“Some kids call me crazy,” says Erica, a 16-year-old sophomore at Pinedale High School in Wyoming. “Days with 20-mile-per-hour winds are my favorite snow days.”

Erica has turned her love of snow into 5 years’ worth of science fair projects, with no end in sight. The work has earned her two trips to the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge (DCYSC) for middle school science fair winners and two trips to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), which features top high school science projects from around the world. Among other prizes, she won $5,000 at this year’s ISEF, held last month in Indianapolis.

This type of snow fence, commonly found in Wyoming, is used to control drifting and blowing snow. Such fences can be up to 14 feet tall.

© Copyright 2006 Ronald D. Tabler. Reproduced with permission.

Erica’s projects have dealt with the use of fences and shrubs to control blowing and drifting snow, particularly to deposit snow in suitable locations and to increase water supplies. Her research has shown that properly constructed fences can trap a significant amount of snow, a benefit for Wyoming and other places where water shortages are a major problem.

Drifting detergent

Erica has always liked playing in the snow, but an encounter with a snow scientist when she was in the sixth grade taught her that snow is more than just fun. Studying snow can lead to useful things, such as methods for shielding highways from drifting snow and for easing droughts.

In Wyoming, for example, the highway department erects tall snow fences to help keep roads clear of snowdrifts. These fences, up to 14 feet tall, consist of horizontal boards mounted on posts, with spaces between the boards. As the wind carries snow over and through such a fence, it slows down and deposits snow in a wide drift behind the fence.

SNK reporter Emily Sohn (left) interviews Erica David about her project at the 2006 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, held in Indianapolis.

Photo by V. Miller

Erica’s first challenge was to find a household product that she could use to imitate drifting snow. Her tests showed that Cascade dish detergent works best. “It had static,” she says, “so the grains stuck to each other.”

This project brought her to Washington, D.C., as a DCYSC finalist in October 2002. There, with video cameras running and lots of media attention, she learned how important it is for a scientist to know how to communicate.

The next year, when Erica was in the seventh grade, she looked at ways in which the standard Wyoming snow-fence design might be improved.

Working in her garage with a fan, wind tunnel, and dish detergent, Erica tested scale models of six fence designs. In three of the designs, the boards had different spacings. In the other three, the boards had the same spacing but different thicknesses. She discovered that fences made with extrathick boards catch more snow than fences made with standard-size boards do (see “Effect of Snow Fences on Snowdrifts”).

The horizontal boards in these three model fences have different spacings.

Photo by V. Miller

At the 2003 DCYSC competition, Erica won a week at Vanderbilt University’s Girls and Science Camp.

Because she had won an award in 2003, Erica wasn’t eligible to enter DCYSC in 2004. But she continued her research anyway. This time, she studied the effect of snow packing on the amount of snow that vaporized (sublimed), thereby reducing the amount of snow available later for melting and increasing the water supply. Dense snow piles with small surface areas last longest, she found.

Drought relief

Last year, Erica scaled up her fence models to test how they would do outdoors in real snow. With her father’s help, she built three 3-foot-tall snow fences, each one with boards of a different thickness. When the weather grew snowy and blustery, she measured wind speeds behind each structure.

Erica measures snow depth behind one of her test snow fences.

Courtesy of E. David

Confirming her earlier observations with small models, Erica found that a fence with thicker boards slowed the wind and trapped more snow than a fence made with thinner boards did. The fence with the thickest boards created a tall, narrow snowdrift close to the fence that lasted a long time.

Because it’s possible to use rows of trees or shrubs instead of fences to control snow drifting, Erica also started investigating how effective the branches of different trees are for intercepting snow. She focused on the role that the moisture content of fir and pine branches plays in water conservation.

Erica oven-dried pine and fir branches to three levels of moisture content. “All of our food smelled like pine for a long time,” she says. To her surprise, Erica found that among firs, the driest branches are stiffest at subzero temperatures, but among pines, the moistest branches are stiffest.

Under drought conditions, she concluded, pines help conserve water by becoming more flexible when dry and depositing more snow on the ground.

These findings earned Erica a third-place prize (and $1,000 dollars) at last year’s ISEF, held in Phoenix, Ariz.

