The Internet of Animals - Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth

The researchers had turned their jalopies into labs on wheels: They sliced holes in the cars’ roofs, through which they inserted pole-mounted antennas. “We drove like tornado chasers behind a single bird each night,” Wikelski writes, “constantly rotating our antennas to determine where the bird was going and to receive the strongest signal possible. All we needed to do was speed after the thrushes while recording their sounds continuously.”

This gonzo research effort yielded breakthrough insights into how birds communicate: A bird would fly up to a certain altitude, call out, and listen for other birds’ responses. If the replies came, the bird would know it had found a good, safe pathway. The research, Wikelski writes, revealed “a highway in the sky, where birds were providing each other with key information on how high to fly, where to go, and who to follow.” This “ancient organic symphony,” he writes, is “created by animals as they exchange information across species and continents.” And it is high time, he argues, for humans to “tune in.”

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Why is building an internet of animals so important that Wikelski has devoted decades of his career to it? The route we are on, particularly in the West, of viewing the natural world only in terms of what we can extract from it for our own gain, is a path to ruin. Wikelski believes the “next chapter in human evolution” is the Interspecies Age, where humans recognize that we are partners with other species, consider their needs when we make decisions, and “link the knowledge these other species have to our own knowledge.” Among many other benefits of this Interspecies Age, he says, will be the ability to draw on animals’ sixth sense to help us predict “when something big is happening in the environment” — a buildup of toxins in a landscape, the onset of an El Niño event, the emergence of a plague of locusts.

All these are important. My one gripe about “The Internet of Animals,” though, is that it places too much emphasis on what animals can tell us about things that might harm us — like predicting earthquakes — as opposed to what they can reveal about how our actions might be harming them. Perhaps this is simply a tool to convince a broad audience of the project’s potential. But the true value of an internet of animals goes back to the meadowlarks. If we don’t know what routes they follow, where they land along the way, what pitfalls — natural or human-made — may cause their journeys to end in tragedy, then we can’t work effectively protect the habitat, food, and other resources they need to survive. An internet of animals would help us see the currently invisible parts of our world — how animals distribute seeds, how they cope with the impacts of climate change, how they interact with one another when there isn’t anyone around to watch.

- Review of the new book The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth by Martin Wikelski

Wisdom Of Animals, Birds, Reptiles & Insects

Drink water from the spring where horses drink. The horse will never drink bad water.

Lay your bed where the cat sleeps. The cat loves calm.

Eat the fruit that has been touched by a worm. The worm looks for ripe in the fruit

Boldly pick the mushroom on which the insects sit.

Plant the tree where the mole digs, for that is fertile land.

Build your house where the snake sits to warm itself,  for that is the stable ground that does not collapse.

Dig your fountain where the birds hide from heat. Wherever the birds stand, the water hides.

Go to sleep and wake up at the same time with the birds – you will reap all of the day's golden grains.

Eat more green – you will have strong legs and a resistant heart, like the beings of the forest.

Swim often and you will feel on earth like the fish in the water.

Look at the sky as often as possible and your thoughts will become light and clear.

Be quiet a lot, speak little – and silence will come in your heart, and your spirit will be calm and fill with peace.

- Saint Seraphim of Sarov 1754-1833

 

The Insect Crisis

Entomologists are instinctively disdainful of any suggestion that pollinating insects could somehow be matched by technology, even on a basic logistical level. Biologist Dave Goulson points out that bees are rather adept at pollinating flowers, given they’ve been honing their skills for around 120 million years, and that, besides, there are around 80 million honeybee hives in the world, each stuffed with tens of thousands of bees feeding and breeding for free. “What would the cost be of replacing them with robots?” Goulson asks. “It is remarkable hubris to think that we can improve on that.” 

To be fair to those devoted to appropriating the characteristics of insects for our use, there is widespread awe at the evolutionary brilliance of flies and bees and scant joy at the crisis that has brought us to the point where the meanderings of academic curiosity are being seized upon as possible salvation from our degenerate ways. When we consider technological solutions, we should perhaps spend less time judging the supply and more time judging the reasons why there’s demand in the first place.

