I've seen Sue before. She's a towering Tyrannosaurus Rex specimen at the Chicago Field Museum, with her gaping maw full of once razor-sharp teeth. I remember staring up at that mouth as a kid and thinking how many times she would have to chew me before I would stop screaming. Turns out, I shouldn't have been worried, as she might have had a chronically killer toothache.

From the Wired article:

The biggest problem for Tyrannosaurus rex could have been a single-celled parasite in a paleolithic turn on the tiny-fells-mighty, War of the Worlds story.

A relative of lowly Trichomonas, a microbe commonly found today in pigeons, may have killed off Sue, the famous T. rex skeleton at the Chicago Field Museum, and many other tyrannosaurids, too.

Paleontologist Ewan Wolff of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues use evidence from modern predatory bird species to argue that the protozoan parasite could have formed lesions along the tyrannosaur mandible, eroding the bone away.

In some cases, the illness might have been bad enough to prevent the animals from feeding, leading to their death from starvation, and creating telltale holes in the jaws of the great beasts.

“I think it’s very tempting when you see a hole in a bone to say it’s bite marks, but there are innumerable disease you could list that cause holes in bones that have nothing to do with bite wounds,” said Ewan Wolff, lead author of a new paper describing the work published Sept. 29 in PLoS One.

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Read the full article here.

Read the PLoS One article here (no login required).

Okay. This is unexpectedly hilarious at first, then it becomes slightly depressing, then absolutely thought-provoking in what it might say about how behavior and chemical exposure.

From the press release:

Both male and female fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) – commonly seen hovering around rotting fruit and vegetables - are active at dawn and dusk, and have a deep sleep at night. They also exhibit a marked 'resting state' during the afternoon, which Professor Isaac likens to a siesta that conserves the fly's energy and reduces damaging exposure to the sun during hot afternoons.

"However, we noted that after mating, females still slept deeply at night, but ditched the usual siesta in favour of extra foraging and searching for places to lay her eggs," he says. "This behaviour lasts for around eight days – and our research findings suggest that this change is not by choice. Females who mated with males that produced sperm without the sex peptide continued to take their siesta. So we're certain that this change of behaviour is chemically induced by the male."

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Read the press release here.

From the Times Online article:

The bubbles in champagne not only supply a loud ceremonial pop when a bottle is uncorked but also enhance the wine’s flavour, according to French scientists.

They showed that the bubbles carry aromas up to the surface and leave them hovering above the sparkling liquid in a fine mist.

As a result, when you lower your head to take a sip, your nose is met by a bouquet of buttery and fruity fragrances that defines the drink.

“People have been making and enjoying champagne for hundreds of years but it’s only now that we’re beginning to understand the science behind what makes these wines so good,” said Tony Milanowski, a winemaker and director of the BA course in viticulture at Plumpton College in Sussex.

The fizz in champagne has this effect because the molecules responsible for its aroma come attached to fatty acids released by the yeast added to the wine during the fermentation process, or directly from the grapes. The acids are double-ended compounds with one end that is attracted to water and another that shuns it.

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Read the full article here.

Physicists have found a way of compressing information and thus boosting the data rate, which could lead to fater internet speeds.

From the BBC News article:

The idea uses silicon waveguides as the lenses.

A long, 10-GHz pulse containing bits of data and a much shorter laser pulse with no information pass through one of these waveguides.

A race is then set up between the halves of the pulse, with the back speeding up and the front slowing down as it passes through an opitcal fibre.

That is due to complex interactions with the silicon, forcing the data-rich pulse to take on the temporal properties of the shorter pulse.

Just like an optical telescope, combining two of these temporal lenses creates a time telescope that can take a standard 10 GHz pulse and create and "image" of it.

That jams the same information into a pulse just one twenty-seventh as long.

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Read the full article here.

From the CNN article:

President Obama, in an effort to stimulate the economy and support critical research, announced $5 billion in grants during a visit to the National Institutes of Health on Wednesday.

The money comes from economic stimulus funds and is aimed at supporting research projects as well as the jobs related to them to fight cancer and other major diseases, Obama said in announcing the grants.

"Cancer has touched the lives of all Americans, including my own family's," the president said. "We all know the terrible toll on families and the promise of treatments that will allow a mother to be there for her children as they grow up, that will make it possible for a child to reach adulthood, that will allow countless people to survive a disease that's claimed far too many lives."

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Read the full article here.

Ships need frequent maintenance to their hulls to prevent drag due to marine life castaways that accumulate over time. Now researchers are proposing adding a second skin to ships that is capable of sloughing off undesireable hangers-on inspired by the skin of marine mammals.

From the New Scientist article:

Ganguli's solution is inspired by the skin of the long-finned pilot whale, Globicephala melas, which was investigated by Christoph Baum at Hannover School of Veterinary Medicine, Germany. In a paper published in 2002 Baum's team reported that the surface of the whale's skin is criss-crossed with a network of nanoscale canals too small for any barnacle larvae to gain any purchase (Marine Biology, DOI: 10.1007/s00227-001-0710-8). They also found that the canals are filled with a gel of enzymes that destroy proteins on the surface of bacteria and algae.

Ganguli is now working on a way to make a ship's hull perform a similar self-cleaning trick. His idea is to cover the outer layer of a ship in a metal mesh, beneath which is a regular pattern of holes that exude a sticky, biosafe chemical that becomes more viscous on contact with seawater.

As the secretion oozes out of the pores it fills the gaps in the mesh and pools on top to form a viscous skin coating the entire hull. This skin steadily wears away, taking with it any life that has gained a foothold, and is replaced by new slime from below.

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Read the full article here.

Zombies have become one of the more popular internet memes over the past year and with the upcoming release of Zombieland, a horror comedy that follows a few survivors in a world filled with the walking undead, it seems like this meme is just about as unstoppable as a reeling crowd of decaying brain-lusters banging down your door.

A physicist, Davide Cassi, at the Universit of Parma wanted to know whether or not it was true entities hiding in complex structures (such as a maze or a mall) could survive if pursued by "predatory random walkers".

From the InsideScience.org article:

Cassi found that the likelihood of survival when threatened by predatory random walkers is closely related to how complex the prey’s hideout is. The more twists and turns, the safer you'll be. In structures that are highly complex and irregular, the chances of the predator coming into contact with its target shrinks down to almost zero.

Cassi formulates a model to describe the behavior of randomly moving particles as they travel through maze-like networks. He said that his work could apply to a wide variety of situations including the distribution of information through the internet and medicine spreading through the human body.

"There are a lot of applications of these results in a lot of fields of sciences," Cassi said. "The most amazing field of applications of these results are in biology, biochemistry and other organisms."

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Read the full article here.

Read the research article from Physical Review E here.