Improvements

Trapping and packing snow is a great strategy for conserving water, but building fences with thick boards is expensive. So, this year, Erica compared her original thick-board fence with some alternative designs.

Erica’s studies showed that this “thick” fence caught more snow than did other test fences. This end view shows the 2-inch strip of wood separating the thin horizontal boards (blue ends) to create a gap.

Courtesy of E. David

In one of these designs, she used two thin boards separated by a 2-inch gap in place of each thick board. The total thickness was still 4 inches, however. Erica’s experiments showed that this fence caught more snow and packed it more densely than did either a traditional fence or the previously tested thick fence.

Erica also investigated the potential use of sagebrush for snow interception and water conservation. Sagebrush is common throughout Wyoming and many other states.

Erica collects intercepted snow from sagebrush samples to measure the snow’s mass and water content.

Courtesy of E. David

As she had done previously for pine and fir, Erica measured the force needed to bend sagebrush branches at subzero temperatures. She discovered that the branches of sage plants become stiffer as the plants get older. This means that older plants hold more snow, increasing the amount of snow lost to sublimation and reducing the amount that becomes part of the snow pack on the ground.

Erica’s project, called “Boards and Branches—Year 5,” won a best-of-category award for environmental sciences at the 2006 ISEF. Her research on building fences and managing plants in a way that would let more water seep into the ground has attracted the attention of government agencies interested in developing strategies for reducing droughts.

Building fences

For next year’s project, Erica plans to build fences as tall as 14 feet and to test how well they work. Whether or not her prize-winning streak continues, she’s sure to keep uncovering more of nature’s snow secrets.

Erica also has advice for anyone inspired to tackle a science fair project. “If you have a passion, like animals or microbiology, go from there,” she says. “Allow yourself to be passionate. And have fun.”

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New experiments show that certain kinds of lobsters avoid sick individuals even before the infected lobsters are contagious or show symptoms that people can see. It’s the first evidence that healthy wild animals detect and shun sick members of their own species.

Caribbean spiny lobsters are social and prefer to share dens, as shown by these young lobsters gathered together under a sponge.

Photo by Mark Butler, Old Dominion University

Caribbean spiny lobsters live in the sea between Bermuda and Brazil. Unlike North Atlantic lobsters, they’re social. Some populations march single file in a long line along the ocean floor for miles every autumn, looking for deeper, calmer waters.

These lobsters also share dens, where they hide and protect each other from intruders. When something invades their space, they fight back by poking their long, stiff antennae at it.

“They’ll drive the antennae into the flesh of fish—or of researchers,” says Mark Butler of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. He says that collecting the creatures is “like trying to grab a porcupine out of a crevice.”

In 1999, one of Butler’s colleagues noticed that sickly young lobsters tended to live alone. They were low in energy, and their shells were discolored. Eventually, he and another lobster expert figured out that these lobsters carried a virus called PaV1. It’s the first virus known to strike lobsters.

Caribbean spiny lobsters are normally active and social, but when sick with a virus (like the lobster in the photo), they move about more slowly, become discolored, and tend to live alone.

Photo by Don Behringer, Old Dominion University

The virus spreads when lobsters touch each other. Young lobsters can also catch the virus through seawater.

In a lab experiment, researchers found that more than 60 percent of lobsters living with infected partners died within 80 days.

In another study, in which scientists surveyed a population of spiny lobsters in the wild, they found that more than 56 percent of healthy lobsters shared hiding places, but only 7 percent of sick ones did.

A recent set of lab experiments then showed that infected lobsters didn’t care whether they shared a hiding place with a healthy lobster or with another sick one. More than 60 percent of healthy lobsters, on the other hand, avoided companions that had become infected 4 weeks earlier. At this stage, researchers couldn’t detect any symptoms in the infected lobsters.

In this lab experiment, lobsters were given a choice of a shelter with a tethered lobster, either healthy or infected, or an empty shelter. Healthy lobsters overwhelmingly picked the empty shelter when the other shelter contained an infected lobster.

