BBC Animal Science — Desert ants in Tunisia smell in stereo, sensing odours from two different directions at the same time. By sniffing the air with each antenna, the ants form a mental ‘odour map’ of their surroundings. They then use this map to find their way home, say scientists who report the discovery in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Pigeons, rats and even people may also smell in stereo, but ants are the first animal known to use it for navigation.

Dr Markus Knaden and colleagues Dr Kathrin Steck and Professor Bill Hansson of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany investigated how the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis navigates around its surroundings.

Each day, individual ants will leave the nest entrance and travel up to 100m in search of food. When they find some, they return straight home, somehow finding their tiny nest entrance again within a bleak, relatively featureless desert landscape.

Scientists knew the ant uses a sophisticated array of visual cues to find much of its way home. But Knaden’s team has now found that the insect does much more than that.

First, they placed four odours marked A, B, C and D around a barely visible nest entrance. They then tested the ants by removing and placing them in a remote location, without a nest entrance but with the same four odours.

The ants immediately headed to exactly where their nest should have been, confirming that they use the odours as olfactory landmarks. When the odours were mixed up, the ants became confused and unable to navigate their way home. “They had learned the olfactory scenery,” Dr Knaden told the BBC.

Ants with one antenna were also unable to navigate using more than one smell, confirming that the insects required two antennae, and an ability to smell in stereo, to find their way around. (03/02/10)

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BBC Anthropological Science — Inscribed ostrich shell fragments found in South Africa are among the earliest examples of the use of symbolism by modern humans, scientists say. The etched shells from Diepkloof Rock Shelter in Western Cape have been dated to about 60,000 years ago. Details are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers, who have investigated the material since 1999, argue that the markings are almost certainly a form of messaging - of graphic communication.

“The motif is two parallel lines, which we suppose were circular, but we do not have a complete refit of the eggs,” explained Dr Pierre-Jean Texier from the University of Bordeaux, Talence, France. “The lines are crossed at right angles or oblique angles by hatching. By the repetition of this motif, early humans were trying to communicate something. Perhaps they were trying to express the identity of the individual or the group,” he told BBC News.

Symbolic thought - the ability to let one thing represent another - was a giant leap in human evolution, and sets our species apart from the rest of the animal world. Understanding when and where this behaviour first emerged is a key quest for scientists studying human origins.

Arguably the earliest examples of conceptual thought are the pieces of shell jewellery discovered at Skhul Cave in Israel and from Oued Djebbana in Algeria. These artefacts are 90,000-100,000 years old. (03/02/10)

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Science Daily — More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. …

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values.  The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years.”

“Evolutionarily novel” preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess.  In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are “evolutionarily familiar.” …

An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals.  Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk.  Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel.  So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals. …

In addition, humans have always been mildly polygynous in evolutionary history.  Men in polygynous marriages were not expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate, whereas men in monogamous marriages were.  In sharp contrast, whether they are in a monogamous or polygynous marriage, women were always expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate.  So being sexually exclusive is evolutionarily novel for men, but not for women.  And the theory predicts that more intelligent men are more likely to value sexual exclusivity than less intelligent men, but general intelligence makes no difference for women’s value on sexual exclusivity. (02/25/10)

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BBC Human Science — Do bald people’s shiny heads contribute to global warming? … Can I disrupt the internal sat-nav of snails eating my petunias?… Will a slinky going downwards on an upwards moving escalator ever reach the bottom?

From curious to genius, these are just some of the ideas we’ve received for So You Want to Be a Scientist? - BBC Radio 4’s search for amateur experimenters. Since we launched the project in our weekly science show Material World in January, over 800 people have sent us their brainwaves.

If they’re selected then we’ll help them turn their suggestions into experiments to carry out themselves - from their kitchen, shed or local park. They’ll also be helped by a professional scientist, to advise on everything from experimental design to statistical analysis. Entries close in three days. So if you have an idea and you haven’t submitted it, you may still apply online here before midnight on February 28th.

A panel of judges chaired by Lord May, ex-UK government science adviser and current president of the British Science Association, will whittle the entries down to just four finalists. They’ll have until September to complete their research and present their findings at the British Science Association festival in Birmingham.  (02/25/10)

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BBC Medical Science — Ballabgarh in northern India has unusually low levels of Alzheimer’s disease. More than 820,000 people in the UK are living with dementia, a number that is expected to double by 2051. Is there anything that can be learnt from this region to slow the trend?

