A new study on chickens is making news, and it has nothing to do with crossing the road. Or with whether or not the chicken came before the egg. It has to do with whether a chicken is male or female. And for the chickens in this study, that’s a difficult question.

In fact, these chickens appear to be both: One half of each chicken has thicker legs and bulging muscles, like a male, or rooster. The other half has thinner legs and darker feathers, like a female, or hen. Once in a while, a chick will naturally grow up like this. Because of their sexual mix, these chickens give scientists a good way to study the process of how a living thing becomes male or female — or even parts of each.

The gynandropmorph chicken has mostly male cells on one side (with bulkier body, light plumage and longer, red wattle) and predominantly female cells on the other.

The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh

In the recent study, scientists from the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, say individual cells in a chicken can have their own sexual identities, in both male and female birds.

Scientists have long debated how sex is determined in animals. One question is what happens to individual cells. All the parts of an animal, including tissues, muscles and organs, are made of cells. Cells are the smallest independent parts of a living thing.

Some scientists have argued that chemicals called hormones are the main factors that control whether an animal becomes male or female. For some kinds of animals, such as people and dogs and cats and other mammals, this idea seemed to work a lot of the time. But not always, as it turns out. And for some groups of animals, such as birds, there may be something very different going on.

Other scientists say that each cell is independent and becomes male or female depending on the genes inside. Almost every cell of a living organism contains genes, which are like the instruction book for life. Genes determine what kind of cell to become — part of a muscle or tissue, for example — and how a cell operates.

The Scottish scientists studied three of half-boy, half-girl chickens, which are called gynandromorphs. “Gyn” means female and “andro” means male, so a “gynandromorph” has some male parts and some female parts.

One of the scientists, Derek McBride, found both male and female cells scattered around in all parts of the chickens’ bodies. But one side of each chicken was dominated by genetically male cells, and the other side was dominated by genetically female cells.

The cells would have all been exposed to the same hormones while the chicken was developing. But the male and female cells remained different from each other anyway. For this reason, the researchers suggest hormones weren’t determining cells’ gender traits as much as genetics were.

“Although gynandromorphs have been reported previously, they have not been analyzed at this level of detail,” Blanche Capel told Science News. Capel is a scientist at Duke University in Durham, N.C., who studies genes.

McBride and his colleagues say their work shows genes might be more influential than hormones in determining the sex of a cell in birds. If genes are responsible, then each cell can become male or female on its own. And this would explain how one animal could, like the three chickens, have both male and female traits.

Chickens aren’t the only animals that can become gynandromorphs. Zebra finches, pigeons and parrots, as well as other kinds of animals, have grown up with the same mix, Michael Clinton told Science News. Clinton worked on the chicken study. He says these animals are evidence that genes, and not hormones, guide sexual identity.

This study is one of many looking at the roles hormones and genes play in cells. Art Arnold, a geneticist at UCLA, says maybe it’s time scientists changed the way they think about hormones and genes. “The old hormone-only theory is no longer viable, for birds or mammals,” he says.

So maybe the question isn’t which came first, the chicken or the egg. Maybe it’s, “Which made the chicken, the hormone or the gene?”

Going Deeper:

Milius, Susan. 2010. “Chicken cells have strong sense of sexual identity,” Science News, March 10. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/57097/title/Chicken_cells_have_strong_sense_of_sexual_identity

Sohn, Emily. 2008. “Animal CSI,” Science News for Kids, March 26. http://sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20080326/Feature1.asp

Nafion is a useful material that has been around since the 1960s, but don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of it. It was first made by a chemist at DuPont, a company that makes chemicals, and it is a common ingredient in fuel cells. (Fuel cells, which are sometimes used to power satellites, produce energy from hydrogen.)

Now, a scientist in Michigan has shown that Nafion has another nifty purpose: It can “remember” three different shapes. If you were to twist some Nafion into, say, a donut shape, it would be able to form into a donut again later.

