Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by that annoying kid who always tapped on the glass of your reptile cage:
Snake Hearing Is Connected To The Jawbone
Full transcript after the jump...
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What, you’ve never heard of an antberry?
While studying black ants in the Panamanian forest, a group of American biologists found a roundworm with a bizarre lifecycle. When an ant devours the parasite, its abdomen swells up and turns red, effectively giving the ant the appearance of a juicy red berry—and dinner, for a passing bird.
(Remember irrepressible Violet Beauregarde, that world champion gum chewer who swelled up to look like a giant blueberry in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Perhaps the problem with Mr. Wonka’s experimental three-course-meal gum was that it harbored some parasitic nematode…)
Birds don’t usually feast on the ants, but they love the berries. And when an ant looks like a berry, the researcher hypothesize, the bird eats the bug, and the parasite spreads to the bird. The researchers say this is the first example of "fruit mimicry" caused by a parasite.
The scientists, Robert Dudley, Stephen P. Yanoviak, and Michael E. Kaspari, were actually studying the aeronautical ability of ants in the tropical forest. But they kept finding ants with swollen, berry-like bellies, and soon, speculation about the berry bellies turned to beer:
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If I've learned anything in my 56 years, it's that children are parasites — I'd know that even if I hadn't fathered dozens of illegitimate kids across the deep south. But science is finally catching up to what ol' Proud Papa here always knew: The placenta produces previously unknown hormones that possess the same molecules as some parasitic worms.
The puzzle as to why a pregnant woman's immune system doesn't attack the fetus and placenta - both of which contain genetic material from the father - may finally have been cracked.
It seems the placenta produces hitherto unknown hormones containing the same molecule some parasitic worms use to avoid detection by the immune system. As well as helping the fetus avoid immune attack, the hormones may also summon extra blood and nutrients to the aid of an undernourished fetus.
[Shudders] Yup, that's the miracle of life for ya...a beautiful thing in all its splendor.
Physicists at the University of Missouri-Columbia are getting close to finishing a new kind of biological printer that, they say, will be able to “print” human tissue:
…the team used bio-ink particles, or spheres containing 10,000 to 40,000 cells, and assembled, or “printed,” them on to sheets of organic, cell friendly “bio-paper.”
The most striking part of the study, mentioned deep in the press release, answers the age old question: how do you produce a synthetic chicken heart that actually beats?
In the study, scientists took cells from a chicken heart and used them to form bio-ink particles, which were then printed on to thick sheets. Heart cells must be synchronized for the heart to beat properly. When the bio-ink particles were first printed, the cells did not beat in unison, but as the cellular spheroids fused, the structure eventually started beating just as a heart does.
What do you do with chicken hearts? How about this?
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