By the time the sick lobsters had been infected for 6 weeks, all healthy lobsters refused to hide near their infected pals. Lab tests show that the virus becomes contagious 8 weeks after a lobster becomes infected.

Rudeness doesn’t appear to be a concern for these creatures. Instead, avoiding sick roommates is a strategy for survival.—E. Sohn

Going Deeper:

Milius, Susan. 2006. Lobster hygiene: Healthy animals quick to spot another’s ills. Science News 169(May 27):325-326. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060527/fob6.asp .

For additional information about how spiny lobsters react to sick neighbors, go to www.odu.edu/oduhome/news/spotlight56.shtml (Old Dominion University).

You can learn more about the Caribbean spiny lobster at marinebio.org/species.asp?id=155 (Blue Ocean Institute).

Oil can be pumped out of the ground only in certain places, however, and there’s a limited supply. Now, scientists have found an unusual way to squeeze additional crude oil out of wells that were thought to be tapped out. They’re using microbes to help extract the trapped oil.

Adding certain types of microbes to oil wells could release significant amounts of trapped oil that pumps, like the one shown here, can’t normally extract.

In the United States alone, about 380 billion barrels of oil lie buried underground in places that are hard to get to—trapped inside porous rocks, for example, or stuck to grains of sand.

Bacteria of a group known as Bacillus make a waste product that works like a laundry detergent. Adding such microbes to oil wells could release trapped oil in the same way that laundry detergent lifts stains out of clothing.

To test the idea in the lab, researchers injected a mixture of Bacillus bacteria and nutrients into a column of sand that also held oil. They found that, under the right conditions, the microbes unleashed up to 40 percent of the trapped oil.

Next, the research team shut off the oil pumps at a site near the town of Oil Center, Okla. In two oil wells, they injected a solution of Bacillus bacteria along with nutrients for the bacteria to live on. In two other wells, they injected just nutrients. And, in a fifth well, they injected only water.

The bacteria had 4 days to work their magic. Then, the scientists turned the pumps back on and collected liquid from each well.

They found that microbes were still living in the microbe-injected wells. Living Bacillus turned up in none of the other wells. Oil flow also appeared to increase slightly in the microbe-treated well, but, because of pump problems, the researchers had trouble collecting enough data to be sure.

In future studies, the researchers plan to measure oil production over a longer period of time in wells treated with microbes. After that, they’ll try the technique in larger wells.—E. Sohn

Going Deeper:

Brownlee, Christen. 2006. Big oil, tiny barons: Microbes can unleash trapped petroleum. Science News 169(May 27):325. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060527/fob5.asp .

Cutraro, Jennifer. 2006. Microbes at the gas pump. Science News for Kids (April 12). Available at http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20060412/Feature1.asp .

From algae to zebras, all living things on Earth have a common ancestor. The Tree of Life Project aims to show how these species are related to one another by putting them into a family tree. Biologists and other scientists all over the world are working to identify and sort Earth’s organisms—from plants to microbes to animals, living or extinct—to see how they fit together.

In the Tree of Life Project, scientists are working out how different organisms, past and present, are related to one another.

By organizing knowledge of living things into a single evolutionary tree, researchers hope to create a tool that will help them unravel the underlying rules that drive life on Earth, in all its diversity.

“There are many, many things we can understand better if we realize that the organism we’re looking at doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” says Scott Lanyon. “It’s actually related to other things.” Lanyon is director of the Bell Museum of Natural History in Minneapolis.

Millions of species

So far, scientists have identified about 1.7 million species around the world. At least 4 million more species remain to be discovered. And these numbers don’t include the millions of species, such as dinosaurs, that have already gone extinct.

This 515-million-year-old fossil of a trilobite was found in eastern Pennsylvania. Researchers are studying such fossils to figure out the evolutionary history of these creatures.

Photo by Bruce S. Lieberman, University of Kansas

Amazingly, this diversity apparently arose from a single primitive organism that lived roughly 3.5 billion years ago. Over time, cells formed, changed, and merged. Groups of cells developed into distinct organisms, splitting into different species that could not reproduce with each other.

For most of history, no one was around to record what was happening. So, there are lots of gaps in the record and many questions about how, when, and where species split.

