas – with a warming potential 28 times greater over a 100-year period.

Despite the severe dangers, emissions are entirely headed the wrong way. Just this month, a new analysis by the NOAA showed annual global methane emissions just experienced their largest year-on-year increase since records began in 1983.

Old wells aren't the only things that are broken.

The findings are reported in Environmental Research Letters.

A Pregnant Ancient Egyptian Mummy Has Been Discovered in a Shocking World First


Photo and scans of the mummy. (Ejsmond et al., J. Archaeol. Sci., 2021)



MICHELLE STARR
30 APRIL 2021


At first, archaeologists thought they were scanning the mummy of an ancient Egyptian priest named Hor-Djehuty. Then, in the body's abdomen, images revealed what appeared to be the bones of a tiny foot.


Full scans confirmed it: the foot belonged to a tiny fetus, still in the womb of its deceased and mummified mother.

Not only is this the first time a deliberately mummified pregnant woman has been found, it presents a fascinating mystery. Who was the woman? And why was she mummified with her fetus? So peculiar is the discovery, scientists have named her the Mysterious Lady of the National Museum in Warsaw.

"For unknown reasons, the fetus had not been removed from the abdomen during the mummification," archaeologist Wojciech Ejsmond of the Polish Academy of Sciences told Science in Poland.

"For this reason, the mummy is really unique. Our mummy is the only one identified so far in the world with a fetus in the womb."

The mummy and its sarcophagus were donated to the University of Warsaw in 1826 and kept in the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland since 1917. The artifact actually has an interesting history. The mummy was initially thought to be female, likely because of the elaborate sarcophagus.

The coffin, cartonnage case, and mummy. (National Museum in Warsaw, Warsaw Mummy Project)

It wasn't until around 1920 when the name on the coffin and cartonnage was translated that perception shifted. The writing revealed that the interred was named Hor-Djehuty, and was highly placed.

"Scribe, priest of Horus-Thoth worshiped as a visiting deity in the Mount of Djeme, royal governor of the town of Petmiten, Hor-Djehuty, justified by voice, son of Padiamonemipet and lady of a house Tanetmin," the translation read.


In 2016, however, computer tomography revealed that the mummy in the sarcophagus may not have actually been Hor-Djehuty. The bones were too delicate, male reproductive organs were missing, and a three-dimensional reconstruction revealed breasts.

Given that artifacts weren't exactly handled with the best care in the 19th century, and given that the coffin and cartonnage were indeed made for a male mummy, it seems that an entirely different mummy was placed in the sarcophagus at some point - perhaps to be passed off as a more valuable artifact.

This is supported by damage to some of the mummy's bandages - likely caused by 19th century looters rifling through looking for amulets, the researchers said.

Thus, it's impossible to know who exactly the woman was, or even if she came from Thebes where the coffin was found; however, a few facts can be gauged from her remains.

Firstly, she was mummified with great care, and with a rich set of amulets, suggesting in and of itself that she was someone important - mummification was a luxury in ancient Egypt, unavailable to most.

X-ray and CT scans of the mummy's abdomen, revealing the fetus. (Ejsmond et al., J. Archaeol. Sci., 2021)

She died just over 2,000 years ago, in approximately the first century BCE, between the ages of 20 and 30, and the development of the fetus suggests she was between 26 and 30 weeks pregnant.

As the first-ever discovery of a pregnant embalmed mummy, the Mysterious Lady poses fascinating questions about ancient Egyptian spiritual beliefs, the researchers said. Did the ancient Egyptians believe that unborn fetuses could go on to the afterlife, or was this mummy a strange anomaly?

It's unclear how she died, but the team believes that analysis of the mummy's preserved soft tissues might yield some clues.

"High mortality during pregnancy and childbirth in those times is not a secret," Ejsmond said. "Therefore, we believe that pregnancy could somehow contribute to the death of the young woman."

The team's research has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Baby Mantis Shrimp Can Throw Knockout Punches at Just 9 Days Old

Side view of an 11-day-old mantis shrimp larva. (Jacob Harrison)

NICOLETTA LANESE, LIVESCIENCE
30 APRIL 2021

Mantis shrimp wield a spring-loaded appendage that punches through water with explosive force - and their babies can start swinging just nine days after they hatch.

