Orchid Mantis: The Predator That Lures Prey By Mimicking Flowers

Praying or preying

The orchid mantis (hymenopus coronatus) is famous for its remarkable similarity to the orchid
flower, but researchers from Macquarie University have now discovered that its’ unique form of deception not only attracts its prey by resembling a blossom, but is in fact even more attractive to pollinators than the real flower.
Since its discovery in South East Asia more than a century ago, the rarity and elusive nature of the orchid mantis has made it difficult for scientists to understand why and how it has evolved this bizarre appearance.
Researchers James O’Hanlon and Marie Herberstein from Macquarie University, along with Gregory Holwell from the University of Auckland mounted an expedition to Malaysia to study the orchid mantis. They observed that the body of the orchid mantis was attractive to flying insects, demonstrating how their flower-like appearance has evolved to lure in unsuspecting pollinators searching for nectar in flowers.
“What really surprised us was the fact that the orchid mantises were even more successful at attracting pollinators than real flowers,” said O’Hanlon.
“Their bright floral colours and petal shaped legs create a tantalizing lure for insects. So it seems that orchid mantises not only look like flowers but also beat flowers at their own game.
“After more than a century of conjecture we provide the first experimental evidence of pollinator deception in the orchid mantis and the first description of a unique predatory strategy that has not been documented in any other animal species.”
Their findings have been published in the Chicago Journals for The American Society of Naturalists.

Chowing down on a butterfly.

Press release source: Macquarie University

'Nymph' insect with troll-like iridescent tuft of 'hair' discovered in South America

Suriname, to be exact:

The 7mm-long creature is golden  and its elongated body is covered in orange dots and stripes. It has hair-like feelers sticking out of its rear which resemble the fuzzy hair of the colourful Troll Dolls, a popular toy in the 1990s. 

The 7mm-wide insect, pictured, was discovered after researchers from the University of Harvard trekked for three weeks to explore the untouched rainforest of southeast Suriname. The unnamed creature is covered in orange dots and stripes. Its feelers are made of wax that protrude from its rear end

Researchers believe the bug is an immature insect called a nymph, possibly fitting into one of four nymph families: Dictyopharidae, Nogodinidae, Lophopidae, and Tropiduchidae.

A nymph is an immature insect. In insects that undergo a gradual metamorphosis, the stage of the life cycle that hatches from the egg is called the nymph. These insects do not pupate like a butterfly.

Often, the nymph looks like a smaller, wingless version of the adult. The nymph may molt several times to reach adulthood.

Insects that undergo simple or gradual metamorphosis, and have a nymph stage, include grasshoppers and crickets, cockroaches, termites and dragonflies.

Dr. Leeanne Alonso, the expedition's leader, said: 'I have conducted expeditions all over the world, but never have I seen such beautiful, pristine forests so untouched by humans.

'Southern Suriname is one of the last places on earth where there is a large expanse of pristine tropical forest.

Mystery humans spiced up ancients’ rampant sex lives

Genome analysis suggests interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and a mysterious archaic population.

New genome sequences from two extinct human relatives suggest that these ‘archaic’ groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known.

The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a different archaic human group, the Denisovans, were presented on 18 November at a meeting at the Royal Society in London. They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups living in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet unknown human ancestor from Asia.

“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work...

The meeting was abuzz with conjecture about the identity of this potentially new population of humans. “We don’t have the faintest idea,” says Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the London Natural History Museum...

Source: Nature

New 'active' invisibility cloak design 'drastically reduces' visibility

A great headline from The Independent today. I don't know if it's a case of intentionally or unintentionally funny. Regardless, here's what it refers to:

A new type of “active” invisibility cloak that could operate over a broad range of frequencies has been developed by researchers at the University of Texas in Austin.
By employing a “superconducting thin film” that is electrically powered the cloak could overcome the limitations of current “passive” designs.
Scientists have previously created small-scale invisibility cloaks that work only in response to very limited types of light. The researchers at the University of Texas give the example of an object that is made invisible to red light, but becomes bright blue as a result, “increasing its overall visibility”.
"Our active cloak is a completely new concept and design, aimed at beating the limits of [current cloaks] and we show that it indeed does," Professor Andrea Alù, a lead author on the study, told the BBC.
"If you want to make an object transparent at all angles and over broad bandwidths, this is a good solution […] We are looking into realising this technology at the moment, but we are still at the early stages."

A great photo, too.

Scientists get inside woolly mammoth's 39,000 year old brain to understand behavior of the extinct species.

The superbly-preserved remains of Yuka were found in 2009 in the Siberian permafrost, but only recently have specialists begun to analyse her brain in a unique study.

Scientists disclosed that the remains are in such good conditions that a full-scale brain mapping exercise is underway which is expected to significantly boost our understanding of the woolly mammoth, a creature which scientists are separately planning to bring back to life using modern technology.

The initial findings were presented at the 73rd Symposium of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Los Angeles. 

