Feb 1: Technology to preserve biodiversity, and more
Asteroid samples, dog truffle hunters, pooping helps you think, and polar bears' de-icing trick
On this week's episode of Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald:
NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission took six years to travel to the asteroid Bennu and return samples to Earth. Now, the first results from the analysis of these rocks are being released. Researchers found evidence of salty water, as well as the elements necessary for life, such as amino acids and the building blocks for RNA and DNA. We spoke with Kim Tait, senior curator of mineralogy at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and co-author of one of the recent studies, published in the journal Nature.
Polar bears spend so much time going in and out of the water that they are considered marine mammals. So when they do this in the frozen Arctic, why are they not covered in ice? A new study reveals their secret to remaining ice-free is in the unique oils they produce that covers their white fur. Julian Carolan, a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin, worked with scientists in Norway, Denmark and the U.K. on this paper published in the journal Science Advances.
A chance discovery has unearthed a new species of North American truffle. These fungi can be desirable and valuable delicacies. American truffle hunter, Lois Martin, and her trained dog Monza found a distinctive truffle in a city park that turned out to be a fungus new to science. Although native to North America, it's more similar to European truffles than any other truffle found in the Americas. Mycologist Greg Bonito at Michigan State University named this new truffle Tuber canirevelatum, meaning "dog-found" truffle, in honour of Monza and other dogs who look for truffles. The work was published in the journal Mycologia.
To maximize your cognitive function, it might be a good idea to have a poo first. That's according to a recent study in the journal Sports Medicine and Health Science. Scientists found that nine out of 13 individuals improved how well they did in a mentally taxing cognitive test if they defecated first, whereas all 13 of them improved their performance when they took a mild laxative the night before. Chia-Hua Kuo, a professor of sports medicine and nutrition at the University of Taipei, said they also saw an increase in oxygen consumption in the test subjects' lower GI tract as they were doing the test, suggesting a previously unsuspected link between the rectum and the brain.
The world is in a biodiversity crisis. We're losing species at an unprecedented rate, thanks to climate change, habitat loss, over-exploitation and more. We look at some of the more out-of-the-box solutions that are currently in the works — from creating an "internet of animals" to monitor biodiversity, to saving samples of Earth's biological resources on the moon.
We spoke with:
Martin Wikelski, the director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, honorary professor of ornithology at the University of Konstanz and the scientific head of the ICARUS Initiative
Mary Hagedorn, a senior research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and senior author of a recent paper proposing a biorepository on the moon that was published in the journal Bioscience
Watch: Observing wildlife from space with ICARUS Initiative