In May, researchers at North Eastern Federal University in Yakuutsk, Russia, announced a “Sensational Discovery”. A well preserved female woolly mammoth, between 50 to 60 years old was spotted in the remote Lyakhovsky Islands of Novosibirsk archipelago in Russia. Even more remarkable, the team announced that the muscle tissues of the beast has “a natural red color of fresh meat” and when the researchers broke ice cavities which housed the blood, “the blood came running out”.

Woah! Blood running out of a 10,000 year old beast discovered in freezing temperatures? Sensational, indeed.

Not surprisingly, the announcement sparked a fury of news reports from across the globe. The Siberian Times published exclusive photos of the “dream discovery”.

While Canada’s CBC News screamed “Woolly mammoth discovery raises exciting possibilities: Cloning could be a lot closer if intact cells found.” An intact cells is one that can be turned into a stem cell in a petri dish, and so coaxed to grow into new cells in a mammoth’s body.

So, what were the chances of finding intact and live cells? “A really good chance,” AFP quoted the head of the expedition, Semyon Grigoriev as saying. Yeah! All very exciting eh?

Well, not entirely. As Kate Wong of Scientific American noted “The find was announced in the popular press rather than in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.” Peer reviewed journals are the language that scientists speak in. When the system works: any scientific finding is dutifully documented and – before it gets published – is read by independent, academic reviewers.

These reviewers critically look at the paper’s findings, and question their validity and importance. If the reviewers reckon the study being reported is good – they stamp its approval. Commonly, reviewers will tell scientists to amend certain sections of their paper to ensure its accuracy. Once the paper gets published in an academic journal, it’s time for the journos to pick it up and report the work.

When academics simply announce their findings to the press it can lead to hyped and inaccurate news articles. So it bugged me that the researchers went straight to a press release with this mammoth find, rather than a journal.

It also bugged Scientific American’s Kate Wong. So she asked evoutionary biologist and paleontologist, Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan as well as Kevin Campbell of the University of Manitoba an expert in ancient DNA, what they thought of the discovery. National Geographic’s Brian Switek also asked some independent experts about the find.

Here’s a rundown of their thoughts.

1) Are the team close to finding intact and living woolly mammoth cells?

Probably not. Beth Shapiro, an expert on ancient DNA at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told National Geographic, “I strongly, strongly suspect that there will be zero intact cells in the find, regardless of whether blood is preserved.” And with no intact cells, no cloned animal.

According to Fisher, the best they could hope to find is “viable” DNA, “meaning that it would be intact enough to use in the context of a cloning effort.” But, Fisher was cautious of this. “In general, ancient DNA is highly fragmented and by no means “ready to go” into the next mammoth embryo,” he wrote.

Campbell, however, was more optimistic, noting via email to Wong that “there is the possibility that red blood cells are still intact.”

2) Did the team find “running” blood?

According to Fisher it’s “hard to say at this moment.” Not surprising, given that the discovery wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal, and these researchers are mostly judging the work based on photographs published in the press. Still he wrote, “I have previously seen coagulated blood in mammoth blood vessels, which is very close to what has been reported here, so that much is entirely reasonable.”

3) If the blood was still runny, why didn’t it freeze?

The mammoth was discovered in temperatures as cold as – 10ºC, and it would be expected that blood plasma would freeze at around -0.8ºC. According to the expedition team, the runny blood may have defied the cold because it had anti-freeze in it. “Interestingly, the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to – 10ºC,” said Grigoriev in the media release. “It may be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties.”

But Campbell is skeptical. In an email to Wong, he acknowledged that many insects and some vertebrates can avoid freezing by producing antifreeze peptides and carbohydrates. However, he writes: “If mammoth blood had this trait, they would be the only known mammalian example of this to my knowledge… I highly (very highly) doubt that circulating mammoth blood was able to supercool ….”

Campbell offers Wong some tantalising explanations as to how the blood ran out of the mammoth’s body. Perhaps there was a tiny amount of anti-freeze in the blood and it became concentrated over time, or perhaps ice loving bacteria with anti-freeze magic components infiltrated the blood, he suggested.

So is this a good finding or what?

I don’t want to poo-poo this finding completely. Mammoths are awesome, and it’s not everyday that we see images of gooey red stuff that appears to be fluid blood running out of one. But, without an independent and official assessment by experts of what the expedition has uncovered it’s tricky to make conclusions about what we have on our cold little hands.

Painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) will not survive the effects of climate change by nesting earlier.

Many flora and fauna are already responding to a warming world by reproducing earlier in the season, when temperatures are cooler. But, a new model, developed by Rory Telemeco, Karen Abbott, and Frederic Janzen from Iowa State University predicts this strategy won’t be enough to save one of America’s most widespread turtles from extinction. “Unless they are able to do something major, this population will be greatly challenged,” says Telemeco.

As I wrote in New Scientist Magazine, “Painted turtles (Chrysemys picta), found in lakes and streams across North America, are one of many reptile species whose sex is determined by temperature. Eggs in warm nests are likely to hatch as females, while males hatch in cooler nests, although no one is sure why.”

For over 25 years Frederic Janzen has observed the nesting times of a population of painted turtles from Carroll County in Illinois, along with the number of male and female hatchlings produced. His previous research found that females can shift their nesting dates by about 10 days, to ensure the eggs develop in soil at the optimum temperature to produce an even sex ratio.

Combining this data with historic records of soil and air temperatures, the team created a model to predict the sex ratio produced in changing temperatures. It successfully predicted the number of males and females born from 40 out of 46 turtle nests in the wild.

When the model was fed a temperature rise of 1.1ºC, it calculated that even if turtles advance their nesting to accommodate the heat, it would result in “entirely female populations and ultimately extinction,” says Telemeco. Conservative climate models predict that average temperatures in the US Midwest will rise by 4 °C over the next century.

Females can start to lay their eggs in more shaded locations, or the biology of the embryos could evolve to deal with warmer conditions in the nest. But, Telemeco, is unsure that even these changes will be enough. “The problem is that climate change is happening so rapidly that an evolutionary response, especially in long-lived organisms, is not likely,” he says.

For more information, head to New Scientist Magazine.

Reference: American Naturalist (2013) DOI: 10.1086/670051

Credit Lorin Neuman-Lee

Insecticide-resistant mosquitoes that block dengue could be the key to controlling the disease, reports a new study.

Professor Ary Hoffmann from the University of Melbourne and Professor Michael Turelli at the University of California, Davis have calculated that releasing mosquitoes with a genetic resistance to insecticides, that are also infected with a virus-suppressing bacteria, could wipe out the disease from particular regions.

“This could really lead to the elimination of dengue in a community,” says Hoffmann.

The results are published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

For more information check out my article in ABC Science.

Men have rather unique and peculiar genitalia. For their body size, the penis is slightly longer and thicker than other primates. Plus, in its flaccid state the human penis does not retract into the body, like many other species.

A popular explanation for this uniqueness is that “Size Does Matter,” or in the scientific vernacular, females use the size of a flaccid penis size to help choose a mate.

But, remarkably, there has been very little evidence to support this claim.
According to Bob Wong, an evolutionary biologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, previous studies either directly asked women what they liked, which is unreliable, or drew too much attention to the penis. For example, one study asked women to rate drawn images in which only the penis size was manipulated. “It was obvious exactly what trait was being tested,” says Wong.

It’s even unclear why women would be attracted to the bigger flaccid penises. Contrary to popular opinion, flaccid penis size is not correlated with the size of an erect penis, and so it is unlikely to influence sexual performance.

Now, Wong and his colleagues have generated over 300 3D computerized images of a naked male body, depicting variations in penis size, as well as body shape (shoulder-to-hip ratio) and height, the latter two traits are known to influence male sexual attractiveness.

Each trait had seven variations, all within the natural range. For example, the 7 flaccid penis sizes ranged from 5 to 13 cm, which accounts for 95% of the natural variation seen in men.

Over 100 heterosexual women from Australia were shown a selection of the images and rated their attractiveness. Crucially, the women were not told which traits had been changed in the images.

Bigger is better

They found that indeed a larger flaccid penis size influenced a man’s sex appeal. “We don’t know what size is best because the most attractive sized penis was actually outside the range we tested,” says Wong. “The relationship is positive and shows no sign of dipping.” That is, women liked the penis that was 13 centimeters long the best and if the trend continued, who knows where it would lead?

