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Brainy red deer live longer in the wild
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ESA/NASA SOLAR HELIOSPHERIC OBSERVATORY (SOHO)
THE flaming ball of plasma in the sky is calmer than we thought. A new analysis of decades of old data on the sun shows that we have overestimated its activity. As plasma churns in a star, it generates magnetic fields. The level of activity of these magnetic fields is constantly shifting in a way that varies from one star to another. To compare stars’ magnetic activity, astrophysicists often use a scale called the S-index, which was developed using the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles, California, between 1966 and 2002. It’s useful to compare other stars to the sun because we can see its processes up close. But its proximity also means we can’t observe the sun with the telescopes that developed the scale, so we can’t be sure our S-index value is accurate. Ricky Egeland at Montana State University in Bozeman requested data from Mount Wilson for another project and was surprised to find measurements of sunlight reflected off the moon. He used this information to place the sun on the S-index more accurately. He found that nearly all previous estimates of the sun’s activity were inflated – the sun is 4 to 9 per cent less active than we thought (arxiv. org/abs/1611.04540). Knowing this will let us compare the sun with other stars more accurately.
Exoplanet sports clouds of ruby and sapphire IT’S cloudy with a chance of gemstones. A super-sized planet 1000 light years from Earth has clouds that may contain building blocks of rubies and sapphires, according to the first exoplanet meteorology report. Planets around other stars are too distant for us to spot their short-term weather. But David Armstrong at the University of Warwick, UK, and colleagues scrutinised four years of data from the Kepler satellite and saw that the brightness of planet HAT-P-7b changed over time.
The planet is about 40 per cent larger than Jupiter and is baked to a searing 1927 °C, in part because it’s so close to its star – it completes an orbit every two Earth days. The brightest areas on the planet moved around with time, which Armstrong and colleagues say is due to changes in cloud coverage around the world. The planet is locked in position so it always shows the same side to the star. As a result, the planet’s day side is much hotter than its night. Clouds could condense on the cool night side, and the
difference would create winds that send the clouds streaming around the planet (Nature Astronomy, doi.org/bvqq). “When we say clouds, they’re definitely not clouds like on Earth,” Armstrong says. The planet is so hot that minerals would be vaporised. Based on its boiling point, Armstrong says the clouds are likely to be made from corundum, the same mineral that produces sapphires and rubies on Earth. But more detail is needed to determine the clouds’ exact make-up. PETE CAIRNS/NATUREPL.COM
Our surprisingly sluggish sun
Monkeys could talk, so why don’t they? OOH, ooh, ooh, ee, ee, ee! That’s two vowels done. But monkeys may have more sophisticated vocal abilities than we give them credit for. It seems that the anatomy of a monkey’s vocal tract is capable of producing the five basic vowel sounds on which many human languages are based. These could theoretically be used to form intelligible sentences, say Asif Ghazanfar at Princeton University and colleagues, who used movies and X-ray images of the vocal tract of a live long-tailed macaque. The team computed the sounds and frequencies these monkeys could, in theory, produce from the 99 tract configurations they saw, and compared them with those made by human vocal tracts (Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/ sciadv.1600723). “They have a speech-ready vocal anatomy, but not a speechready brain,” says Ghazanfar. “Now we need to find out why the human but not the monkey brain can produce language.” The results add to a growing body of evidence that some monkeys and apes can generate rudimentary sounds needed for speech-like communication.
Brainy red deer live longer in the wild WE PRIDE ourselves on our big brains, but have lacked hard evidence that individuals with large brains do better than others. Now a study has shown that big-brained red deer live longer and raise more offspring. Corina Logan from the University of Cambridge and her team looked at the skulls of 1314 red deer (Cervus elaphus) from the Isle of Rum, off the west coast of Scotland, in the first study of its kind in wild mammals. The life histories of the deer are well documented thanks to the Isle of Rum Red Deer Project, which has been collecting data on the island for
more than 40 years, spanning seven deer generations. “This kind of study has not been conducted before because it requires long-term data from a large number of individuals,” says Logan. The team found that female deer with larger skulls lived significantly longer and raised more offspring to adulthood – though it’s still not clear why this is so. They also found that the ratio of skull volume to body size was a heritable trait that red deer can pass on to their offspring (Royal Society Open Science, DOI:10.1098/ rsos.160622).