- Excerpts from The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World by Oliver Milman

People never learn from history. This history wasn't too long ago - in 2010 during Iraq war Pentagon spend whopping $19 billion to reverse engineering dog's nose (in vain) to find a replacement for bomb sniffing dogs! 

Miyabeacin - Found In The Balk Of The Willow Tree Has Potential In Cancer Therapy

Abstract

Willow (Salix spp.) is well known as a source of medicinal compounds, the most famous being salicin, the progenitor of aspirin. Here we describe the isolation, structure determination, and anti-cancer activity of a cyclodimeric salicinoid (miyabeacin) from S. miyabeana and S. dasyclados. We also show that the capability to produce such dimers is a heritable trait and how variation in structures of natural miyabeacin analogues is derived via cross-over Diels-Alder reactions from pools of ortho-quinol precursors. These transient ortho-quinols have a role in the, as yet uncharacterised, biosynthetic pathways around salicortin, the major salicinoid of many willow genotypes.

- Full paper here

How Whales Resist Cancer

However, given that cell division may lead to errors, larger animals should get more cancer. After all, bigger body, more cells/cell divisions, more possible mutations. Enter a paradox.

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If we look within species, there seems to be a positive correlation between cancer risk and body size. Larger individuals → increased risk. But, when we look across species, this correlation breaks down. An elephant does not get more cancer than a mouse. This apparent resistance of larger-sized species to cancer is known as Peto’s paradox, named after English statistician Richard Peto who first observed it in 1977.

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Evolution, it seems, has gifted the larger species some extra protection.

A new study now exposes some of those gifts by looking at the largest of animal groups: cetaceans. The whales.

The researchers went looking for clues in the genetic data of 7 species of cetacean (bottlenose dolphin, orca, beluga, Yangtze river dolphin, the sperm whale, common minke whale, and the bowhead whale). They also looked at 8 other species to have good points of comparison (cow, pig, dog, horse, microbat, human, mouse, and the African elephant).

They started with data on known tumor suppressor genes and then scoured the cetacean DNA for traces of those.

The scientist found evidence of positive selection for seven of the tumor-suppressing genes in whales: CXCR2 in all cetaceans and DAB2, ADAMTS8, DSC3, EPHA2, TMPRSS11A, ANXA1 specifically in baleen whales (which happen to be the largest of all whales). These genes are known to be involved (in humans) in cancers such as lung neoplasm, leukemia, teratocarcinoma, as well as in immune system disorders.

Another interesting finding was that cetaceans genes had a higher turnover rate, aka more gene loss and gain. This makes sense because the researchers also found more gene duplications. Extra gene copies give evolution more material to play with. (This turnover signal was strongest in the baleen whales as well.)

Evolution is cleverer than we are…

- More Here

Honeybees Coat Hive Entrance In Animal Dung To Repel Predators

As a kid, while visiting my grandmother's town, I have seen many poor people (in Tamilnadu) coat the floor of their small house using cow dung. Once the cow dung is dried out, it formed a thin-solid layer, and surprisingly, the house would smell fresh. 

For 46 years, I didn't know the answer to that question except for a good hypothesis that cow dung is rich in 'good' microbiome and in turn, helps keep harmful viruses and bacteria at bay (you can read about it here and video here). 

It looks like that hypothesis is true and even honeybee's use the same trick: 

This “fecal spotting” not only repels giant hornets—it’s the first clear example of tool use in honeybees, says Heather Mattila, an entomologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and co-author of the study, published December 9 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Before this study, researchers had not investigated what caused the black marks often seen covering beehive entrances in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Mattila and colleagues verified that the dark material is actually feces of various animals, such as chickens and cows. The researchers also documented that the feces repel a species known as Vespa soror, commonly called giant hornets.

To finally figure out what the bees had been doing “was pretty stunning,” says Mattila, whose research was partially funded by the National Geographic Society. It’s “one of the coolest things our [research] group has ever explored.”