As the sun breaks through the morning mist in Ballabgarh, the elders of the village make their way to their regular meeting spot to exchange stories and share a traditional hookah pipe.

These men are in their sixties and seventies, while their faces bear the evidence of years of hard work in the fields, their minds are still sharp.

In other parts of the world, people of their age would be at some risk of developing dementia. But here, Alzheimer’s disease is rare. In fact, scientists believe recorded rates of the condition in this small community are lower than anywhere else in the world. …

Dr Chandra told me they tested people to see whether fewer of them carried the APO4E gene, which predisposes people to Alzheimer’s disease. They did not. Ballabgarh Northern India A farming community means everyone is physically active.

When compared to people living in a community in Pennsylvania, US, they found almost exactly the same proportion carried the gene. But in contrast with lives in Pennsylvania and other parts of the world, the people of Ballabgarh are unusually healthy. It is a farming community, so most of them are very physically active and most eat a low-fat, vegetarian diet. Obesity is virtually unheard of.

Life in this fertile farming community is also low in stress, and family support is still strong, unlike in other, more urban parts of India. “It all leads to a happy body, and a happy mind and hopefully a happy brain,” says Dr Chandra. “Cholesterol levels here are much lower. We believe that is what is protecting the community.”

Life in Ballabgarh could not be more different from the complicated, stressful existence many of us lead in the rest of the world. But perhaps this community has something to teach us. (02/09/10)

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BBC Health Science – US First Lady Michelle Obama has launched a nationwide campaign to tackle child obesity. One in three children in the US is overweight or obese and Mrs Obama says the issue threatens America’s future.

She is setting out an ambitious plan to try to solve the childhood obesity problem within a generation. The Let’s Move campaign will seek to raise the nutritional level of school meals and improve access to healthier food in deprived areas.

Mrs Obama has stressed that the campaign, launched on Tuesday, is not entirely hers. She has enlisted the help of politicians, entertainers and sports personalities to get the message across. Parents, businesses, schools and local government will need to increase their efforts in the area, she has said. Parents will be encouraged to enroll their children in extra-curricular sports and leisure activities.

Mrs Obama has herself performed a hula-hoop routine at the White House to try to increase the profile of exercise for children.

On Tuesday she told USA Today: “I would move heaven and earth to give my kids all the chance in the world for them to be at the top of their game in every way, shape and form.” In his budget proposal last week, President Barack Obama called for an additional $1bn to fund child nutrition programmes. (02/09/10)

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BBC Environmental Politics — Four “eco-towns” due to be built in England are to receive a funding boost of £60m to be spread over the next two years, the government has announced.

The towns, which were whittled down from a shortlisted 12 last year, are Whitehill-Bordon in Hampshire, St Austell in Cornwall, Rackheath in Norfolk and North West Bicester in Oxfordshire.

Each is set to receive just over £9m for the next financial year from the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), with an additional £2-6m earmarked for 2010/2011. The Department for Schools, Education and Families has also agreed to ring-fence £2.5m to spend on “greener schools”.

These locations could house up to 30,000 people in eco-friendly dwellings in five years’ time. (02/09/10)

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BBC History of Technology — Towards the end of the war, Alan Turing - the father of the computing age - had hid himself away in a hut at Hanslope Park in rural Buckinghamshire where, he told his assistant, he was “building a brain”. At the end of fighting, Turing took his plans with him to his new post at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington.

In March 1946 he handed over a report (which went unpublished during his lifetime) which contained detailed plans, including circuit diagrams, for the Automatic Computing Engine (Ace). But when the engineers and scientists at NPL saw the plans they blanched at its complicated design.

Instead of building the whole thing, they decided to put together a smaller pilot machine. By this time, Turing had left NPL for a sabbatical at Cambridge and it fell to Jim Wilkinson, Harry Huskey and, later on, Donald Davies to get on with the construction. The machine ran for the first time on 10 May 1950. By modern standards it was sluggish but in its day was the fastest in the world. …

Another NPL pioneer, Donald Davies, also cut his teeth on the Ace. He joined NPL at the same time as Jim Wilkinson and was, for a while, Turing’s assistant. Much later, when he was head of the computer section at NPL, he did ground-breaking work on the best way to organise computer networks.