Curiously, co-author of the paper Dr Brian Mautz from the University of Ottawa in Canada, told Nature that there was a ceiling effect, and it’s likely the most attractive penis would be between 12.8–14.2 centimetres in its flaccid state.

Larger penises had a bigger effect on the attractiveness of taller men. “To put it bluntly,” said Mautz in a media release, who was also involved in the work, “If you are short and pear-shaped, a large penis is not going to increase your attractiveness.”

But, why is bigger and flaccid better?

“It is not exactly clear why females would prefer larger flaccid penises,” says Wong. On average, women rated the images in 3 seconds, suggesting they were not aware of their attraction to larger penises. “This is way too fast to consciously note the differences but, rather, would be based on an overall assessment of ‘attractiveness’ of the image,” says Wong.

The team speculate that fashion and culture, which has historically drawn attention to male genitalia, may have influenced our obsession with penises and their size. “In the 15th and 16th century, for example, codpieces were popular fashion items in Europe,” says Wong. “Penis sheaths, similarly, are worn by men in many cultures for example in the highlands of New Guinea”.

Although there might be a lot of talk about penis size, the study found that the most important attractiveness trait tested was body shape. Shoulder to hip ratio – which tests how wide shoulders are relative to hips – accounted for almost 80 percent of the variation in relative attractiveness scores, while height and penis size only accounted for between 5 to 6 percent.

Still, the study surely suggests that men can thank women for their relatively large penises.

Journal Reference PNAS: Doi/10.1073/pnas.1219361110

“Right now, we’re inside a computer program?” Asks a very a perplexed Neo in the 1999 classic, The Matrix. He has just realised that the world around him is virtual reality. While The Matrix is fictitious, according to some scientists, it’s very easy for us to confuse virtual reality for, well, reality.

The quote opens the book “Infinite Reality”, which is co-written by Stanford researcher, Professor Jeremy Bailenson. “With that monotone query,” he writes, “a very confused Neo… convinces hundred of millions of viewers that virtual reality could be so real that people have no idea they are actually living in a simulation.”

Our Virtual World

Nearly a third of the world’s population is online – that’s well over 2 billion people connected to the virtual world. This mass of eyes are now staring at increasingly realistic and connected images, thanks to high definition screens, high speed computing and sensor-enabled devices such as the Nintendo Wii.

Bailenson argues that our virtual experiences will become even more immersive, eventually giving people the sensory information that makes it feel like they are “inside” virtual worlds. And when this happens, we will have to ask ourselves, what is “real” anyway?

What is reality?

Reality is not what’s in our environment, argues Bailenson in his book. Rather it’s constructed in our mind. We see all the colours of the rainbow – but there are many colours that we don’t see, such as infrared light. There are also more smells than the human nose can sense. And our idea of motion is completely subjective, too. Take for example, when you’re driving in a car, a speeding motorcycle will seem to be moving slower, than if you are standing still. The list of how our perception is fallible could go on, but we get the point.

This all means that what we take as reality, is really just what our senses are detecting. This makes the mind rather vulnerable to buying into experiences that aren’t “real”, so long as we are shown the right sensory information. As Jeremy Bailenson says, “The mind buys into an experience it deems it real.” Enter virtual reality.

Welcome to the “Holodeck”

To find just how confused the brain can get between virtual and reality, Bailenson has set up a Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory at Stanford University in California . This is one of the closest experiences you’ll get to the Holodeck. People inside are given head-mounted displays capable of an overall field of view of almost 120 degrees. While moving through the lab, which can project images of anything from an underwater swimming experience to a cityscape, subjects are being tracked. An infrared lighting diode sitting atop their head is detected by a nearby camera that feeds information into computers calculating where – within approximately 30mm – they are, and when you got there – to 100th of a second. Images are updated 100 times a second to reflect their movement – making it rather easy to get confused with reality. Among other snazzy devices, the room also has a clever sound system with 22 speakers, hidden behind the wall and beneath the floor.

By shoving people into this set up, Bailenson has discovered that people easily fooled by virtual reality. People walking a tightrope over a chasm in the lab can get frightened, even though if they know there is no chasm really there. Clinical psychologist, Dr Robin Rosenberg, told ABC’s Catalyst, “Your heart starts beating. You know intellectually that this is just the virtual world, that you’re in a room, that you can’t get hurt, but your body does not know that. Your brain is sending it all these signals.”