The study takes on even more significance because Vespa soror is the closest relative to Vespa mandarinia, also known as Asian giant hornets, or “murder hornets,” whose recent discovery in the Pacific Northwest has fueled worldwide intrigue.

Understanding how the Vietnamese bee behavior repels hornet attacks could have applications for protecting honeybees in other countries, including the United States, Mattila says.

And I have seen people step on elephant poop for the same reason. Ancients had good wisdom passed on for generations. Science slowly proves it right but you don't have to wait until science proves it. 

Biodiversity and protecting all our fellow creatures is the only important task we have. Economy and money are man-made bullshit will never stand the test of time. 

Why I Loved & Will Always Love Biology

Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.

This is biology.

– Bert Hubert, Our Amazing Immune System

I was just an average kid at school but by sheer coincidence, I was school first in biology and history.  I guess, what you subconsciously love comes out naturally. But I didn't pursue biology from high school for one reason and one reason only - I couldn't kill animals. Nevertheless, that love for biology only increased with time. 

James Summer has a brilliant hindsight observation on the same-shared love of biology - I should have loved biology:

I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.

In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. I needed Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Medusa and the Snail:

For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.

I wish my high school biology teacher had asked the class how an embryo could possibly differentiate—and then paused to let us really think about it. The whole subject is in the answer to that question. A chemical gradient in the embryonic fluid is enough of a signal to slightly alter the gene expression program of some cells, not others; now the embryo knows “up” from “down”; cells at one end begin producing different proteins than cells at the other, and these, in turn, release more refined chemical signals; ...; soon, you have brain cells and foot cells.

How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that? It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo—DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA—was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. Could anything more interesting be imagined?

Someone should have said this to me:

Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.

This is biology.

– Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”

What I've Been Reading

Everything I am now is because of Max. I had nothing when Max into my life, he gave me everything. Now, I have everything but I don't have Max. That's the irony and brutality life played with me. But that's how of the law of impermanence works.

People usually think my love for Max makes me say "everything I am now is because of Max." Yes, I love him more than anything but that sentence is also true without bringing love into picture. What we did together couldn't have happened if either of us were alone.

Our relationship is not transcendental (whatever that means) but it was more earthly which we don't comprehend yet.  I guess, my life is to meant to document what I experienced for future generations can use our relationship for lack of better term - a data point to comprehend these symbiotic relationships better. My aversion of individualist mindsets with me, me and more me world is hence visceral.

Merlin Sheldrake takes my collaborative and symbiotic relationship with Max to even more at a fundamental level and explains one of the most fundamental truths -  symbiotic relationships were the cause of life on earth in his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures.

Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been - and continue to be - a result of fungal activity. Plants only made it out of the water around five hundred million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of million years until plants could evolve on their own. Today, more than ninety percent of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi - from the Greek words for fungi (mykes) and root (rhiza) - which can link trees in shared networks sometimes referred to as the "wood wide web." This ancient association gave rise to all recognizable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of the plants and fungi to form healthy relationships. 

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The study of relationships can be confusing. Almost all are ambiguous. Have leaf-cutter ants domesticated the fungus that they depend on, or has the fungus domesticated the ants? Do plants farm the mycorrhizal fungi that they live with, or do the fungi farm the plants? Which way does the arrow point? This uncertainty is healthy. 

Robert Macfarlane last year with this book Underland: A Deep Time Journey (which I still have to finish) opened our minds to new truths and in turn, his book turned out to be one of the top books of the 21st century.  Merlin Sheldrake repeats history this year with this book with this story of mycorrhizal networks.

One of my favorites and underutilized tools in the AI toolkit is Graph Network Algorithms. Little did I know that David Read, a mycorrhizal biologist, and his team unleashed the network science when in 1984, they showed that carbon could pass between normal plants through fungal connections. Thirteen years later, in 1997, Suzanne Simard replicated Read's findings in natural settings and coined the phrase "Wood Wide Web."