At the time making a phone call meant literally creating an electrical circuit between the two people in the conversation. That tied up the entire line for the length of that chat, even though for most of the time the connection will go unused because of the silences and gaps that punctuate conversation.

Rather than mimic this and tie up computer links for a long time as data was sent back and forth, Mr Davies realised that the spaces could be used. By splitting data into packets and threading them on the same line, the carrying capacity of that link could be boosted and the whole network made more powerful.

Roger Scantlebury, who worked with Dr Davies, presented the ideas about “packet switching” to a conference in the US, where they were picked up by the creators of the nascent Arpanet, the fledgling internet.

Does that mean Britain invented the internet?

“Yes and no,” said Mr Scantlebury. “Certainly the underlying technology of the internet, which is packet switching, we did invent.”(02/05/10)

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BBC Bird Science — Birds may use their feathers for touch, using them to feel their surroundings just as cats use their whiskers. The revelation that feathers have this hitherto unknown function comes from research on auklets, birds that sport prominent plumes on their heads.

Auklets with bigger crests, that stick out further, bump into things less.

A wider analysis suggests that numerous birds, from parrots, penguins, pheasants and hummingbirds, also use their feathers to feel their way. Details of the discovery are published in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Many species of bird sport elegant long feathers, either crests, beards or whiskers that adorn the head and face, or striking tail feathers. Many of these feathers are thought to have a sexual function, being used to advertise a bird’s virility to potential mates. But Dr Sampath Seneviratne of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and Professor Ian Jones of Memorial University in St John’s, Canada suspect they may also have a tactile function.

They explored why a group of birds called auklets have evolved such elaborate head feathers. Within the genus Aethia, a number of species have different shaped feathers, but both males and females tend to look the same. The birds usually breed in dark, rocky crevices.

The researchers placed individual auklets into a dark experimental maze, designed to resemble a natural crevice, and recorded how often they bumped into things. Both crested and whiskered auklets bumped their heads 2.5 times more often if their feathers on their heads had been artificially flattened. Also, “without the aid of the crest, naturally long-crested individuals had more head bumps than short-crested individuals,” Dr Seneviratne told the BBC.

The two ornithologists then conducted a wider comparative analysis: checking which bird species sport long ornamental feathers against their lifestyles and where such birds live. What emerged was a striking pattern. “Birds that live in complex, cluttered habitats and are active at night tend to have a greater probability to express such facial feathers,” says Dr Seneviratne. “We found a highly significant correlation for the observed trend.” (02/05/10)

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BBC Life Science — Migrating insects use highways in the sky to speed their journey, according to a study published in Science magazine. Researchers say moths and butterflies use sophisticated methods to find winds that will take them in certain directions for thousands of kilometres. The little creatures travel on winds of up to 100km (60 miles) per hour. They use internal compasses to find these fast moving winds to carry them to their journey’s end.

It may seem a little difficult, in the depths of winter, to imagine sitting outside on a balmy summer’s evening gazing up at the velvety night. But, if you can, cast your mind’s eye back because above you was a windy highway used by thousands of these delicate migrating creatures. And the same journeys are sometimes carried on over several generations of insect.

The scientists say that each insect uses the same complex methods to whisk them to their wintering water-holes in the Mediterranean and back to more northerly climes in the summer.

“We were surprised by the scale of the movements, although we wouldn’t have started the research without some idea of what was happening,” says Dr Jason Chapman of the Rothamsted Research Institute in Hertfordshire, UK, who is the lead author of the report. “What is also surprising is that very few of the insects end up going the wrong way”.

But most moths and butterflies look like they can hardly make it across the garden. So how to they avoid getting ripped to shreds in these fast moving winds? “When you are flying within the windstream you don’t feel it” says Dr Chapman. “Having said that, we think the way they choose the winds that are fastest is through some sort of turbulence mechanism. As the data has built up over the years we have been amazed by the subtlety and sophistication of the system.”

It is still not known exactly how this mechanism works - that will be for further study. (02/05/10)

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