Avatars

Bailenson also creates an avatar of his subjects, to see how people react when they see themselves in a warped reality. He found that giving people taller avatars made them feel more confident in the lab. And, remarkably, this confidence boost stuck around for a few hours once the people entered “the real world”. Similarly, a more attractive avatar made subjects act more warm and social outside of hte lab.

Keep in mind, many of these studies were pretty small, and they didn’t look at the results overtime. Still, they suggest that people can change their behaviour and attitude after spending a bit of time in virtual reality.

Creepier still, is this experiment. Bailenson’s team created avatars of children. He showed the kids’ avatars swimming with whales. Interviewing them a week later, half of the children developed false memories – and believed that they themselves had gone swimming with the cetaceans.

Bailenson reckons there are huge implications for this work. Of course he does, it’s his work, but still. “We think virtual reality is a way to change very entrenched behaviour,” he told New Scientist Magazine. For example, in small studies he’s found that people are more likely to go to the gym and exercise if they’re shown a 3-D avatar losing weight while they exercise.

Kathy Cleland at the University of Sydney, who is the director of the digital culture, says the behavioural changes from virtual realities shouldn’t be overstated – as it’s unclear how long term these effects last. “It’s an interesting and new way of experiencing new worlds,” she says. “But the more time I spend in the virtual world, the more impressed I am by the complexities of the physical world.”

As a kid, I figured that adults knew all of the big things in life: Why is the grass green? Why do zebras have stripes? How the moon was born? … and so on. I didn’t know the answers, but I was sure the adults did. So, it came to my surprise to realise that them adults are still working out a thing or two. For one, they don’t even know how that big rock in space – the moon – came to be.

For a long time, it was thought the moon formed around 4.5 billion years ago, when the Solar System was in the midst of a violent game of planetary billiards. At around this time baby-Earth was hit by an object about the size of Mars, and spewing from that impact was a mass of debris.

Eventually, some of the cloud of astronomical dust congealed to become solid. It also became trapped in the Earth’s gravity, and so that large rock started hoola hooping our home planet, and our moon was formed.

If true, the birth of our moon is different to those on other planets. For example Mars’ two puny moons, Deimos and Phobos, were passing through the Red Planet and got stuck in its gravitational pull.

In an episode of ABC’s Catalyst that I co produced, Prof Brian Cox described the process rather elegantly, “What we think happened was that in the early history of the solar system, a planet, a big planet, probably almost Mars-size, was involved in a glancing collision with the Earth. So they bounced off each other, chunks of the Earth were knocked out, and it’s that rubble that then coalesced into the moon.”

According to Cox, we think this because there is evidence from the Apollo missions, which studied the moon rocks, showing they have very similar chemical composition to Earth rocks. But there are some key differences between the two spaceballs. “There’s very little iron in the moon,” says Cox. “An the explanation for that is that because the blow was glancing, it didn’t hit the cores of these two planets. And the core of a planet is where all the heavy elements and the iron is.”

That theory was looking good, but there were a few issues with the details of the collision – and where the dust came from. As BBC reports “the early models indicated that much of this debris would have originated from the impactor, whose composition would most probably have differed substantially from that of Earth. This is not reflected in the analysis of Earth and Moon rocks – for example, their oxygen isotope, or atom type, compositions are identical.”

Hm, what are the adults missing? In October last year, a study was published proposing a new theory of the moon’s birth. Dr. Robin M. Canup from Southwest Research Institute calculated that our moon, and Earth, were born out of a collision with two rocks that were about the same size. No “glancing collision”, but rather an almighty thwack that threw up debris everywhere – eventually congealing into the same sort of rock. There’s a nice video of the model here.

So, where does that leave us? “The ultimate likelihood of each impact scenario will need to be assessed by improved models of terrestrial planet formation,” said Canup in a press release. In other words, watch this Space.

For more information:
- “Alternate Theories of Moon Formation”

Clinicals trials are currently underway for a “female viagra”. For some, this is exciting news – that could bring a lot of fun into their bedrooms. But, others are concerned that the hunt for female viagra is merely a cash cow for pharmaceuticals.