The World Wide Web appeared to have more in common with a cell or an ecological system than a Swiss watch. Today, network science is inescapable. Pick any field of study - from neuroscience, to biochemistry, to economic systems, disease epidemics, web search engines, machine learning algorithms that underpin much of AI, to astronomy and the very structure of the universe itself, a cosmic web crisscrossed with filaments of gas and clusters of galaxies - and the chances are that it makes sense of the phenomenon using a network model.

Simard's paper and her catchy concept of wood wide web found its way into James Cameron's Avatar as Pandora where symbiotic networks and relationships thrive.



It is an impossible task to review all the nuanced details Sheldrake covers in this book. I learned so many things on each and every page!

No kidding - the book closes with how language and analogies affect the research and understandings of mycorrhizal networks.

It's the narrative that we tell that needs to be examined. I'd really love to get past the language and try to understand the phenomenon. Once again, it may be more helpful to ask why this behavior has evolved in the first place: who stands to benefit.

Today, the study of shared mycorrhizal networks is one of the fields most commonly beset with political baggage. Some portray these systems as a form of socialism by which wealth of the forest can be redistributed. Others take inspiration from mammalian family structures and parental care, with young trees nourished by their fungal connections to older and larger "mother trees". Some describe networks in terms of "biological markets," in which plants and fungi are portrayed as rational economic individuals trading on the floor of an ecological stock exchange, engaging in "sanctions," "strategic trading investments," and "market gains."

Yes, it is that ridiculous and hilarious how our language biases us into mindless ideologies that affect our thinking and makes it close to impossible to change our minds.

On the positive note, the word "symbiosis" was coined by Albert Bernhard Frank in 1877 while describing the mutualistic relationship in lichens. There is an entire chapter on lichens in this book.

We need to learn to evolve our language as our understandings of realities evolves. Unfortunately, we are dwelling in the bed of Procrustes where we twist reality to fit into our stubborn and static world of languages.

One of the great mistakes I made because of my ignorance is not adding mushrooms to Max's diet regularly. I didn't know. But now, Fluffy, Garph, Neo, and I get our daily dose of mushrooms. This is how knowledge and truth works. A simple bayesian update to learn constantly, change the mind, and bring into action every day.

The bigger question is what other known unknowns I don't know yet?

Emergent Systems & Collective Intelligence - Lessons From Schools Of Fish

• Ignorance and uninformed can be a positive thing. Having uninformed individuals participating in this decision making actually democratizes the group decision making. This prevents extremist individuals from having a disproportionate influence. (what a lot of dictators did decades ago, now its tv/radio talk show heads turn to ruin our civilization)
• When you broadcast the same information to multiple individuals, you have eroded the capacity for collective intelligence.  (I don't see too much difference between people in North Korea and religious nut cases here and how these tv/radio talk show hosts are creating impotent minds) 
• Collective intelligence relays on the individual to gather evidence themselves towards the problem. Not to be told what to think. (constant bayesian updates, keeping the mind as a river and keeping an open mind until we kick the bucket)
• Animal groups evolve strategies to avoid overly correlated information. Unfortunately, in human society, we rely on highly correlated information. 

The insight that there is collective intelligence, an intelligence that goes beyond an individual that is "embedded somehow" into this collective has been the focus of research for the last few years. 

Wow! What a brilliant insight!! You can read more about this here.

Many great philosophers and thinkers have been warning for centuries about thinking too much about "self",  too much of "outsourcing" our thinking process and too much dependence ("insourcing") on everything our mind confabulates without any sense of external realities.

Each one of the fish in the school has a brain and sense which learns based on evidence and does an "almost perfect" bayesian update to their brain and senses. The process repeats, ad infinitum.

Yes, "almost perfect".

A multiple "almost perfect" bayesian updates from all the fish in the school then creates "better than almost perfect" bayesian update to the collective brain and senses. The process repeats, ad infinitum.

Nature is indeed beautiful. I am so grateful to be part of this wonderful planet and given a chance to experience this beauty.

Thank you Max, for helping me see the world through your eyes.