Don’t go quizzing your nearest Nafion just yet. Its memory isn’t of the usual kind: Nafion’s memory is based on temperature. Nafion is a synthetic polymer, which means it’s a manmade material of thousands of molecules linked together like a chain. Polymers come in many shapes and sizes — in fact, Silly Putty is a familiar polymer.

This image represents how a certain material would look if you could see the way its atoms get together. The green, blue, red and yellow circles are atoms lined up in long chains that create the polymer Nafion. Image: Eduardo J. Lamas. From the website of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

The scientist behind this Nafion experiment is Tao Xie, who works at General Motors’s Chemical Sciences and Materials Systems Laboratory in Warren, Mich. In order to understand what Xie did, it might be easy to think of Nafion as a kind of high-tech Silly Putty.

First, Xie heated a strip of the material up to 140° Celsius (284° Fahrenheit). Next, he let the Nafion cool for a bit, and then twisted it into a shape. Then, he did it again: He let the Nafion cool, and then made a shape. All in all, he made three different shapes out of the polymer as it cooled down.

Then came the fun part: As he heated the Nafion back up, it changed shape on its own — again and again, as the temperature rose. And by the time it got all the way back to the highest temperature, the Nafion had changed into all three of the shapes Xie had put it in. And the material took each shape at a certain temperature, the same temperature it had the first time, when Xie had given it each shape.

“We’ve shown with this material that more shapes are possible,” Xie says.

Nafion is an example of a smart material. Smart materials are special because they have properties (such as shape) that change in response to changes in temperature, pressure or other external factors. (Smart materials called piezoelectrics, for example, generate a bit of electricity when pressure is applied — as a result, they’re often used in electric starters, such as those in outdoor grills.)

Nafion isn’t the first material that can remember its shape, but Xie’s study is the first time this shape memory has been observed in a polymer that already exists and is used for other purposes. Usually, “materials have been tailor-made for these uses,” Andreas Lendlein told Science News. Lendlein is the director of the polymer research institute at the GKSS Research Center in Teltow, Germany.

Xie says he hopes his work inspires other scientists to find new uses for Nafion.

Going Deeper:

Ehrenberg, Rachel. 2010. “Polymer shifts shape with changing temperature,” Science News, March 10. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/57107/title/Polymer_shifts_shape_with_changing_temperature

Ornes, Stephen. 2009. “Supergoo to the rescue,” Science News for Kids, February 25. http://sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20090225/Note3.asp

The student, Ngoc Mai Nguyen, says she told her boss, biologist Tyrone Hayes, “‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t think this is normal.’” Nguyen, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, was working in Hayes’ laboratory. Hayes told Nguyen to keep watching — and write down what she saw each day.

Nguyen knew all the frogs had started out as males. She didn’t know, however, what Hayes knew: that there was something in the water of the frog tank. That something was a popular weed killer called atrazine, and since birth the frogs had been raised in water that contained the chemical.

Hayes says the experiments in his lab show that 30 percent of the male frogs that grew up in water with atrazine started to behave like females, and even send out chemical signals to attract other males.

When this frog species is raised in the lab in water tainted with what EPA considers acceptable concentrations of atrazine, males change — sometimes into apparent females.

Furryscaly/Flickr

Laboratory experiments are not the only places where frogs may run into atrazine. The chemical is used as a weed killer, so it can pollute surface water downstream of the crops where it is used. In these rivers and streams, the concentration of atrazine can reach 2.5 parts per billion — the same concentration Hayes tested in his laboratory. This similarity suggests that male frogs may be turning into females in their natural habitats.

The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, is a government organization responsible for protecting human health and the environment. The EPA defines what concentrations of certain chemicals are allowed in U.S. waterways, and the EPA has determined that up to 3 parts per billion — well above the concentration that turns male frogs into females — of atrazine is safe. If Hayes is right, even the EPA definition of a safe concentration is actually not safe for frogs.

Hayes and his team have also showed that it’s not just the frogs’ behavior that changes after exposure to atrazine. Males raised in water containing atrazine had low levels of testosterone and did not try to attract females.