In a new study, published Thursday (April 29) in the Journal of Experimental Biology, scientists studied larval Philippine mantis shrimp (Gonodactylaceus falcatus) originally collected from Oahu, Hawaii.

The team also reared some of the same species from eggs, carefully monitoring their development through time and then zooming in on their punching appendage under the microscope.

The appendage, called the raptorial appendage, works similarly to a bow and arrow, in that the tip of the appendage gets pulled back, "nocked" against a spring-like mechanism and then let loose in a sudden release of elastic energy, said first author Jacob Harrison, a graduate student in the biology program at Duke University.

"While we have a pretty great understanding of how it functions in the adults … we didn't really have a solid understanding of how it develops," Harrison told Live Science.

Related: Smash! Super-stabby mantis shrimp shows off in video

Now, in a "remarkably complete and carefully controlled" study, Harrison and his team have started to unravel the mystery of when mantis shrimp start throwing down like lightning-fast boxers, said Roy Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study.

A larval mantis shrimp punching at 20,000 frames per second. (The Company of Biologists, Harrison et al., J. Exp. Biol., 2021)

And furthermore, since larval mantis shrimp have transparent shells, "what's new about this study is [that] the transparency of the raptorial apparatus allows them to see in great detail exactly what's going on," Caldwell said.

"That hasn't been possible in looking at adults," whose exoskeleton is opaque, he said.

Slower than expected, but still impressive

When adult mantis shrimp unleash a flurry of strikes, the tips of their appendages can slice through the water at about 50 mph (80 km/h), according to National Geographic.

But a mathematical model, published in 2018 in the journal Science, hinted that baby mantis shrimp might throw even faster punches than adults, assuming they take up boxing at a young age.

This model, developed in the same lab Harrison works in, zoomed in on the spring mechanism mantis shrimp use to deliver punishing blows.

"We see these mechanisms all over biology," from jumping frogs and insects to stinging jellyfish that fire venom-filled capsules into their prey, Harrison noted.

The model hinted that these spring-loaded mechanisms should generally become less efficient at larger scales, and therefore, smaller springs with less mass should generate higher acceleration when let loose.

Another model that specifically focused on mantis shrimp revealed a similar result, indicating that larger mantis shrimp species strike more slowly than smaller species, the researchers reported in 2016 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.


Harrison and his team wanted to see if these models held up in larval mantis shrimp, since of course, they're smaller than adults of their species. So the team searched for tiny, translucent mantis shrimp in Hawaii in the dead of night.

"If you go out where you can find adult mantis shrimp, you can actually stick a light in the water, and mantis shrimp will come like a moth to a flame," Harrison said. That said, larval crabs, shrimp and fish also flock to the light and get scooped up in the same buckets as the mantis shrimp; so therein lies the challenge.

These free-swimming shrimp larvae had matured enough to exit the burrow in which they hatched, so they tended to be at least 9 to 14 days old at the time of capture, Harrison noted.

To collect data on even younger mantis shrimp, Harrison also collected an egg clutch from a female G. falcatus found at Wailupe Beach Park. The eggs hatched in transit on their way to Duke University, but the team still managed to raise the puny mantis shrimp for 28 days in their lab.


Related: Six bizarre feeding tactics from the depths of our oceans

With mantis shrimp in hand, the team carefully observed how the larvae developed through time. G. falcatus larvae were previously known to progress through six larval stages, each marked by the larva molting its exoskeleton. The team found that, in the first and second larval stages, the larvae huddled together at the bottom of the tank; by the third stage, they began swimming but did not throw any punches.

But by the fourth stage, around day 9 to 14, "larvae began striking and 'waving' their raptorial appendages as they swam through the water," the authors wrote in their report.

At this point, the raptorial appendages had fully formed and closely resembled an adult's, in terms of structure, and the larvae also began snacking on larval brine shrimp that the team provided. Each larva measured about the size of a grain of rice at this juncture.