Wisdom Of The Week

New research published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first to provide a heart rate profile for free-ranging blue whales. The resulting data shows how the hearts of these enormous cetaceans help them hold their breath for prolonged periods of time as well as how they’re suddenly able to exert the energy needed for lunge feeding and then replenish their blood oxygen levels when back at the surface.

At the same time, the new study, co-authored by marine biologist Jeremy Goldbogen from the School of Humanities Sciences at Stanford University, suggests the blue whale has reached the largest size possible for an aquatic organism on Earth. The cardiovascular system of the blue whale, while impressive, is probably the limit of what is biologically possible, according to the new research.

Blue whales are the largest creatures to have ever lived on the planet. These aquatic mammals can reach upwards of 30 meters (98 feet) in length and weigh an astonishing 173 metric tons (380,000 pounds or 172,365 kilograms). To put this into perspective, that’s equal to about 292 very heavy African elephants—currently the largest terrestrial animal on Earth.

Living in the ocean is what allow blue whales to grow to such an enormous size possible, as no creature of that immensity could possibly support itself on land. The largest land animals to have ever lived were the titanosaurs, a group of four-legged, long-necked dinosaurs that included Argentinosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Rapetosaurus. These herbivores got as long as 15 meters (50 feet) and weighed nearly 82 metric tons (180,780 pounds or 82,000 kilograms). They were big, no doubt about it, but not nearly as big as the blue whale.>br>
The new research notes that another important factor allowing blue whales to grow so large is their highly specialized cardiovascular system. For marine biologists, however, understanding exactly what makes the blue whale’s heart tick has proven difficult given they’re almost too big to measure. To overcome this hurdle, Goldbogen and his colleagues developed an electrocardiogram (ECG) tag that they attached to a blue whale with suction cups.

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The heart rate profile for the blue whale came as a surprise even to the researchers. The observed bradycardia was 30 to 50 times lower than expected. The low rate was made possible by an elastic-like part of the whale’s body called an aortic arch, according to the new paper. This remarkable piece of whale anatomy transports blood to the outer reaches of the whale’s gigantic body, contracting slowly to maintain blood flow during the long interval between beats. The heart’s unique pulsations and shape keeps blood flowing and is what makes the whale’s higher heart rate possible.

During tachycardia, the blue whale’s heart rate is likely working at the highest maximum limit allowable by the constraints of biology, according to the authors. A more robust cardiovascular system is not likely, they argue, and the new research may actually explain why no species on Earth has grown bigger than the blue whale.

- More Here

The Secret to Ant Efficiency Is Idleness

“Some of them worked for five hours at a time just going up and down and up and down and up and down. And most of the other ants never appeared at the tunnel,” Dr. Goldman said.

This didn’t have to do with some ants being lazier than others. His team could remove the hard workers and another group would take over and do just as well, and the same 70/30 rule would hold.

After running various computer models of the behavior, he found out that this was the ideal distribution of work. And that the individual virtual ants had to have idleness built in as a potential response to a crowded tunnel.

To get the digging done efficiently, he said, “there’s only one good strategy” — an unequal distribution of tunnel digging work and a willingness to turn away from work.

If you start out in a computer model with eager diggers, he said, you have to add some programming that says, for any ant, “I’m going to get down there and then if it’s taking too long, I’ll turn around.”

He said, “You have to add a lot of this kind of giving up in the eager ants to make it actually work.”

His team also tested this out with small robots and came up with the same conclusion. And this could matter quite a bit, he pointed out. The formula does not apply only to tunnel digging, but to any situation in which a traffic jam could stop progress, such as a swarm of robots entering a disaster site to search for survivors or hazards. Or imagine a lot of nanobots deployed into the bloodstream to deliver drugs to some site in the body.

- More Here

What I've Been Reading

Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist by Robert Trivers.

Robert Trivers is one of those few humans whom I respect immensely. I have learned so much from his work and most importantly, he changed my perspective on many things.