But that’s not all: Out of 40 frogs raised in water containing atrazine, four had high levels of estrogen — a female hormone (that’s four out of 40 frogs, or one in 10). Hayes and his team dissected two of the frogs and found female reproductive organs. The other two transgender frogs were introduced to healthy males and mated with those males, producing baby male frogs.

Other scientists have looked at Hayes’ work and carried out similar experiments — with similar results. Plus, researchers who study other animals have observed that atrazine affects those animals’ hormones.

At least one scientist, Tim Pastoor, says Hayes has made mistakes in his study and that atrazine is safe. Pastoor is a scientist with Syngenta Crop Protection, a company that makes and sells atrazine.

In an email to Science News, Pastoor wrote that Hayes’ new experiments don’t lead to the same results as Hayes’ earlier studies. “Either his current study discredits his previous work, or his previous work discredits this study,” Pastoor wrote.

It’s important to know how atrazine affects the animal population. Any chemical that can change the reproductive patterns of an animal threatens that species’ survival.

The quake that struck central Chile February 27 was one of the six largest temblors that have occurred since 1900. This map shows the quake's epicenter. Credit: U.S. Geological Survey

If you feel like there just isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done, maybe you can blame an earthquake.

Just after 3:30 am on February 27, a powerful earthquake shook the central part of Chile, a country in South America. In cities including Santiago, the capital, some buildings collapsed and hundreds of people were hurt or killed.

Chile wasn’t the only part of Earth shaken by the quake, however.

According to studies done by geophysicists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, the earthquake affected the whole planet. The quake tilted the Earth’s axis — an invisible line around which our planet rotates — a few centimeters. And, even more surprisingly, that earthquake shortened the length of a day.

To understand how an earthquake can change the length of a day, it’s important to understand what causes an earthquake in the first place. The Earth’s outer shell, or crust, is like a jigsaw puzzle, made of giant pieces that fit together. These pieces are called tectonic plates. Scientists have identified seven large plates and many other, smaller plates.

Unlike the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, tectonic plates do not always fit together well. Each plate moves on its own, and plates are continuously moving. As a result, they may collide, move apart or slip past each other. The border between two plates can be a violent place, home to explosive volcanoes or — as in the case of Chile — earthquakes.

This view of Earth comes from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard the Terra satellite. Credit: NASA

Chile sits on the western edge of the giant South American tectonic plate, but just to the east of Chile is the Nazca plate. These two plates have been colliding at the rate of 8 centimeters, or about 3.1 inches, every year. That may not seem like much — it’s about half the speed at which hair grows — but “this is one of the fastest plate convergence rates on Earth,” Jian Lin told Science News. Lin is a geophysicist at Woods Hole. “Geo” means “Earth,” and physics is the study of forces, energy and motion. So a geophysicist studies the motion, forces and energy of the Earth.

At the boundaries between them, the plates may get stuck for long periods of time and then slide past each other quickly. That’s what happened on February 27, when rocks on the boundary between the Nazca and South American plates slipped past each other by 20 or 30 feet, Lin says. The quake let go stress that had been building between the plates for tens if not hundreds of years. The first earthquake struck just after 3 a.m., but in the next week people in Chile experienced 180 “aftershocks,” which are other quakes — often less powerful — that follow after the first. These earthquakes may have shifted and sped up the rotation of the Earth, according to Lin and other scientists.

As buildings collapsed in South America, a large portion of the Nazca plate headed down toward the center of the Earth very suddenly. When the mass inside the Earth moves around, the planet may change the way it spins — in this case, the axis shifted by a bit. But our planet also picked up speed. Richard Gross told Science News that one way to think about it is to imagine an ice skater, spinning in a circle with her arms outstretched. As she brings in her arms, she starts to spin faster.

And because the quake was in the Southern Hemisphere, the change in mass happened in just one part of Earth, as if the skater had pulled in only one arm. So Earth’s rotation axis tilted a bit.

Similarly, but on a much bigger scale, more mass went toward Earth’s center, and it started spinning faster. And when the Earth spins faster, days get shorter. But don’t worry — you probably won’t miss the lost time. The earthquake shortened an Earth-day only by about 1.26 microseconds — not even enough time to blink.

