Who was it that first said that people are stardust?
Some people, of a certain age, might say Joni Mitchell, who sang, “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the gar-ar-den,” in her paean to the Woodstock festival. Others will say Carl Sagan, the author and host of “Cosmos.”
In fact, the answer goes back before those acolytes of beauty and consciousness were born. In 1929, the Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley declared, “We organic beings who call ourselves humans are made of the same stuff as the stars” — a remarkable observation, considering that at the time nobody even knew what made the stars shine.
It would be 30 years before Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, William Fowler and Fred Hoyle showed in a classic paper [ http://rmp.aps.org/abstract/RMP/v29/i4/p547_1 ] that the atoms that compose us are not only the same as the ones in stars — most of them were actually manufactured in stars. Starting from primordial hydrogen and helium, denser elements like iron, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen were built up in a series of thermonuclear reactions and then spewed into space when these stars died and exploded as supernovas in a final thermonuclear frenzy.
Any gardener knows that ashes make good fertilizer. Our atoms were once in stars.
I was reminded of all this by a pair of recent news items. One involved dung beetles, among the least lordly occupants of this cosmic garden, which apparently navigate by orienting themselves to the light of the Milky Way.
The blam in question happened — or rather was noticed here on Earth — on June 3. It was then that astronomers, alerted by a brief flash of high-energy gamma rays in the sky, think a pair of dead, ultradense neutron stars collided, leaving behind only a distant radioactive glow. Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said the explosion could have created an amount of gold equivalent to the mass of 20 Earth Moons.
Neutron stars are themselves a result of cataclysms, those supernova explosions that can squeeze the space out of atoms and compress a mass more than the Sun into a ball 10 miles across — essentially a great ball of neutrons, hence the name. On Earth, a teaspoon of the stuff would weigh about five billion tons.
Astronomers have always wondered whether ordinary supernova explosions could produce very heavy elements like gold, whose nucleus has 79 protons and 118 neutrons — a far cry from the single proton that is a hydrogen nucleus. If a pair of neutron stars are in orbit around each other, they can collide — a second cosmic act that will add to the universe’s repertory of elements, the bling from blam.
Indeed, Dr. Berger and his colleagues suggested that all the gold in the universe might have been produced by neutron star collisions, which have been termed “kilanova” explosions.
Of course we aspiring gardeners have other names for what is left behind after an object’s energy has been metabolized into light and heat to nurture the cosmos.
Which brings us back to the lowly dung beetle, the scarab.
These creatures, [ http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/10/science/in-recycling-waste-the-noble-scarab-is-peerless.html ] which live on the feces of larger animals, have a problem. Once a beetle has found some dung and rolled part of it into a ball, he’s got to get it out of there, rolling it in a straight line away from the dung pile, or the other beetles will come and poach it.
How they manage this, even on moonless nights when obvious cues and landmarks are absent or invisible, has been a mystery.
Last January a team of Swedish and South African researchers reported that African dung beetles, Scarabaeus satyrus, can use the Milky Way as their guide.
In a series of experiments in a game preserve and a planetarium, a team led by Marie Dacke of Lund University in Sweden found that when the beetles were fitted with little caps that prevented them from seeing the sky or the stars were clouded out, the beetles wandered aimlessly, putting their little dung treasures at risk.
But a starlit sky, or just a dim band representing the disk of our humble home galaxy, is a enough to keep them on track.
“Although this is the first description of an insect using the Milky Way for their orientation, this ability might turn out to be widespread in the animal kingdom,” the scientists wrote [ http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S0960982212015072 ] in Current Biology.
It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful or humbling connection between the sacred and the profane, the microscopic and the large, inner space and outer space.
The Milky Way is one of nature’s grandest creations: hundreds of billions of glittering stars, wreathed in ribbons of gas and dust, a cloudy, starry pinwheel so vast that a light beam would take 100,000 years to cross it and the Sun with its planetary entourage takes a quarter of a billion years to circle it once.
And it is only one of countless galaxies, scattered like sand from here to eternity, rushing outward in the great expansion, whose meaning, if we are honest, is as fathomless to us as it is to a scarab pushing its carefully wrought investment portfolio through this garden of Earthy delights.
Scarabs were sacred to the ancient Egyptians for their ability to create life from waste. They were a symbol of the eternal renewal of life from death, not unlike the waxing and the waning of the stars themselves.
Egyptians wore representations of them as amulets. And wouldn’t you know, in one of the ultimate symbols of recycling, some of them were even gold.
You may have seen these studies before. I hadn't .. I thought it was fascinating! .. Fascinating that the Milky Way can help a dung beetle while working and now, we will find out how many more of our critters use the Milky Way for all kinds of things .. .;) .........
A fossil of the ancient insect Cretophasmomima melanogramma, left, and the modern leaf-shaped plant organ Membranifolia admirabilis. (Oivier Bethoux (left photo), Frederic Jacques (right photo))
By Monte Morin March 19, 2014, 6:59 p.m.