"On another occasion, Bill and I were discussing racial prejudice and the possible biological components thereof, and he said to me, "Bob, once you've learned to think of a herring gull as an equal, the rest is easy." What a welcome approach to the problem, especially from within biology. Bill was down to the level he taught me to be at. We are all living organisms - make discriminatory comments about others at your own risk. In Bill's view, it was always better to try to see the world from the view of the other creature.

One of the Bill's deepest lessons was in how to view other organisms in a way that took into account that very act of viewing has its own effects. This was Heisenberg uncertainty principle applied to biology. 

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No one has bothered, after all these years, to come up with a coherent account of the various conditions under which species prosper and generate new species, or fail and go extinct. This in part because Stephen Gould expropriated the subject for his own uses and set back the development of a science by some twenty years. I am trying to help develop the underlying logic he failed to. 

Bees Can Solve The Traveling Salesperson Problem

Past research that looked only at the order in which small foragers like birds and bees arrive at each destination, showed that they often find optimal solutions—but it couldn’t explain how the animals decreased flight times. To figure that out, the bee research team set up five artificial flowers, which were not as attractive as real flowers but did offer the bees sweet nectar when they landed. Scientists then tracked the insects over two days as they explored the paths and developed routes.

A bee drawn to an artificial flower keeps figuring out how to get here faster. (Joseph Woodgate)
Like people, bees are creatures of habit. The study’s bees established favorite paths early on and followed them regularly, limiting exploration with time. They also became better navigators with each flight, changing route sequences to improve speed from one feeder to another until they found the best paths, and becoming increasingly adept at their favorite flights. They never became completely set in their ways, however.

The research team believes their work can inform a few very different fields of study. For one, it improves understanding of how bees and other pollinating insects search for food and operate, which can help humans minimize risks posed by habitat loss and increased agriculture. The study also adds to a growing body of knowledge on animal cognition, used to understand both animal and human brains. Lastly, the researchers say, their findings could come in handy for technologists developing machines that navigate. In the future, when your GPS tells you to turn left, you may have a bee to thank for the information.

- More Here

Wisdom Of The Week

Why explore extraterrestrial caves? Partly for the same reasons scientists venture into caves on Earth. They’re protected from weather and (on other worlds) from meteoric bombardment, so their geological formations serve as frozen records of the planet’s past. Then there’s the life question. Liquid water on Mars is likely to exist underground, at depths where ice is melted by warmth from the planet’s interior. In caves, the temperature stays relatively stable, so they would also offer refuge from the 200-degree Fahrenheit day-night swings on the surface. Most important, they offer protection from radiation. Since Mars’ protective magnetic field flickered out eons ago, the constant barrage of cosmic rays on the surface likely would have destroyed any exposed critters. If life moved underground to escape, caves are a good place to look for fossil evidence of their tenancy. It’s even possible that in some Martian caves, life still exists.

“This is where the action is in terms of exploration,” says Penny Boston, a veteran cave scientist who just left the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology to become director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the agency’s focal point in the search for extraterrestrial life. Recently she’s been a leading advocate for what may strike many as a novel idea: that the ideal place to search for alien biology is not on the Martian surface, where NASA’s rovers have been looking, but beneath it.

- Mars, Underground: Looking for life on other planets? Go deep

What Would Happen If Humans Disappeared?

Predicting Oscar 2016 Winner via Swarm Intelligence

What is Particle Swarm Algorithm? Check out the video



The prediction's are :

• Best Picture: The Revenant
• Best Actress in a Leading Role: Brie Larson (Room)
• Best Actor in a Leading Role: Leo DiCaprio (The Revenant)
• Best Director: A.G. Iñárritu (The Revenant)
• Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Kate Winslet (Steve Jobs)
• Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Sylvester Stallone (Creed)

How good are these predictions?
We will know tomorrow am (I don't lose my sleep watching Oscars :-) )

Pinnacle of BioMimicry - David Hu wins Ig Nobel Prize for Studying the Urination Duration of Various Animals

The idea is to challenge what is considered important scientific research and illustrate that valuable information can come from more trivial subject matters. Every year there are 9,000 nominations, and only 10 teams are selected as winners.