The team shot high-speed, high-resolution video of the strikes by the older larval mantis shrimp they'd scooped from the ocean, to see just how they hurl their appendages through water. This required placing the rice-size larvae into a custom rig and securing them with glue, so they'd stay in frame and in focus.

The footage enabled the team to not only examine the speed and mechanics of each punch, but also to watch as elements of the spring mechanism slid to and fro under the transparent exoskeleton.

"What we found was that they could produce really high accelerations and velocities relative to their body size," Harrison said.

These metrics specifically measure how rapidly the larvae appendages can transition from stillness to striking, so in this respect, the larvae were "roughly on par with a lot of the adult species," he said.

However, in terms of their overall speed, the larval strikes only traveled about 0.9 mph (1.4 k/h) - an order of magnitude slower than the adult strikes.

"The finding that was a little bit surprising was that the speed of the strike is less than what we see in adults," Caldwell said.

This difference in speed may be related to the actual materials making up the spring, he said; perhaps the spring itself or the "latch" that nocks the appendage in place, differs in larval and adult mantis shrimp, limiting the amount of elastic energy that the larvae can deploy.

Related: Dangers in the deep: 10 scariest sea creatures

The water surrounding the mantis shrimp may also impact their striking speed, Harrison suggested.

To teeny marine creatures, like larvae, water feels quite viscous, more like molasses than water as we experience it, he said. It may be that, as mantis shrimp mature, they can better overcome the stickiness of the water and execute faster strikes.

And despite being slower than adults, the larvae still threw punches that were five to 10 times faster than the reported swimming speeds of similarly sized organisms and more than 150 times faster than their favorite brine shrimp snacks can swim, the authors wrote.

Evolutionarily, there may not be much pressure for larvae to increase their striking speed before reaching maturity, Caldwell said.

The study is also limited in that the team only collected video of defensive strikes, provoked by irritating the larvae with a toothpick, Caldwell noted. "We know, in adults, there's considerable ability to modulate the strength of the strike depending on what it's being used for," whether that be defense, or capturing or stabbing prey, he said. So the speed of the strike may differ somewhat, depending on its purpose.

Looking forward, Harrison and his team plan to probe what factors limit the larval mantis shrimps' striking speed, as well as when the shrimp overcome this limitation in the course of development, he said. They also want to examine whether the raptorial appendage develops similarly across the hundreds of mantis shrimp species, he added.

"The larval stomatopods," another term for mantis shrimp, "are basically a black box, we know very little about them," Caldwell noted. "Almost anything done on larval stomatopods is new and interesting … They've just literally scratched the surface in terms of looking at morphology."

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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

Nigerian artist Laolu uses African celebrities as his canvas for malaria awareness campaign

Earl Nurse, CNN 4/29/2021


When Laolu Senbanjo received an email requesting him to work with Beyoncé, he thought it was a scam.

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© Cindy Ord/Getty Images NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 06: Laolu Senbanjo paints a model during the Belvedere Vodka's Celebration of the Launch of the 2018 Limited Edition bottle designed by Laolu Senbanjo during New York Fashion Week at The Whitney Museum Of American Art on September 6, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images for Belvedere)

"The Nigerian in me was just thinking it's just one of those emails," the 38-year-old recalls. "I wanted to know what the catch was and when they would ask me to pay some money." Eventually, he did respond -- and ended up with a job doing body art for Beyoncé's 2016 visual album "Lemonade."

Having recently relocated from Nigeria to New York City to pursue his passion, this was the biggest break of his career.

The artist, who now goes by Laolu NYC or simply Laolu, has a style that stands out mostly because of his willingness to use anything, or anyone, as a canvas. Whether it's sneakers for Nike, bottles for Belvedere, or face art for Serena Williams, Laolu's signature brush strokes are in demand.

"The style is called 'Afromysterics,' which means the mystery of African thought pattern," Laolu explains, adding that it "heavily relies on very sophisticated symbols. I call them hieroglyphs from Yoruba mythology."

Now, the visual artist is using that style to help raise awareness for one of the world's deadliest diseases.


An artistic take on malaria

Last year, Laolu was asked to become the art director for a new campaign geared to raise awareness among African youth about the dangers of malaria. Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease that is most prevalent in Africa, with Laolu's home country of Nigeria accounting for almost a quarter of the more than 400,000 people that die from the disease each year.