Extinct creatures aside, scientists have plenty to learn about links among the different species of plants, microbes, and animals that are living today. Biologists who specialize in studying ants, frogs, plants, monkeys, or some other group of living things, for example, don’t always know how their own discoveries might relate to findings about other species.

Male red-winged blackbirds, for example, are more brightly colored than females. “To understand why, it’s helpful to know what the closest relatives to redwings do,” Lanyon says. “But to answer these questions, we have to delve into the past. We have to talk about history.”

Adult male red-winged blackbirds have a distinctive bright-red patch on their wings. Females have no such marking.

Kent Olsen, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Katja Schulz, an entomologist at the University of Arizona, agrees. “It can be hard to make sense of dragonflies with weird wings or parasitic worms with weird hooked mouths,” she says “But when you put a historical spin on it, you can begin to think about what might have happened along the way.”

DNA tests

Getting a detailed look at the past has become possible because of recent advances in our understanding of the genetic material DNA, which is found in all cells.

Changes, or mutations, in DNA drive evolution. Members of the same species start with lots of DNA in common. But as species split, their DNA becomes less similar. Using new technologies, scientists can compare stretches of DNA to find out the point at which two organisms split from their common ancestor.

By studying the DNA of the yellow water lily, researchers are obtaining clues about the evolution of flowering plants.

Yi Hu, Penn State Eberly, College of Science, Department of Biology

Supercomputers do the math required for making such comparisons. But even computers have limits.

“If you have DNA for four species, it doesn’t take a computer long [to make a comparison],” Lanyon says. “But when you have thousands of species, you quickly get to the point where computers can’t handle it.”

“This is a huge nightmare for computer scientists,” he adds. “We’re producing data much faster than we can analyze it in a sophisticated fashion.”

So, there’s a lot of research aimed at improving computers and the methods that they use to make comparisons.

Even though it’s far from complete, the evolutionary tree of life can be a great resource for scientists, Lanyon says.

A compound in the bark of the Pacific yew tree helps fight cancer.

© 2005 Walter Siegmund

Several decades ago, for example, scientists found a compound in the bark of the Pacific yew tree that helps fight cancer. Unfortunately, this yew species contains only tiny amounts of the stuff. By checking the tree’s closest relatives, researchers were able to find another species that produces a larger supply of the compound.

Web project

As some scientists struggle to assemble a complete evolutionary tree, researchers at the University of Arizona are putting what is known so far into a format that people can easily understand and navigate.

Visitors to the Tree of Life Web Project Web site (tolweb.org/tree/ can start at the root of the tree, where life began, and work their way up and down the branches. They can also zero in on specific families and species to read background information and see pictures.

At this point, the site contains more than 4,000 pages. And it’s getting bigger all the time.

Insects known as walking sticks mimic twigs to hide from predators. Researchers have discovered that some walking stick species lost their ability to fly millions of years ago, and then later regained it.

Insect Molecular Genomics Lab, Brigham Young University; photo by Allison Whiting/BYU

“When you see that humans and jellyfish share a common ancestor,” Schulz says, “it makes you aware that all life on Earth is one big community.” Schulz is the project’s managing editor.

Only experts can add information to the evolutionary tree, but anyone can contribute to the Web project. With your teachers, you can build “treehouses”—special pages on the Tree of Life Project Web site where you can post your own scientific studies, poems, pictures, stories, or art projects.

The only requirement is that your treehouse must be about organisms in some way, Schulz says. Each contribution also has to be original.

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Western scrub jay.

Photo by Lee Karney, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Among western scrub jays, certain birds are ranked higher than others. High-ranked birds often steal food from birds of lower rank. Low-ranked birds never steal from their superiors, but they sometimes steal from others of the same rank. In a generous spirit, jays allow their mates to raid each other’s hoards.

In a recent set of tests, scientists gave some yummy waxworms to individual jays. They also provided two ice cube trays, filled with pellets, as hiding places.

A western scrub jay goes to a lot of trouble when hiding treats in a pellet-filled ice cube tray to foil a thief.