Hu was assisted by Patricia Yang, a mechanical engineering graduate student, and biomedical engineering undergraduates Jerome Choo and Jonathan Pham.

Hu's research was directed by his interest in the link between the gravitational pull during urination and the advancement of efficient water systems. With camera in hand, Hu and his students ventured out to Zoo Atlanta to record and study 32 different mammals including elephants, cows and rats. By examining the video of the urine streams in slow motion, they were able to determine a relation between the length of the urethra and the flow rate of the urine. Their conclusion was that all mammals empty their bladders in about 20 seconds. The research could ultimately lead to better engineered systems for water tanks, backpacks, and fire hoses that can be built for more efficiency.

- More Here

Microbes May Use CRISPR As A Weapon In Their Millions-Year-Old Struggle Against Viruses

Thanks to the speed of CRISPR research, the accolades have come quickly. Last year MIT Technology Review called CRISPR “the biggest biotech discovery of the century.” The Breakthrough Prize is just one of several prominent awards Doudna has won in recent months for her work on CRISPR; National Public Radio recently reported whispers of a possible Nobel in her future.

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Doudna and other researchers did not pluck the molecules they use for gene editing from thin air. In fact, they stumbled across the CRISPR molecules in nature. Microbes have been using them to edit their own DNA for millions of years, and today they continue to do so all over the planet, from the bottom of the sea to the recesses of our own bodies..

We’ve barely begun to understand how CRISPR works in the natural world. Microbes use it as a sophisticated immune system, allowing them to learn to recognize their enemies. Now scientists are discovering that microbes use CRISPR for other jobs as well. The natural history of CRISPR poses many questions to scientists, for which they don’t have very good answers yet. But it also holds great promise. Doudna and her colleagues harnessed one type of CRISPR, but scientists are finding a vast menagerie of different types. Tapping that diversity could lead to more effective gene editing technology, or open the way to applications no one has thought of yet.

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At the time, Koonin, an evolutionary biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Md., had been puzzling over CRISPR and Cas genes for a few years. As soon as he learned of the discovery of bits of virus DNA in CRISPR spacers, he realized that microbes were using CRISPR as a weapon against viruses.

Koonin knew that microbes are not passive victims of virus attacks. They have several lines of defense. Koonin thought that CRISPR and Cas enzymes provide one more. In Koonin’s hypothesis, bacteria use Cas enzymes to grab fragments of viral DNA. They then insert the virus fragments into their own CRISPR sequences. Later, when another virus comes along, the bacteria can use the CRISPR sequence as a cheat sheet to recognize the invader.

Scientists didn’t know enough about the function of CRISPR and Cas enzymes for Koonin to make a detailed hypothesis. But his thinking was provocative enough for a microbiologist named Rodolphe Barrangou to test it. To Barrangou, Koonin’s idea was not just fascinating, but potentially a huge deal for his employer at the time, the yogurt maker Danisco. Danisco depended on bacteria to convert milk into yogurt, and sometimes entire cultures would be lost to outbreaks of bacteria-killing viruses. Now Koonin was suggesting that bacteria could use CRISPR as a weapon against these enemies.

To test Koonin’s hypothesis, Barrangou and his colleagues infected the milk-fermenting microbe Streptococcus thermophilus with two strains of viruses. The viruses killed many of the bacteria, but some survived. When those resistant bacteria multiplied, their descendants turned out to be resistant too. Some genetic change had occurred. Barrangou and his colleagues found that the bacteria had stuffed DNA fragments from the two viruses into their spacers. When the scientists chopped out the new spacers, the bacteria lost their resistance.

Barrangou, now an associate professor at North Carolina State University, said that this discovery led many manufacturers to select for customized CRISPR sequences in their cultures, so that the bacteria could withstand virus outbreaks. “If you’ve eaten yogurt or cheese, chances are you’ve eaten CRISPR-ized cells,” he said.