POWER WORDS (adapted from the Yahoo! Kids Dictionary and materials from the Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin)

tectonic plate A segment of the Earth’s outer crust that moves independently of other regions.

earthquake A sudden movement of the earth’s crust caused by the release of stress accumulated along geologic faults or by volcanic activity.

geophysics The physics of the earth and its environment, including the physics of fields such as meteorology, oceanography, and seismology.

axis A straight line about which a body or geometric object rotates or may be conceived to rotate.

microsecond One millionth of a second.

According to a new study, an ancient culture in what is today South Africa scratched on ostrich eggshells to make symbols 60,000 years ago. The researchers say these shells represent some of the earliest evidence yet for people engraving designs.

The eggshells were discovered at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa, and over the last few years researchers have collected 270 shell fragments with scratch marks on them. The largest pieces are roughly the size of your thumbnail, and the researchers think that the 270 pieces could have come from about 25 different eggshells.

In a recent study led by Pierre-Jean Texier, researchers say they have identified two patterns in the scratches. The older pattern looks something like a ladder on its side: two parallel lines are connected by smaller lines etched at right angles to the original two. The newer pattern also uses parallel lines with shorter lines crossing them, but sometimes the long lines run together or cross each other.

People of the Howiesons Poort culture engraved standardized geometric designs on fragments of ostrich eggshell fragments, designs that probably indicated group identity.

P.-J. Texier, Diepkloof project

Each pattern was popular for awhile sometime between 65,000 and 55,000 years ago. Texier is an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux 1 in Talence, France. An archaeologist is a scientist who studies places where people lived long ago and the artifacts remaining in those places — tools, pottery, or, in this case, eggshells. The goal is to understand the lives and cultures of ancient people.

The eggshells were engraved by the Howiesons Poort culture, African hunter-gatherers. Many of the fragments were found with holes punched in them, which suggests they were parts of containers — in this case, probably vessels used to carry water. The suggestion that these ancient people were able to transport water is very exciting to archaeologists.

“The ability to carry and store water is a breakthrough technological advance, and here we have excellent evidence for it very early,” Curtis Marean told Science News. “Wow!” Marean is an archaeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Archaeologists already knew that this ancient culture — as well as other cultures nearby — carved designs into pieces of clay, but this study shows that the ancient people came back to the same patterns over and over again.

A particular pattern may show ownership: Just as you write your name on your belongings, someone may have scratched his pattern into his water vessel. Texier, who led the study, suggests the patterns may have identified shells that belonged to a particular community.

The ostrich eggshells aren’t the oldest artifacts to emerge from this part of South Africa. Recently, 13 pieces of engraved pigment were removed from the area. (Pigment is a kind of clay often used for coloring.) These pieces are believed to be between 75,000 and 100,000 years old — showing that ancient cultures had already started carving designs by that time.

Going Deeper:

Bower, Bruce. 2010. “Stone Age engraving traditions appear on ostrich eggshells,” Science News, March 1. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56807/title/Stone_Age_engraving_traditions_appear_on_ostrich_eggshells

Sohn, Emily. 2007. “Ancient cave behavior,” Science News for Kids, October 24. http://sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20071024/Note2.asp

Now, there’s a new kid on the block: Elements, meet copernicium.

This element was officially named on February 19, but the element itself isn’t new. German scientists made and observed it in 1996. But in the 14 years since then, other scientists have been working to study and validate the original findings. A scientific breakthrough is “validated” when other scientists can perform the same experiment and get the same results. Validation is an important part of the scientific process because it demonstrates that a scientific discovery was not a mistake.

All that hard work finally paid off when the element finally received its name, copernicium, from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (the organization in charge of making sure chemists all over the world use the same words to mean the same things.) copernicium is named in honor of Nicolaus Copernicus, a 16th century Polish scholar who proposed that Earth orbits the sun (rather than that everything orbits Earth) and that Earth turns on its own axis. These ideas may seem obvious now, but in 16th century Europe, they were revolutionary.