© Science

When a jay other than its mate was watching, a bird would hide more waxworms in the tray that was farther away from the watcher. Later, when revisiting the trays in private, any hider who’d been watched by a superior during the first episode shifted more treats to other hiding places than did a bird watched by a subordinate, a mate, or no other jay.

Next, the researchers let a jay hide waxworms in a single tray while a jay of similar rank watched. In the second round, there was a different observer and a different tray for hiding food.

When the hider came back to the scene and found one of the original observers watching, it remembered which tray it had used while that observer was watching. Then, it went about moving worms away from that tray to the other one.

And the jay would be very sneaky while doing it. Keeping the food hidden in its beak, it would poke its beak into several possible hiding places. A spy couldn’t easily tell into which spot the food was actually placed.

Scientists were surprised to find evidence that birds could tell the difference between individuals and could remember what those individuals knew.

The new findings are “just the last step in a long series of experiments showing that birds do all kinds of things,” says Tom Smulders of the University of Newcastle in England.

The term “birdbrain” may be a compliment after all!—E. Sohn

Going Deeper:

Milius, Susan. 2006. Jay watch: Birds get sneakier when spies lurk. Science News 169(May 20):309. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060520/fob5.asp .

You can learn more about the western scrub jay at www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/Infocenter/i4810id.html (U.S. Geological Survey) or www.birds.cornell.edu/bow/wscjay/index.html (Cornell University).

Antibiotics have become so widely used, however, that many bacteria have developed ways to survive treatment. And when antibiotics stop working, sick people end up getting sicker. Tens of thousands of people die each year as a result.

This microscope image shows clumps of Staphylococcus bacteria that are resistant to an antibiotic known as methicillin.

Janice Carr, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Now, scientists at Merck Research Laboratories in Rahway, N.J., may have found a new weapon against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Lab tests in mice show that a compound called platensimycin attacks—and kills—certain bacteria in a new way.

Antibiotics were developed more than 50 years ago, and most types currently available work the same way as the early kind did. They attack bacteria cell walls. Or, they disable bacteria by knocking out the parts of the cell that make DNA and proteins.

Platensimycin takes a different approach. It attacks an enzyme that bacteria need to build and maintain membranes in their cells. Enzymes are types of proteins that make chemical reactions happen more quickly.

The neat thing about platensimycin is that it exists in nature. It is, in fact, the fourth natural compound found that targets the same enzyme. It’s also, by far, the most powerful of the four compounds.

“Nature is telling us again and again that if you want to go after bacteria, go after this enzyme,” says Charles O. Rock, a biochemist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

The Merck scientists found platensimycin by sorting through about 250,000 natural compounds. The search led to platensimycin, which is a small molecule made by a bacterium that lives in the soil in South Africa.

Scientists aren’t yet sure whether platensimycin will work as a drug in people. Still, the research is another example of how good nature can be at solving problems.—E. Sohn

Going Deeper:

Seppa, Nathan. 2006. Bug zapper: Novel drug kills resistant bacteria. Science News 169(May 20):307. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060520/fob1.asp .

To learn how antibiotics work and about resistance to antibiotics, go to science.howstuffworks.com/question88.htm and science.howstuffworks.com/question561.htm (How Stuff Works).

When I was 18, a friend and I traveled through New England to Canada, mainly to see moose in the wild. We came home without a glimpse of these hefty animals.

A bull moose in Alaska.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Today, seeing moose has become harder than ever in many places. Northwestern Minnesota, for instance, was home to about 4,000 moose in the 1980s. A 2003 survey turned up just 237.

And on Lake Superior’s Isle Royale in northern Michigan, a one-time population of 2,000 moose has fallen to 450, says Rolf Peterson. He’s a wildlife ecologist at Michigan Technological University in Houghton.

In other places, moose are doing just fine, but scientists are closely tracking their populations.

“As we do more and more timber harvesting and summer-home building and other things that affect moose habitat, we need to learn how to manage [these activities],” says John Pastor, an ecosystem expert at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. “We have an obligation to moose.”

Big eaters

Moose are among the largest land animals in North America. An adult male can weigh more than 1,000 pounds, including its 60-pound antlers. And they are striking creatures, with lanky legs, huge ears, and long noses. Their inch-wide nostrils shut tight when the animals swim.

