ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

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• Brain activity of nematodes seeking food offers new view on sleep
• Inside the mouth of a hydra: Hydra rips its own skin apart just to open its mouth
• Want to avoid a cold? Try a tattoo or twenty, says researcher
• Evolutionary leap from fins to legs was surprisingly simple
• First tomatoes, peas harvested on Mars, moon soil simulant
• Dinosaur-like lower leg created on bird through molecular experiment

Brain activity of nematodes seeking food offers new view on sleep Posted: 08 Mar 2016 10:30 AM PST If you have trouble sleeping, the neurons in your brain may be firing like those in roundworms randomly seeking food in the absence of clues, says a biologist.

Inside the mouth of a hydra: Hydra rips its own skin apart just to open its mouth Posted: 08 Mar 2016 10:29 AM PST Hydra is a genus of tiny freshwater animals that catch and sting prey using a ring of tentacles. But before a hydra can eat, it has to rip its own skin apart just to open its mouth. Scientists now illustrate the biomechanics of this process for the first time and find that a hydra's cells stretch to split apart in a dramatic deformation.

Want to avoid a cold? Try a tattoo or twenty, says researcher Posted: 08 Mar 2016 08:00 AM PST There's no known cure for the common cold, but receiving multiple tattoos can strengthen your immunological responses, potentially making you heartier in fighting off common infections, according to research. However, receiving a single tattoo can, at least temporarily, lower your resistance.

Evolutionary leap from fins to legs was surprisingly simple Posted: 08 Mar 2016 06:08 AM PST New research reveals that the limbs of the earliest four-legged vertebrates, dating back more than 360 million years ago, were no more structurally diverse than the fins of their aquatic ancestors.

First tomatoes, peas harvested on Mars, moon soil simulant Posted: 08 Mar 2016 05:59 AM PST The second experiment on how to grow crops on Mars and moon soil simulant have given a surprising outcome. As a result of what the researchers in the Netherlands learned from their first experiments, they were able to grow ten different crop species. Tomatoes, peas, rye, garden rocket, radish and garden cress were harvested.

Dinosaur-like lower leg created on bird through molecular experiment Posted: 07 Mar 2016 12:30 PM PST Any one that has eaten roasted chicken can account for the presence in the drumstick (lower leg) of a long, spine-like bone. This is actually the fibula, one of the two long bones of the lower leg (the outer one). In dinosaurs, which are the ancestors of birds, this bone is tube-shaped and reaches all the way down to the ankle. Researchers have found that when a maturation gene called Indian Hedgehog was inhibited, this resulted in chickens that kept a tubular fibula as long as the tibia and connected to the ankle, just like a dinosaur.

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