Click here for more details and photos of the moment the brain was removed from Yuka's remains before the analysis began.

Comet? Asteroid? Hubble astronomers observe bizarre six-tailed space object

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have observed a unique and baffling object in the asteroid belt that looks like a rotating lawn sprinkler or badminton shuttlecock. While this object is on an asteroid-like orbit, it looks like a comet, and is sending out tails of dust into space.

Normal asteroids appear as tiny points of light. But this asteroid, designated P/2013 P5, has six comet-like tails of dust radiating from it like the spokes on a wheel. It was first spotted in August of this year as an unusually fuzzy-looking object by astronomers using the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii.

Because nothing like this has ever been seen before, astronomers are scratching their heads to find an adequate explanation for its mysterious appearance.

The multiple tails were discovered in Hubble images taken on 10 September 2013. When Hubble returned

"We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," said lead investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles, USA. "Even more amazingly, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust. That also caught us by surprise. It's hard to believe we're looking at an asteroid."

One explanation for the odd appearance is that the asteroid's rotation rate increased to the point where its surface started flying apart, ejecting dust in episodic eruptions that started last spring. The team rules out an asteroid impact because a lot of dust would have been blasted into space all at once, whereas P5 has ejected dust intermittently over a period of at least five months.

Careful modelling by team member Jessica Agarwal of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Lindau, Germany, showed that the tails could have been formed by a series of impulsive dust-ejection events. Radiation pressure from the Sun smears out the dust into streamers. "Given our observations and modelling, we infer that P/2013 P5 might be losing dust as it rotates at high speed," says Agarwal. "The Sun then drags this dust into the distinct tails we're seeing."

The asteroid could possibly have been spun up to a high speed as pressure from the Sun's light exerted a torque on the body. If the asteroid's spin rate became fast enough, Jewitt said, the asteroid's weak gravity would no longer be able to hold it together. Dust might avalanche down towards the equator, and maybe shatter and fall off, eventually drifting into space to make a tail. So far, only a small fraction of the main mass, perhaps 100 to 1000 tonnes of dust, has been lost. The asteroid is thousands of times more massive, with a radius of up to 240 meters.

Follow-up observations may show whether the dust leaves the asteroid in the equatorial plane, which would be quite strong evidence for a rotational breakup. Astronomers will also try to measure the asteroid's true spin rate.

Jewitt's interpretation implies that rotational breakup may be a common phenomenon in the asteroid belt; it may even be the main way in which small asteroids "die". "In astronomy, where you find one, you eventually find a whole bunch more," Jewitt said. "This is just an amazing object to us, and almost certainly the first of many more to come."

The paper from Jewitt's team appears online in the 7 November issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
to the asteroid on 23 September, its appearance had totally changed. It looked as if the entire structure had swung around.

Source: SpaceTelescope.org

Astronomers identify intergalactic gas station on the outskirts of the Milky Way

Our Galaxy may have been consuming clouds of gas in a magnetic wrapper to keep making stars for the past eight billion years.

That’s the conclusion of astronomers at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency.

Dr Alex Hill, the lead author of a study of the Smith Hydrogen Gas
Cloud, a large gas cloud falling into the our Galaxy from intergalactic space, explained:

“Clouds like this may provide the fuel for our Galaxy to make stars, but they must be held together by something, or they’d disintegrate when they hit the warm outer part of the Galaxy — the halo. They wouldn’t reach the Galaxy’s disk, where the star-making is going on.”

The investigators found that the Smith Cloud has a magnetic field. It’s 50 000 times weaker than the Earth’s, “but it’s probably still strong enough to keep the cloud together”, Dr Hill said.

The findings were published recently in The Astrophysical Journal.

“This is one of the few such clouds large enough for us to be able measure its magnetic field,” added Dr Naomi McClure-Griffiths, a member of the research team.

“It seems the cloud is protected by a magnetic bubble, the same way the Earth’s magnetic field protects it from the solar wind.”

Named after its discoverer, Gail Bieger (née Smith), the Smith Cloud is at least two million times the mass of our Sun. If it were visible to the naked eye, it would look 20 times wider than the full Moon.

The Smith Cloud is one of thousands of “high velocity clouds” of hydrogen gas flying around the outskirts of the Milky Way. Astronomers believe their origins are mixed, some stemming from burst “bubbles” in the gas of our Galaxy, some being primordial gas, and some associated with small galaxies our Galaxy’s gravity is shredding from a distance.

The Smith Cloud is probably either semi-primordial gas condensing from the halo of the Milky Way or gas stripped from another galaxy.

Traveling at around 80 miles a second (130 kilometers a second), the Smith Cloud is only 8 000 light-years from our Galaxy’s disk and will drive into it in less than 30 million years.Its impact should produce galactic fireworks of some sort – possibly a burst of star formation or a supershell of neutral hydrogen.

Related links:

An all-sky map of high-velocity clouds

Astronomy Picture of the Day: High Velocity Clouds and the Milky Wa