ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

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• Woodrats' genes help them to win arms race against food
• New tool makes a single picture worth far more than a thousand words
• Molecular engineers record an electron's quantum behavior
• Parasitic worms sniff out their victims as 'cruisers' or 'ambushers'
• Seven tiny grains captured by Stardust likely visitors from interstellar space
• Plants may use newly discovered molecular language to communicate
• A self-organizing thousand-robot swarm
• Scientists study 'talking' turtles in Brazilian Amazon
• Dark bands in starlight: New Milky Way maps help solve stubborn interstellar material mystery
• Parenting from before conception: Babies' health doesn't 'start from scratch'
• Freeways as fences, trapping the mountain lions of Los Angeles
• Hoopoes' eggs show their true colors
• Mobile phones come alive with the sound of music

Woodrats' genes help them to win arms race against food Posted: 15 Aug 2014 07:23 AM PDT A handful of genes arm the woodrat against the toxic chemicals in its foodstuff, the creosote plant, according to research. It's long been a mystery exactly how the woodrat developed the ability to handle the chemicals in the creosote plant, which are toxic to other rodents. The new study identifies the genes switched on in two species of woodrat with resistance to the plant poisons, showing that the genes that they are born with play a central role in whether they feel the effects of its toxic chemicals.

New tool makes a single picture worth far more than a thousand words Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:23 PM PDT A photo is worth a thousand words, but what if the image could also represent thousands of other images? New software seeks to tame the sea of visual data in the world by generating a single photo that can represent massive clusters of images.

Molecular engineers record an electron's quantum behavior Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:21 PM PDT Scientists have developed a technique to record the quantum mechanical behavior of an individual electron contained within a nanoscale defect in diamond. Their technique uses ultrafast pulses of laser light both to control the defect's entire quantum state and observe how that single electron state changes over time.

Parasitic worms sniff out their victims as 'cruisers' or 'ambushers' Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:19 PM PDT It has been speculated that soil-dwelling parasitic worms use their sense of smell to find suitable hosts for infection. New research comparing odor-driven behaviors in different roundworm species reveals that olfactory preferences reflect host specificity rather than species relatedness, suggesting that olfaction indeed plays an important role in host location.

Seven tiny grains captured by Stardust likely visitors from interstellar space Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:19 PM PDT The 1999 Stardust mission flew by comet Wild-2 in 2004, capturing cometary and interstellar dust, and delivered its dust-loaded collectors to Earth in 2006. Scientists now report preliminary results of their eight-year analysis of the interstellar particles: seven dust motes that likely originated in another solar system less than 100 million years ago. The particles are more diverse than expected, and fluffier, like a tossed salad.

Plants may use newly discovered molecular language to communicate Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:19 PM PDT A scientist has discovered a potentially new form of plant communication, one that allows them to share an extraordinary amount of genetic information with one another. The finding throws open the door to a new arena of science that explores how plants communicate with each other on a molecular level. It also gives scientists new insight into ways to fight parasitic weeds that wreak havoc on food crops in some of the poorest parts of the world.

A self-organizing thousand-robot swarm Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:18 PM PDT The first thousand-robot flash mob has assembled at Harvard University. Just as trillions of individual cells can assemble into an intelligent organism, or a thousand starlings can form a great flowing murmuration across the sky, the Kilobots demonstrate how complexity can arise from very simple behaviors performed en masse. To computer scientists, they also represent a significant milestone in the development of collective artificial intelligence.

Scientists study 'talking' turtles in Brazilian Amazon Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:15 PM PDT Turtles are well known for their longevity and protective shells, but it turns out these reptiles use sound to stick together and care for young. Scientists working in the Brazilian Amazon have found that Giant South American river turtles actually use several different kinds of vocal communication to coordinate their social behaviors, including one used by female turtles to call to their newly hatched offspring in what is the first instance of recorded parental care in turtles.

Dark bands in starlight: New Milky Way maps help solve stubborn interstellar material mystery Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:13 PM PDT An international team of sky scholars has produced new maps of the material located between the stars in the Milky Way. The results should move astronomers closer to cracking a stardust puzzle that has vexed them for nearly a century.

Parenting from before conception: Babies' health doesn't 'start from scratch' Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:13 PM PDT There's now overwhelming evidence that a child's future health is influenced by more than just their parents' genetic material, and that children born of unhealthy parents will already be pre-programmed for greater risk of poor health, according to researchers. "The reality is, the child doesn't quite start from scratch -- they already carry over a legacy of factors from their parents' experiences that can shape development in the fetus and after birth. Depending on the situation, we can give our children a burden before they've even started life," experts say.

Freeways as fences, trapping the mountain lions of Los Angeles Posted: 14 Aug 2014 09:43 AM PDT That mountain lions have managed to survive at all in the Santa Monica Mountains of California -- in the vicinity of Los Angeles -- is a testament to the resilience of wildlife, but researchers studying these large carnivorous cats now show that the lions are also completely isolated, cut off from other populations by the freeway. According to the researchers' analyses, only one young mountain lion successfully dispersed into the Santa Monica Mountains in a decade.

Hoopoes' eggs show their true colors Posted: 14 Aug 2014 09:39 AM PDT Preen gland secretion causes hoopoes' eggs to change color, possibly giving signals about the robustness of the mother bird, researchers have found. Hoopoe females use cosmetics on their eggs - and the eggs gradually change color when they are incubated, from bluish-grey to a more saturated greenish-brown. This happens because secretion from the uropygial or preen gland – a substance birds use to preen and protect their feathers – is transfered from the female hoopoe's gland to her eggs directly with the bill and by means of belly feathers.

Mobile phones come alive with the sound of music Posted: 12 Aug 2014 09:17 AM PDT Charging mobile phones with sound, like chants from at football ground, could become a reality, according to scientists. Last year, researchers found that playing pop and rock music improves the performance of solar cells. Developing this research further, a team has now created an energy-harvesting prototype (a nanogenerator) that could be used to charge a mobile phone using everyday background noise – such as traffic, music, and our own voices. The team used the key properties of zinc oxide, a material that when squashed or stretched creates a voltage by converting energy from motion into electrical energy, in the form of nanorods.

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