The element copernicium has 112 protons and is named for the 16th century scholar Nicolaus Copernicus (pictured).

Dumelow/Wikimedia Commons

Scientists organize all the elements on a chart called the Periodic Table. Each element gets a symbol and its own number, and copernicium gets the symbol Cn and the number 112. This number means that inside every atom of copernicium are 112 protons. Protons are particles inside the nucleus, or core, of every atom. The lightest element, hydrogen, has only one proton inside each atom.

Its 112 protons make copernicium the heaviest known element with a name. It was first observed by Sigurd Hofmann, a scientist at the Center for Heavy Ion Research, or GSI, in Darmstadt, Germany. Hofmann and his team created copernicium in the laboratory when they blasted atoms of lead (each with 82 protons) with zinc isotopes, kinds of zinc atoms that each had 30 protons.

This was no easy process: You can’t just shoot one atom at another and expect the atoms to buddy up. In 1996, Hofmann and his team had to figure out a way to get all the protons together — and stick. They used a machine, called the Universal Linear Accelerator, that can accelerate atoms up to 10 percent the speed of light. After a week of working on these high-speed collisions, Hofmann’s team found copernicium — even though it quickly vanished. Most of the superheavy elements in copernicium’s neighborhood — those that are heavier than uranium — tend to be unstable, which means they decay into smaller atoms quickly.

Now, 14 years after Hofmann’s experiment, other scientists are able to make copernicium and validate Hofmann’s original work. Scientists are excited about copernicium. If such a superheavy atom can be created, then even heavier elements might be waiting in the future. “One of the exciting things is, how far can we keep going?” says nuclear chemist Paul Karol of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Going Deeper:

Ehrenberg, Rachel. “Naming an atomic heavyweight,” Science News, February 25. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56651/title/Naming_an_atomic_heavyweight

Ornes, Stephen. 2010. “The hottest soup in New York,” Science News for Kids, March 3. http://sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20100303/Note3.asp

Ornes, Stephen. 2008. “The particle zoo,” Science News for Kids, June 25. http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20080625/Note2.asp

A stomachache was not how Smith wanted to start vacation. “I was hoping I would get better,” she says, “So I could go ski.”

As the day progressed, things worsened. A sharp pain developed in her lower right side. She couldn’t swallow the soup her sister warmed up for her at lunchtime. By the time she saw a doctor later that afternoon, she was hunched over in pain.

When she learned that her appendix was infected, she didn’t have much time to be afraid. She was rushed into surgery. The next morning, her appendix was gone.

“It was a little scary because it happened so quickly,” says Smith, now an evolutionary biologist at the Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine at Midwestern University in Glendale, Ariz. But she has never missed her long-lost organ. In fact, the emergency left her with a lifelong fascination for a body part she no longer has.

“I have always been interested in the appendix and trying to figure out why we have one,” Smith says. “There’s been this idea for so long that it didn’t do anything.”

Appendices have long been considered “vestigial structures.” That means we don’t actually need them. The brain, heart, skin and most other organs are essential for survival. But you can live a long life without an appendix. The same goes for tonsils, wisdom teeth, body hair and other vestigial structures.

At best, according to traditional thinking, vestigial structures just take up space. At worst, they can get infected and cause all sorts of trouble. So why do we have these unnecessary body parts in the first place?

Growing evidence suggests that we have them because they aren’t actually unnecessary at all. Their function probably depends on where you live (and perhaps when you lived). In some parts of the world, people still need vestigial body parts. Studying where and when these features are or were useful is helping scientists make new advances in modern medicine. The work is also providing insight into the history of humankind — telling scientists things about our ancestors that we didn’t know before.

“It may be the case with a lot of unnecessary body parts that they may have had a function in the past but we don’t necessarily need that function anymore,” says Smith, who ended up studying the appendix sort of by accident. “That can give us insights.”

The hidden point

The appendix is a small organ that looks like a little worm (lower left of image). It doesn’t lead anywhere, but may serve as a haven for good bacteria.