A bull moose wades in the water in search of food.

Ralph Town, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

One scientific mystery is the ability of moose to sustain themselves on leaves and twigs. They need 30 pounds of food a day, Pastor says. Because it takes as many as 3,000 bites to get this much food, feeding takes up most of a moose’s day.

All this eating can make a major dent in the forest. At Isle Royale, researchers count chomped twigs at sample sites to monitor how much gets eaten. The scientists also fence off sections of forest to compare chomped areas with nonchomped areas.

To determine the effect of moose nips on plant growth, scientists in Sweden clipped twigs at various heights to mimic the way moose eat. Their results showed that every time a moose bites a twig, the plant branches out instead of growing up. So, browsed birch, aspen, and willow get shrubbier, while uneaten spruce and pine grow taller. As a result, the moose’s preferred trees suffer in the shade.

A grazing bull moose at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Mike Boylan, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

But the grazing moose somehow seem to know when to call it quits. Studies suggest that before moving on, moose eat just enough from an area to fill themselves up but not so much that the forest can’t recover.

“It seems that moose have a detrimental effect on the forest, but somehow the forest survives,” Pastor says.

Moose are tied up in the food web in other ways. Spiders, snails, and insects, for example, depend on the plants that moose eat, so populations of these creepy crawlers change as moose browse.

A cow moose at the Silvio O. Conte National Wildlife Refuge in Massachusetts.

Ryan Hagerty, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

At the other end of the food chain, moose and wolf populations seem to interact and fluctuate together, Peterson says.

Each winter for the past 47 years, researchers have counted populations of moose and wolf on Isle Royale. From an airplane, the scientists follow tracks in the snow. They keep track of the number of moose killed by wolves. When they find a dead moose, they record its age, sex, and other information.

The scientists have found that the number of old moose has the biggest impact on wolf populations. This is because wolves are more likely to attack older rather than younger moose. When there are lots of old moose in a certain area, there’s plenty of food for wolves, so their populations tend to go up.

Climate change

By studying population patterns, scientists hope to figure out why moose in some areas are in trouble. At this point, many signs appear to point to climate change.

Moose like cold weather, which explains why they range across Canada, the northern United States, Sweden, and other chilly places. Earth’s atmosphere has been warming in recent years, however, and temperatures are increasing fastest in the coldest places. As a result, the trees that moose like to eat are retreating to colder places. The animals must follow or starve.

A researcher attaches a tracking collar to a moose calf.

Jim Akaran, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Warmer weather also seems to make moose more vulnerable than usual to certain diseases, says Warren Ballard. He’s a population ecologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

In northwestern Minnesota, for example, analyses of dead moose reveal that the creatures are dying at a rapid rate from brain worms and liver flukes, parasites that didn’t bother them much in the past. The animals are also low in some essential minerals, such as copper and selenium.

“We can’t say yet that there’s a cause and effect” between global warming and moose decline, Ballard says. “But it sure looks that way.”

There’s still hope for a happy ending for moose. When given a chance, their populations recover quickly, Pastor says. And moose continue to dominate the land in many places.

A moose calf.

Leroy Anderson, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

I finally had my first encounter with moose in Anchorage, Alaska, last summer. I was cycling on a city trail with friends when suddenly a mama moose and her calf blocked our way. For 15 minutes, we waited, afraid they would attack if we got too close. They were so big!

It was thrilling to see such a majestic animal up close, and my excitement lingered long after we managed to sneak by. As we passed, I’m happy to report, they looked strong and healthy to me.

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Two groups of researchers independently discovered the rare creature in different forests in Tanzania last year (see “New Mammals”). They classified the shy animal as a mangabey, a type of primate, and gave it the species name Lophocebus kipunji.

The monkey, however, may not be a mangabey after all. New evidence suggests that it belongs to a brand new genus (a category that’s one step broader than species). It may fit in the primate family tree closer to baboons than it does to mangabeys.

Scientists are proposing a new genus name for the rare, shy kipunjis. These monkeys live in groups. They travel and look for food in the forest canopy of Tanzania’s highlands. These monkeys communicate with distinctive honk barks.