Tefina is a nasal spray being developed by Trimel Pharmaceuticals to help women experiencing anorgasmia – a difficulty experiencing orgasm. Currently in clinical trials, Tefina is a testosterone-based drug that would be used like Viagra, that is, when women are anticipating a bit of rough and tumble (rather than an ongoing treatment).

Dr. Susan Davis, Professor of Women’s Health in the School of Public Health at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, is a lead researcher on Trimel’s trials. She told The Current, that the drug works by dilating blood vessels in the genitals and so, increasing sensation there. “This dilation increases the capacity for women to experience an orgasm,”” she said.

Meet FOD

FOD is ‘‘Female Orgasmic Disorder’’, and it’s a bit controversial. One of the troubles with the “disorder” is defining what it is, and that’s because the female orgasm is an engima unto itself. “Unlike orgasm in the male, which is usually accompanied by ejaculation, there is no equivalent objective ‘‘marker’’ of orgasm experienced by women,” writes Cynthia Graham at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford, in her paper about diagnosing the condition.

Still, the condition is definable enough to make it into the psychiatrists bible for diagnosing conditions – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). According to the DSM, one of the essential features of FOD is the “the persistent or recurrent delay in, or absence of, orgasm following a normal sexual excitement phase”.

It’s unclear how common the disorder is, but surveys tend to find that around one third of women might be affected.

Will it work?

Tefina is currently being trialed throughout Australia, the US and Canada. In a press release Davis noted that, “We have previously shown that for women with low sexual interest, testosterone therapy not only improves sexual desire and arousal, but also enhances a woman’s ability to reach orgasm.” So, things are looking promising.

But, according to The Atlantic “Similar treatments have been tried in the U.S. and failed.”

Also, not everyone is excited about this kind of research. Elizabeth Canner, who made a documentary in 2009 about “the fevered race to develop the first FDA-approved Viagra for women” told The Atlantic, that diagnosing sexual dysfunction and even giving the condition a name like Female Orgasmic Disorder, is part of a pharmaceutical lobby to sell drugs and unnecessarily medicate women.

While no good can come of snorting medication that’s not needed – I have to say that a female drug to make orgasm easier, would be wonderful for a lot of women. Fingers crossed for the trials.

British intelligence agents think it’s impossible to decipher an encrypted message written in WWII, and recently found attached to the leg of a pigeon.

The bird’s skeleton was discovered in the chimney of 17th-century home in Surrey, UK in 1982 when the home owner, David Martin, was restoring his chimney. David Martin, told the The Guardian “I started finding bits of a dead pigeon. We thought it might be a racing pigeon until we spotted a red capsule.” Martin opened up the red capsule. “I wondered if there was a secret message inside, and indeed there was!”

“Inside the canister was a thin piece of paper with the words “Pigeon Service” at the top and 27 handwritten blocks of code,” reports BBC.

According to Discovery News, it’s believed the bird was released by allies in Nazi-occupied France on June 6 1944, during the D-Day Invasions. At the time, Churchill had instituted a radio blackout, so homing pigeons were used to carry secret information back to England.

Codebreakers at Government Communications Headquarters, told the BBC that “without access to the relevant codebooks and details of any additional encryption used, the message will remain impossible to decrypt.”

Gone Crackers?

Curiously, a Canadian fellow named Gord Young’ claimed to have cracked the code in 17 minutes using a code book he inherited. His solution, however, has since been poo-pooed by Michael Smith an historical advisor to Bletchley Park, the Buckinghamshire home where the German Enigma code was cracked during World War II.

Turns out Young’s book was for cracking WWI codes. “The idea that a World War One code would have been used during the second world war is just silly, frankly,” said Smith. “It wouldn’t have been used because it would have been well known to the Germans and insecure.”

Hero Birds

According to Discovery “birds played a very active role in World War II (the RAF trained 250,000 birds, forming the National Pigeon Service) and, between 1943 and 1949, 32 were awarded the Dickin Medal, Britain’s highest possible decoration for valor given to animals.”

Bombers would drop military pigeons behind enemy lines, where resistance fighters picked them up, attached secret messages to their legs, and released them homeward.

Discovery News speculates that this bird was heading toward Bletchley Park, which is around 80 miles from Martin’s house, but before reaching his destination tried to rest on the chimney, and died from the fumes of a fire below. Perhaps not Dickin Medal material, then.