- More Here from Carl Zimmer

Biologically Inspired Design Inspires a New Strategy for Zoo Atlanta

Highlighting these unexpected similarities between what animals do and what people are trying to do is a new strategy Georgia Institute of Technology researchers are using to hopefully increase public awareness about animals and encourage conservation. They’ve created an iPhone app based on biologically inspired design, highlighting two dozen species that have helped engineers solve problems or invent new solutions.

“Learning that owls eat rodents is interesting, but explaining how they’ve helped us invent new technologies is a more effective way of getting us interested in the natural world,” said Marc Weissburg. The Georgia Tech professor led the app project and is co-director of the Institute’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design.

Owl wings are built to disperse air pressure, which allows them to fly silently to sneak up on their watchful prey. Engineers used the same principle to design the super-fast, and super-quiet, Shinkansen bullet train. Flamingos pump water in and out of their mouths at a speed of four pumps a second while eating. They use their beaks to strain water and trap their food. Researchers are studying their bills to construct water filters of the future.

The app also features zebras (keeping ships cool), elephants (transforming floors and walls into speaker systems) and rattlesnakes (all-terrain robots).

The ZooScape app, which also includes a game that tests a user’s knowledge of the animals and their contributions, can be used by anyone, anywhere. It becomes interactive at Zoo Atlanta. The app uses GPS to send notifications to the guests’ smartphones whenever they visit an exhibit of an animal that has contributed a biologically inspired design.

- More Here

Wisdom Of The Week

You've probably never heard of the fat-tailed dwarf lemur, a nocturnal primate (native to Madagascar) that hops around in trees and is about the size of a rat. But these little guys are pretty closely related to humans—relative to most other life on Earth, anyway—and they are able to do something quite extraordinary. Like bears, marmots, and bats—but unlike any other primates—they hibernate (or, as some researchers put it, enter into a prolonged "period of increased torpor") during Madagascar's winter season. For as much as half the year, they huddle together, dramatically slow their metabolism, and (hence the name) live off of their plentiful tail fat.

This primate species, explains University of Pennsylvania professor of medicine David Casarett, may provide a roadmap for how humans themselves might someday enter a hibernationlike state. After all, despite the dramatic differences between us, we share 97 percent of our DNA with this tiny (and super cute) mammal, according to one Duke University lemur expert. "There's hope out there, maybe, for a wonder drug, a simple injection that will reduce somebody's metabolism by 99 percent, and put victims in a state of suspended animation," says Casarett, author of the new book Shocked: Adventures in Bringing Back the Recently Dead.

Why would anyone want to enter a state of suspended animation? Hibernation is characterized by a slower metabolism, a decreased heart rate, slower breathing, and much colder body temperatures. And while there are several reasons why a person might want to go there, perhaps the most common one involves staving off death. People who have just been shot or injured in a car wreck, or who are having a heart attack, all share one danger: Vital organs, like the brain, are easily damaged after going just a few minutes without receiving sufficient oxygen from their bloodstream.

More and more evidence suggests that traditional practices of resuscitation, which may include keeping the body warm and trying to kick-start the heart (using hormones like epinephrine), can sometimes do more harm than good. Warm body temperatures and a quickly beating heart keep the organs of the body functioning at top speed, using up oxygen and other nutrients in the bloodstream. After as few as four minutes without oxygen, say from a heart attack, brain damage can set in.

So maybe we should consider putting away the epinephrine and instead encourage the body to cool down and slow its metabolism, as in hibernation, so that the organs most in danger of being irreparably harmed require less energy, and therefore less oxygen, to survive. "By cooling cells, you decrease their metabolism," Casarett says. "You decrease the rate at which they use some of the building blocks of energy…cells also reduce the rate at which they use oxygen. And so by reducing the metabolic rate of those cells, [you] can essentially trick the body into thinking that it's in a state of hibernation." Casarett says that this technique holds the potential to stave off brain damage for 20 or 30 minutes—maybe even an hour.

- Will Humans Ever Learn to Hibernate? brilliant piece based on David Casarett's new book Shocked: Adventures in Bringing Back the Recently Dead