© Tim Davenport/WCS

When the scientists named L. kipunji, they had seen it in the wild and taken pictures of it. But they had never been able to study one up close. Then, last August, a Tanzanian farmer found a dead kipunji in a trap that he had set to catch animals that tried to eat his crops.

To better understand its place in the primate family tree, a group of international scientists collected samples of the genetic material DNA from the dead animal. Analyses of the DNA suggested that this new monkey is more closely related to baboons than it is to mangabeys.

An adult male kipunji.

© Tim Davenport/WCS

Comparisons of the young male monkey’s body to those in the baboon collection at Chicago’s Field Museum, however, told a different story. L. kipunji just didn’t fit in. It didn’t look like a baboon.

This artist’s illustration shows a kipunji’s distinctive head and face.

© Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

If it’s not a mangabey, and it’s not a baboon, then what is it? The researchers propose a new genus called Rungwecebus. The genus name refers to Mt. Rungwe, where this monkey was first observed. So, the monkey’s name is now Rungwecebus kipunji.

Scientists continue to debate the decision to create a new genus, but if it sticks, it would be the first new monkey genus to be recognized since the 1920s.—E. Sohn

Going Deeper:

Milius, Susan. 2006. Monkey business: Specimen of new species shakes up family tree. Science News 169(May 13):293-294. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060513/fob7.asp .

Sohn, Emily. 2005. New mammals. 2005. Science News for Kids (May 25). Available at http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20050525/Note2.asp .

Now, an international research team has found intact pieces of this ancient asteroid within the crater. The finding may shake up long-held theories of what happens during such collisions.

This sample drilled from rock contains a piece of the asteroid (arrow) that blasted a crater in the Kalahari Desert in Africa 144 million years ago.

Wolfgang W.D. Maier et al./Nature

Asteroids are rocky objects that orbit the sun. If their paths cross Earth’s orbit, they can strike our planet at speeds that average 20 kilometers per second (or 43,200 miles per hour). When large asteroids hit the ground, they produce high temperatures and pressures, carving out bowl-shaped features called craters.

Scientists have known about southern Africa’s large Morokweng crater for a decade. They had detected the crater from the way it warps the planet’s gravitational and magnetic fields in the area. However, the feature is hard to study because it lies buried beneath up to 200 meters (656 feet) of sand in the Kalahari Desert.

When the researchers drilled holes into the ground within the crater, they found evidence that heat from the asteroid’s impact had melted a sheet of rock that was 870 meters (2,850 feet) thick. After the impact, this rock had slowly cooled and hardened again.

Now, in one of the holes, researchers have found an intriguing rock at a depth of 766 meters (2,510 feet). The rock is about the size of a beach ball, and its chemical composition suggests that it came from outer space. It also seems to have come from a different part of the solar system than do the meteorites that fall to Earth today.

Asteroids often melt and combine with Earth rocks around them before hardening again. This asteroid, however, appears untouched on the inside. Smaller pieces of similar rock appear all over the place inside the crater.

“For the first time, it is possible to hold in your hand a . . . piece of a giant asteroid that hit Earth,” says Iain McDonald of Cardiff University in Wales, who was a member of the research team. “This intact fragment may tell us a lot more about the insides of asteroids than we currently know.”

Scientists have long assumed that large asteroids completely melt or vaporize when they hit the ground. The new discovery challenges this assumption.

“This is pretty interesting,” says Frank T. Kyte, a geochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “This will make a lot of people rethink the impact process.”—E. Sohn

Going Deeper:

Perkins, Sid. 2006. Blast survivors: Fragments of asteroid found in ancient crater. Science News 169(May 13):292-293. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060513/fob4.asp .

Sohn, Emily. 2005. Killers from outer space. Science News for Kids (May 18). Available at http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20050518/Feature1.asp .

A picture phone lets you see your friend. What if you had an imaging technology that created a three-dimensional look-alike of your friend?

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That’s the crazy idea behind the claytronics project at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Research in Pittsburgh. Claytronics is the term that project researchers use for a form of programmable matter.