3drenderings/iStockphoto

Consider your body, and you’ll notice a hodgepodge of random features that might seem silly when you stop to think about them. What’s the point of fingernails, for example? Why is there hair on your toes? And what’s the deal with muscles in your ears? Do we really need muscles in our ears?

Throughout history, scientists, too, have wondered about structures that don’t seem to do anything useful. The appendix is a popular example. This little, worm-like pouch is about four inches long and less than half an inch wide.

The organ grows near where the long intestine meets the short intestine. The intestines are essential for digestion, but the appendix appears to just sit there.

“It’s a dead-end sack,” says William Parker, an immunologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. “It doesn’t go anywhere.”

Parker didn’t start out intending to study the appendix. His specialty is the immune system — a collection of organs, cells and molecules that our bodies use to stay healthy. But his research led him to the appendix anyway.

Parker knew that the human body is full of tiny organisms called bacteria, which can overwhelm the immune system, cause infections and make a person sick. He also knew that some bacteria are good for human health. Among other benefits, these “good” bacteria help people digest food and fight off “bad” bacteria that cause disease.

The immune system doesn’t just benefit from good bacteria, though. In the 1990s, Parker and colleagues began to figure out that the immune system also helps good bacteria flourish. These bacteria appear in thin layers called biofilms, which grow on the side of the gut near and inside the appendix. These biofilms, the researchers learned, provide a barrier that keep out bad bacteria.

“Once we figured that out, it should have been obvious to us what the appendix did,” says Parker, whose team also found that the appendix has a particularly robust biofilm. “It’s in the perfect spot to harbor bacteria — out of the flow and with a thin, narrow opening. And there’s a large amount of immune tissue associated with it.”

After stumbling on a possible link between the immune system and the appendix, though, the scientists still had some clues to compile before being sure of the organ’s purpose.

Hangout for good bacteria

In 2007, Parker’s team put together all the evidence they had gathered and came up with a conclusion: The appendix serves as a “safe house,” Parker says, a storage bin for good bacteria. If bad bacteria attack, good bacteria emerge from the appendix and come to the rescue.

Having a safe space for good bacteria should be especially useful in parts of the world that are poor and undeveloped — places where people are starving, medicine is hard to come by, clean water is scarce and diarrhea can kill. In those places, Parker says, the appendix probably helps keep people alive, especially young children.

In fact, people in the developing world rarely get infected appendixes, like Smith’s. Most cases of appendicitis, in fact, occur in the United States and other developed countries, where water is purified, hospitals are sterilized and medical care is easier to get.

Those trends suggest that the appendix evolved in our ancestors to maintain health in a bacteria-filled world. Today, places such as the United States might be too sterile for the appendix. When the organ has nothing do, the immune system can turn on itself, sending people to the emergency room, Parker says. Other problems, such as allergies and immune diseases, might have similar roots.

Even in ultra-clean societies, then, the appendix and other vestigial organs might be unrecognized heroes.

“Just because body parts don’t seem to have any usefulness here doesn’t mean you wouldn’t need them if you were suddenly thrown in the middle of the woods somewhere and had to drink from whatever mud hole you could find nearby and you had to run away from predators,” Parker says. “Problems we are having today with allergies and autoimmune diseases are a result of the body not really fitting in with our culture.”

Figuring out the true purpose of the appendix and other overlooked organs, Parker adds, is an important step toward solving medical mysteries.

“We want to understand how the body functions so we can work towards getting it to function normally,” he says.

To do that, it can help to take an historical view. By considering what was normal a long time ago and comparing the old normal to the new normal, researchers can see how evolution has shaped our bodies over hundreds of thousands of years. That process of change over time is called evolution.

“The best way to figure out how the body was designed to work,” Parker says, “is to look at how it was meant to work over hundreds of millions of years of evolution.”

Wise beyond our years

The appendix isn’t the only example of a body part with hidden powers. Wisdom teeth are another. This final set of molars usually grows in at around age 20. Today, most people get their wisdom teeth removed before the bulky molars can squeeze other teeth out of place or get infected.

