Jan 21: Fork-headed trilobite, echidnas blow snot bubbles, Perseverance delivery drop-off and more…
Farming fish lose their fertilizer and inoculation against misinformation.
On this week's episode of Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald:
An ancient sea creature sported a massive fork on its head — what for?
Researchers have used 3D model reconstructions of a bizarre trilobite — an ancient shelled sea creature — to understand why it grew a trident as long as its whole body on its head. Alan Gishlick was part of a team that studied the unusual trilobite fossil. By modelling different options, they concluded in a study published in the journal PNAS that the forks were used for fighting other trilobites for mates.
READ MORE: Ancient sea creature sported a big fork on its head to toss away the competition
Echidnas blow snot bubbles to keep cool under the Australian sun
Echidnas, sometimes known as spiny anteaters, are one of Australia's unique animals, resembling hedgehogs with a tubular, rounded beak. They can't sweat, pant or lick, so they have to get inventive with ways to stay cool. Dr. Christine Cooper at Australia's Curtin University used thermal cameras to observe echidnas in the wild, which helped confirm something she and her students saw in the lab – echidnas blow bubbles out of their nose. Once the bubbles burst and evaporate, they help the animals cool down. The study was published in the journal Biology Letters.
The Mars Perseverance rover is caching samples for return to Earth
NASA's newest Mars rover has spent almost two years roaming around in the vicinity of its geologically interesting landing site, collecting rock and sediment samples. This month, the Perseverance rover started dropping off the first of those samples at strategic locations on Mars, so they can be picked up by a future courier mission that will return them to Earth. We hear how this part of the mission has been going from University of Alberta's Chris Herd, a returned sample scientist with the mission.
Farming fish lose their fertilizer to invasive rats
Jewel damselfish farm algae on coral reefs that surround tropical atolls, and their algae farms are fertilized by run-off from the islands that's historically been rich in guano from seabirds. But on many of these islands, invasive rats have devastated seabird populations, and the lack of literal trickle-down is leading to a change in farming for the unfortunate fish. Ecologist Rachel Gunn, recently at Lancaster University in the U.K., studied this unusual relationship between a terrestrial and a marine ecosystem. Her research was published in Nature.
How to fight an infodemic with cognitive vaccines
In the last few years, many officials have noted how we've suffered not one but two outbreaks. One was the biological epidemic of COVID-19, the other, an "infodemic" of political, medical and scientific misinformation. Now psychologists are testing whether we can fight misinformation the way we fight viruses — with inoculation. Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist from the University of Cambridge, tested this on Youtube. He found that by exposing people to the techniques used to create misinformation, they could produce intellectual antibodies to build resistance to it much like vaccines build resistance to disease. His study was published in the journal Science Advances.
WATCH: Prebunking Manipulation Techniques - Ad Hominem Attacks