Bizarre Tongue-Eating Parasite Found in the Jersey Coast

There's been a spate of amazing animal discoveries recently--the giant rat-eating plants found in the Philippines, a huge woolly rat discovered in a volcanic crater--and now, yet another creature has emerged that could be right out of a sci-fi film. It's a bizarre creature that survives by eating its hosts' tongue and then attaching itself inside the mouth.

The sea-dwelling parasite attacks fish, burrows into it, and then devours its tongue. After eating the tongue, the parasite proceeds to live inside the fish's mouth. There's a horror film waiting to be made about this thing. Surprisingly, the fish doesn't seem to suffer any severe impediment--just the loss of its tongue--and seems to have no trouble surviving with its new, far uglier tongue.

While the isopod, a kind of louse, has been known to exist for a while now, discoveries of live specimens is rare. The BBC reports that "Fishermen near the Minquiers - islands under the jurisdiction of Jersey - found the isopod, a type of louse, inside a weaver fish." So no, the tongue-eater wasn't found in that Jersey. The Jersey Shore is still tongue replacing creature-free, if you stateside Northeasterners were worried about the thing ruining your late summer vacationing.

Not that you'd have to be too concerned anyways--the isopod isn't a threat to humans in the slightest, though it's reportedly vicious, and can deliver quite a little bite. One of the fishermen who found the creature described it thus: "Really quite large, really quite hideous - if you turn it over its got dozens of these really sharp, nasty claws underneath and I thought 'that's a bit of a nasty beast'." And while it can't seriously hurt people, it evidently doesn't like them: "It doesn't affect humans other than if you do actually come across a live one and try and pick it up - they are quite vicious, they will deliver a good nip."

( http://www.treehugger.com/ )

20 Percent(%) of Our Energy Used By The Neurons (Brain)

Experiments conducted on squid brains in the early days of neuroscience created misunderstandings about the workings of the human brain that have persisted for 70 years, according to a new study. While the squid experiments did shed light on how messages are transmitted between brain cells with electrochemical signals (and led to a Nobel Prize for the experimenters), researchers are just now realizing that the results gave scientists a confused idea about the efficiency of neurons.

The story begins seventy years ago when a pair of British physiologists, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, took the first stab at figuring out how neurons transmit electrical signals, known as action potentials. Because most neurons are small–in humans, a cubic millimeter of gray matter can contain 40,000 neurons–the duo turned to squid, which contain a giant axon, the long thin part of a neuron through which action potentials travel. Those early experiments found that transmitting the action potential along the axon was a very inefficient process that used a great deal of energy, and neuroscientists ever since have assumed that mammal brains had the same inefficient wiring.

Researcher Henrik Alle, lead author of the new study published in Science, decided to reexamine the old assumptions. “I saw this old work,” says Alle. “I thought I cannot believe personally that nature would waste such energy.” Alle figured that nature would have made the process more efficient in mammals, whose brains send a huge number of messages [NPR News].

Alle and his colleagues studied rat brains using sophisticated techniques that weren’t available to Hodgkin and Huxley, and found that rat neurons use only about a third as much energy to transmit the action potential. The researchers say we can assume that the results from rats can be applied to human brain cells. “Electrical signals found in mammalian brain cell types are very similar”, says Alle.

The difference between the cephalopod and the mammals can be explained by the movements of the positively and negatively charged ions that flow in and out of the neuron, changing its voltage and beginning the electric pulse of the action potential that moves down the axon. Hodgkin and Huxley were the first to suggest that the squid cells were inefficient because sodium ions entering the cells neutralised the effect of potassium ions leaving. This hampered the creation of a net voltage across the cell membrane. “It’s like having the accelerator and the brake on at the same time,” says Arnd Roth, a study coauthor. In rat cells, however, the process is better coordinated so that almost all the sodium ions enter before potassium ions rush out.

The results don’t change the scientific thesis that although the brain accounts for only 2 percent of our body weight, it consumed 20 percent of our energy–it just means that the energy is being used by the neurons in other ways than to generate action potentials. Researchers suspect that the bulk of energy that goes to the brain is used for keeping the brain cells alive and used in synapses, where signals are transmitted from one neuron to the next.

(http://blogs.discovermagazine.com)

Found, the coldest place on Earth That is Antarctica's Ridge A

The search for the best observatory site in the world has led to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth, a place where no human is thought to have ever set foot. The finding was detailed on August 31 in the Publications of the Astronomical Society.
Antarctica's Ridge A, world's coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth. To search for the perfect site to take pictures of the heavens, a US-Australian research team combined data from satellites, ground stations and climate models in a study to assess the many factors that affect astronomy — cloud cover, temperature, sky-brightness, water vapour, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence.

The researchers pinpointed a site, known simply as Ridge A that is 4.053 metres high up on the Antarctic Plateau. The study revealed that Ridge A has an average winter temperature of minus 70 degrees Celsius and an extremely low amount of water in the air.

The site is also extremely calm, which means that there is very little of the atmospheric turbulence that elsewhere makes stars appear to twinkle.

"It's so calm that there's almost no wind or weather there at all" said study leader Will Saunders, of the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Australia.

All these elements combine to make the perfect recipe for an astronomical observation post: "The astronomical images taken at Ridge A should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers," Saunders said. "Because the sky there is so much darker and drier, it means that a modestly sized telescope there would be as powerful as the largest telescopes anywhere else on earth."

The site would even be superior to the best existing observatories on high mountain tops in Hawaii and Chile, Saunders said. Researchers assert that a telescope at the site could take images nearly as good as those from the space-based Hubble telescope.

Located within the Antarctic Territory claimed by Australia, the site is 89 miles from an international robotic observatory and the proposed new Chinese "Kunlun" base at Dome A, a higher point on the Antarctic Plateau.

source : google.com