With their extraordinary ability to mimic twigs and leaves, stick insects are among nature's most renowned masters of disguise.
But it's not just predators they've managed to avoid. Sneaky phasmatodae, or "ghost" insects, have also flummoxed scientists by leaving behind precious few fossil clues concerning their unique evolution.
But on Wednesday, researchers from China, France and Germany announced the discovery of a long-extinct species that lived around Inner Mongolia roughly 126 million years ago.
The insect, dubbed Cretophasmomima melanogramma, was described in the journal PLOS One [ http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/%20http:/dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0091290 ] and would have existed during the time of the dinosaurs. Long and narrow, the bug probably used its wings as a leaf-like cloak to fool birds and rat-like mammals, according to researchers.
Wang and colleagues uncovered three fossils of the insect -- one female and two male -- and wrote that their wings appeared to have dark, parallel lines. When folded back, the wings would have assumed a "tongue-like" shape that covered the insect's abdomen.
Researchers argue that the wings resembled a leaf-shaped plant organ called Membranifolia admirabilis. Although fossils of the plant organ have been found in the same region of northern China, it is unclear exactly what type of plant they belonged to.
The authors wrote that since today's stick insects mimic the same plants they eat, they believe this was probably the case in the Jehol biota. (To watch some videos about modern stick insects, click here [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Phasmatodea ].)
Researchers noted that the three specimens each measured roughly 2 inches long, with the female being slightly larger than the males. In modern species, the difference in length between males and females, or what's called sexual size dimorphism, is more pronounced.
"This new record suggests that leaf mimicry predated the appearance of twig and bark mimicry in Phasmatodeans," the authors wrote. "Additionally, it complements our growing knowledge of the early attempts of insects to mimic plant parts."
Scientist finds 19 new species of speedy, clever praying mantises
By Amina Khan This post has been updated, as indicated below. March 19, 2014, 6:50 a.m.
Welcome to the fold! An entomologist trekking through Amazonian rain forest and sifting through musty museums has discovered 19 new species of praying mantis in Central and South America. The findings, published in the journal ZooKeys, nearly triple the number of known bark mantis species and reveal the diversity of this charismatic insect group.
These insects aren’t your typical praying mantises, said entomologist Gavin Svenson, curator of invertebrate zoology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The archetypal praying mantis is a fresh, new-leaf green with a tubular body and is seen as an ambush hunter. Not so with the bark mantises, which have brownish, mottled backs and flat bodies that allow them to lie flat against the bark of a tree and hide from predators.
Unlike your garden-variety praying mantis, these bark mantises don’t just sit quietly and wait for unsuspecting prey to come their way -- they’re speedy critters that can quickly chase down a fly or a cricket for a quick snack. They also actively evade their enemies, scurrying around to the other side of a tree if they see someone coming, just as neurotic neighborhood squirrels do. As a last-ditch effort to avoid getting eaten, they even jump to the ground and fall into the dead leaf litter and play dead.
“For an insect, that’s pretty complicated,” Svenson said of the behavior. “I don’t think most people would think an insect would play dead. You can literally find this thing in the leaf litter and poke it and it’ll just lay there.”
But Svenson said that there was relatively little research on the praying mantis, in spite of its high profile compared to other bugs. So he visited countries in South America, North America and Europe to search for mantis species. Some he found while looking though old samples that were close to a century old, that had never been labeled or properly categorized. Others he had to go searching through the jungle to locate. He brought back hundreds of specimens.
[Updated, 6:48 a.m., March 19: Each search came with its challenges. The museum search was painstaking and time-consuming; many samples had been collected decades ago, dropped off at the museum and long forgotten. Looking through them was like sifting through a giant, scientific rummage sale.
"It’s easy to miss stuff," Svenson said. "You’re searching through specimen archives that have been there for a long, long time. You don’t know exactly what you’re going to find."]
In the jungle, these clever insects were fairly skilled at eluding capture. In one instance, Svenson had to poke a branch at an insect entrenched in a tree for three hours in the middle of the night before he could coax it down and nab it.
“Who knows? I probably missed the 20th new species because they’re so difficult to catch sometimes,” Svenson said.
Is there a chance that species discovered in the museum collections may no longer exist in the wild? It’s possible that some have gone extinct or are highly threatened, Svenson said, pointing out that some of the forests where old museum specimens were caught may have been replaced by urban development.
“It has a lot of implications in conservation,” he added.
The new finds bear some colorful names. One insect, named Liturgusa algorei after former Vice President Al Gore to honor his environmental activism, was caught in thick rain forest in northern Peru. So was another named Liturgusa krattorum, after Martin and Chris Kratt of the PBS children’s television show "Wild Kratts," which teaches kids about animal biology. Another, named Liturgusa fossetti, is named after the late explorer James Stephen Fossett. Another named Liturgusa bororum is named after the Bora people, who live in parts of the Amazon Basin. Svenson even got to name two species, Liturgusa tessae and Liturgusa zoae, after his daughters Tessa and Zoey.
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