Millions of years ago, though, human faces weren’t as flat as they are today and mouths had more room for wisdom teeth. After 20 years of life without dental care, our ancestors would have benefited from a fresh set of strong teeth that could chew and grind raw food.

Our ancestors may have found wisdom teeth more useful than we do.

Lakhesis/iStockphoto

As for other structures long thought to be pointless, a recent study found that the spleen stores a whole lot of immune cells. Among other roles, those cells help to repair hearts that are damaged. Tonsils, which are also removed routinely in many developed countries, probably help boost the immune system, as well, Parker says.

As they continue to find purposes for seemingly purposeless body parts, scientists are connecting our present with the past. They are also connecting the human animal with other animals on Earth.

Last year, Smith teamed up with Parker and other colleagues to look at a whole bunch of mammal species, some that lived tens of millions of years ago. The researchers found that the appendix has existed in a wide range of animals, from rodents to primates to Australian marsupials. The study also revealed that the appendix evolved more than once throughout history. Both findings suggest that the appendix has had an important purpose throughout time.

By looking closely at our body’s “pointless” parts, we can begin to imagine what our bodies used to be able to do. Recognizing the body’s lingering power could also open up a whole new future of possibilities.

“Our evolution gives our bodies a lot of resilience and strength we really don’t need very much in our society,” says Parker. “I sit around in my office and have all the food I want. My body can do so many things I never ask it to do.”

This story and other Science News for Kids features describing research in medicine and biology are supported with funding from The Lasker Foundation. The foundation and its programs are dedicated to the support of biomedical research toward conquering disease, improving human health and extending life.

This is very bad news indeed for certain types of squid.

Scientists already knew that sperm whales, like a lot of mammals, can come together to form communities. Some researchers think that these groups, usually females and young whales, raise their young together. The new study suggests that in addition to raising whales, these groups also cooperate when they’re going after a meal.

Sperm whales usually feast on squid, but to catch these animals the whales sometimes have to dive thousands of feet below the ocean surface. In 2007 and 2008, scientists set out to study groups of sperm whales swimming in the Gulf of California. They attached a tiny device, about the size of a hockey puck, to some of the whales. These devices recorded information about where and to what depths the whales were swimming.

The devices stayed attached for up to a month, then broke free and floated to the surface so that the scientists could retrieve them. In looking at the data from these devices, the researchers were surprised to find that, when diving to the deep, the whales followed unexpected patterns. Some whales zigzagged back and forth, and it appeared that the whales did not all follow the same paths.

One sperm whale’s movements over seven days (traced in image) show the animal making many deep dives in a small area.

Mate et al., Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute

“We expected their dives to be similar, but often one of the three whales went deeper than the other two,” Bruce Mate told a group of scientists and reporters at a scientific meeting in February. Mate is the director of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, which is in Newport.

Mate and his team suspect that some whales were herding individual squid into one large group — so that other whales could swim right into the middle of the squid-huddle and feast. Other animals, such as sea lions and dolphins, herd fish in a similar way: Some members of the group gather together the food, the others eat.

Mate’s team suggests that the deepest diving whale was preventing squid from swimming downward to escape. The sperm whales may take turns doing the deep diving because it’s difficult to dive so deep in the ocean.

Mate’s research suggests that sperm whales are herding but, doesn’t deliver proof, says Kelly Benoit-Bird. She is a biological oceanographer at Oregon State’s main campus in Corvallis. The scientists only looked at whales, not whales’ prey, she says, so it’s difficult to tell exactly what was happening with the squid. There are two sides to this story: the whales’, and the squid’s.

So now, Mate is headed back to the ocean — to study the squid. But it won’t be easy: Unlike fish, which show up on sonar because they have air bladders, squid are harder to find. Plus, Mate won’t be the only one searching for squid: The sperm whales are still out there, and they’re hungry.

Going Deeper:

Perkins, Sid. 2010. “Sperm whales may team up to herd prey,” Science News, February 23. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56563/titl/Sperm_whales_may_team_up_to_herd_prey

Sohn, Emily. 2008. “Hearing whales,” Science News for Kids, February 13. http://sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20080213/Note2.asp