The idea is to have a huge bunch of microscopic, robotic units that can arrange themselves into different three-dimensional objects.

Find that idea hard to grasp? If so, just picture a pile of minuscule beads that can arrange themselves to look like your faraway friend at one moment, a chair the next moment, and maybe a mechanical dog after that. That’s what claytronics might make it possible to do. If you’ve ever played with modeling clay, you know that this new concept is aptly named.

“It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea,” Seth Goldstein admits. A computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, he and Todd Mowry of Intel came up with the idea for claytronics several years ago.

Claytronics is so far out that computer scientist Peter Lee, who’s also at Carnegie Mellon, was dumbfounded when Goldstein told him about it. “It’s a completely crazy idea, but it’s also a really great idea,” he says. “I think it’s bound to lead to a lot of new discoveries.”

If it works, claytronics could transform communication, entertainment, medicine, and more. The research may help scientists learn how to better manage networks that consist of millions of computers. It will also advance their understanding of nanotechnology—how to make tiny, tiny parts do useful things.

Programmable atoms

Signals from a video camera light up a screen in just the right way to create an image of whatever the camera captures. With claytronics, the imaging system would make a three-dimensional copy of whatever it detects.

So, when a friend called you, a moving, sensing copy of your friend would take shape in your room, assembled out of a pile of special beads, each one a microscopic robot. You could talk with and touch this look-alike friend, and she could do the same. It would almost be as if you and your friend were in the same room.

But getting from today’s technology to tomorrow’s 3-D images isn’t going to be easy. The robot beads needed for such a system not only have to be extremely small but also need to know what to do.

At Carnegie Mellon, researchers are building little units, called catoms, that interact with each other and may eventually be able to assemble themselves into different shapes.

Courtesy of Seth Goldstein

At Carnegie Mellon, researchers are working on the miniature robot beads that would rearrange themselves into an object. They call these units catoms. Right now, the units are pretty big—44 millimeters wide. Eventually, they’ll be less than a millimeter across.

Each catom will have a little computer, or processor, access to power, a communication system, sensors, and a way to stick to other catoms and even change color.

Goldstein and his coworkers are currently focusing on catoms that move about only on a flat surface. Each catom is a cylinder with electromagnets all along its rounded side. Magnetic attraction and repulsion allow the catoms to move about and respond to each other.

When a programmer sends a command, catoms are supposed to work together to create a particular shape. “When in contact with other catoms,” Lee says, “they share [electrical] power and become a computer network.”

Getting catoms to do what they’re supposed to do is a tricky problem.

Courtesy of Seth Goldstein

But figuring out how to make the catoms arrange themselves into the right shapes is a tough problem, even when they’re allowed to move only on a flat surface instead of in three dimensions. And the more units there are, the tougher it gets. For claytronics to work, millions of these microrobots will have to work together.

Endless possibilities

If and when scientists figure it all out, the possibilities are pretty amazing.

Your toys could change shape day by day. You could play video games with people whose claytronics look-alikes interact with you, even though the players themselves live elsewhere.

To receive various radio and TV signals, antennas sometimes have complicated shapes. An antenna made from programmable matter could change its shape to suit the signal being received.

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If you had a medical emergency, a claytronics version of you could form in your doctor’s office, and a version of your doctor could appear in your home. Using a phone or an Internet link, the doctor could examine you.

Even if these virtual doctors never make it from the drawing board, developments in claytronics could lead to improvements in communication systems. For example, a claytronics antenna could change its shape to improve its ability to receive different radio frequencies.

The ability to get claytronics units to work together could also lead to improved communication among large numbers of computers in huge networks.

Within the next 20 years, Goldstein predicts, claytronics could enable biologists to make large, 3-D models of complex molecules called proteins. Using these models, researchers could see how the proteins fold and interact with one another. Architects could use catoms to make miniature models of bridges and buildings.

Some of the more fantastic applications may never happen, Lee says. Then again, a claytronics world may arrive in your lifetime.

Crazy ideas have a way of becoming reality. A generation or two ago, few people could imagine singing greeting cards, DVD players, iPods, and PlayStation systems. Now, they’re everywhere.

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