A former human rights attorney in Nigeria, Laolu has caught malaria multiple times himself and eagerly volunteered his services to help spread the message.

"Malaria has taken so many lives in my country," he says. "(It) continues to be a stumbling block for a lot of us. And just to know that this is preventable -- for me it's a worthy cause."

The campaign, which launched in February, is called Draw The Line Against Malaria. It includes a short film featuring African talents such as Nigerian actor Omotola Jalade Ekeinde, Rwandan choreographer Sherrie Silver, and Kenyan marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge.

All are sporting custom artwork by Laolu. "It's a skill that I've had to develop over time to be able to create art on anyone," he says as he explains his body art process. "They have to be comfortable because it's a level of intimacy that they probably don't give just anyone. So it's very ritualistic and is very sacred to me."

© TSE Laolu paints on the legs of Kenyan athlete and Olympic Gold Medalist Eliud Kipchoge, who features in the Draw The Line campaign film.

The Muundo

The designs for the campaign aren't just random -- they are based around images Laolu created that all have meaning.

The collection of symbols, lines and shapes creates a new visual language he calls "The Muundo" which means "artistic creation" or "structure" in Swahili.

As part of the campaign, users can design their own contribution to the Muundo. The goal is to create a giant mural that will be presented to world leaders at the next Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Rwanda, later this year.

"It's a way where we are all collaborators on this project," Laolu says. "We have everybody drawing the line, everybody's being an artist, everybody, creating something, (and) being part of drawing the line against malaria. I think it's pretty phenomenal.

© Courtesy of Laolu NYC Beyoncé wears face paint by Nigerian artist Laolu for her visual album "Lemonade."

This Woman Faced Felony Charges For Not Returning A Sabrina The Teenage Witch VHS

Long gone are the days when a part-time Blockbuster employee sick with power was tasked with hounding delinquent movie renters who, for one reason or another, just couldn’t bring themselves to return that VHS on time. Who among us didn’t pay a late fee for keeping the 1998 masterpiece Armageddon an extra week or two?! The ending! The ending alone!

© Provided by Refinery29

The consequences of failing to return a rented movie, however, are anything but in the past for one Texas woman. When Caron McBride tried to change her name after getting married, she was notified of an “issue” she had in Cleveland County, OK: felony charges for not returning Sabrina the Teenage Witch to a movie rental store in the town of Norman in 1999.

“They told me that I had an issue in Oklahoma and this was the reference number for me to call this number and I did. Meanwhile, I’m a wanted felon,” McBride told CBS Dallas/Fort Worth. “I thought I was gonna have a heart attack.”

McBride was charged for felony embezzlement of rented property in March 2000, according to the local news channel. She had been unaware of the charges, however, or that the movie had even been rented in her name. She thinks her at-the-time roommate must have rented the movie and failed to return it, but didn’t even mention it.

“He had two kids, daughters that were 8, 10, or 11 years old, and I’m thinking he went and got it and didn’t take it back or something,” McBride said. “I have never watched that show in my entire life. Just not my cup of tea.” (Not sure what our Lord and Savior Melissa Joan Hart did to deserve that, but I digress.)

The rental store, Movie Place, went out of business in 2008 (thanks, Netflix), so whoever is in possession of the 1996 coming-of-age movie can certainly keep it now. But McBride says that over the past two decades, she thinks she may have been terminated from various jobs due to the felony charges showing up on background checks.

The Cleveland County District Attorney reportedly dropped the charges once McBride’s story aired on local television. Her record, however, still reflects the charges, and the DA said that McBride would have to get her case expunged in order to clear her record entirely. Refinery29 reached out to Cleveland County DA Greg Mashburn for comment, but did not hear back at the time of publication.

Sure, Netflix might be the ruthless streaming service that had the audacity to put movie rental shops like Blockbuster and Movie Place out of business, only to promote a documentary about it. But would Netflix hold a 20-year grudge against an absent-minded customer to the tune of federal charges? Honestly, probably. Did you see that Blockbuster documentary? Talk about cold-blooded.