It is a regrettable truth that there’s by no means time to hide the entire attention-grabbing clinical tales we come throughout every month. Prior to now, we have now featured year-end roundups of cool science tales we (nearly) neglected. This yr, we are experimenting with a per thirty days assortment. February’s listing contains dancing sea turtles, the name of the game to a wonderfully boiled egg, the most recent step forward in decoding the Herculaneum scrolls, the invention of an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb, and extra.
Dancing sea turtles
There’s rising proof that positive migratory animal species (turtles, birds, some species of fish) are in a position to milk the Earth’s magnetic box for navigation, the use of it each as a compass to decide route and as a type of “map” to trace their geographical place whilst migrating. A paper revealed within the magazine Nature provides proof of a imaginable mechanism for this extraordinary skill, a minimum of in loggerhead sea turtles, who carry out an full of life “dance” once they apply magnetic fields to a delectable snack.
Sea turtles make spectacular 8,000-mile migrations throughout oceans and have a tendency to go back to the similar feeding and nesting websites. The authors consider they do so thru their skill to bear in mind the magnetic signature of the ones spaces and retailer them in a psychological map. To check that speculation, the scientists positioned juvenile sea turtles into two huge tanks of water geared up with huge coils to create magnetic signatures at particular places inside the tanks. One tank options this type of location that had meals; the opposite had a an identical location with out meals.
They discovered that the ocean turtles within the first tank carried out unique “dancing” strikes once they arrived on the space related to meals: tilting their our bodies, dog-paddling, spinning in position, or elevating their head close to or above the outside of the water. Once they ran a 2nd experiment the use of other radio frequencies, they discovered that the exchange interfered with the turtles’ interior compass, and so they may now not orient themselves whilst swimming. The authors concluded that that is compelling proof that the ocean turtles can distinguish between magnetic fields, most likely depending on complicated chemical reactions, i.e., “magnetoreception.” The map sense, on the other hand, most likely depends upon a special mechanism.