17/24/31 December 2016 | NewScientist | 15
ESA/NASA SOLAR HELIOSPHERIC OBSERVATORY (SOHO)
THE flaming ball of plasma in the sky is calmer than we thought. A new analysis of decades of old data on the sun shows that we have overestimated its activity. As plasma churns in a star, it generates magnetic fields. The level of activity of these magnetic fields is constantly shifting in a way that varies from one star to another. To compare stars’ magnetic activity, astrophysicists often use a scale called the S-index, which was developed using the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles, California, between 1966 and 2002. It’s useful to compare other stars to the sun because we can see its processes up close. But its proximity also means we can’t observe the sun with the telescopes that developed the scale, so we can’t be sure our S-index value is accurate. Ricky Egeland at Montana State University in Bozeman requested data from Mount Wilson for another project and was surprised to find measurements of sunlight reflected off the moon. He used this information to place the sun on the S-index more accurately. He found that nearly all previous estimates of the sun’s activity were inflated – the sun is 4 to 9 per cent less active than we thought (arxiv. org/abs/1611.04540). Knowing this will let us compare the sun with other stars more accurately.
Exoplanet sports clouds of ruby and sapphire IT’S cloudy with a chance of gemstones. A super-sized planet 1000 light years from Earth has clouds that may contain building blocks of rubies and sapphires, according to the first exoplanet meteorology report. Planets around other stars are too distant for us to spot their short-term weather. But David Armstrong at the University of Warwick, UK, and colleagues scrutinised four years of data from the Kepler satellite and saw that the brightness of planet HAT-P-7b changed over time.
The planet is about 40 per cent larger than Jupiter and is baked to a searing 1927 °C, in part because it’s so close to its star – it completes an orbit every two Earth days. The brightest areas on the planet moved around with time, which Armstrong and colleagues say is due to changes in cloud coverage around the world. The planet is locked in position so it always shows the same side to the star. As a result, the planet’s day side is much hotter than its night. Clouds could condense on the cool night side, and the
difference would create winds that send the clouds streaming around the planet (Nature Astronomy, doi.org/bvqq). “When we say clouds, they’re definitely not clouds like on Earth,” Armstrong says. The planet is so hot that minerals would be vaporised. Based on its boiling point, Armstrong says the clouds are likely to be made from corundum, the same mineral that produces sapphires and rubies on Earth. But more detail is needed to determine the clouds’ exact make-up. PETE CAIRNS/NATUREPL.COM
Our surprisingly sluggish sun
Monkeys could talk, so why don’t they? OOH, ooh, ooh, ee, ee, ee! That’s two vowels done. But monkeys may have more sophisticated vocal abilities than we give them credit for. It seems that the anatomy of a monkey’s vocal tract is capable of producing the five basic vowel sounds on which many human languages are based. These could theoretically be used to form intelligible sentences, say Asif Ghazanfar at Princeton University and colleagues, who used movies and X-ray images of the vocal tract of a live long-tailed macaque. The team computed the sounds and frequencies these monkeys could, in theory, produce from the 99 tract configurations they saw, and compared them with those made by human vocal tracts (Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/ sciadv.1600723). “They have a speech-ready vocal anatomy, but not a speechready brain,” says Ghazanfar. “Now we need to find out why the human but not the monkey brain can produce language.” The results add to a growing body of evidence that some monkeys and apes can generate rudimentary sounds needed for speech-like communication.
Brainy red deer live longer in the wild WE PRIDE ourselves on our big brains, but have lacked hard evidence that individuals with large brains do better than others. Now a study has shown that big-brained red deer live longer and raise more offspring. Corina Logan from the University of Cambridge and her team looked at the skulls of 1314 red deer (Cervus elaphus) from the Isle of Rum, off the west coast of Scotland, in the first study of its kind in wild mammals. The life histories of the deer are well documented thanks to the Isle of Rum Red Deer Project, which has been collecting data on the island for
more than 40 years, spanning seven deer generations. “This kind of study has not been conducted before because it requires long-term data from a large number of individuals,” says Logan. The team found that female deer with larger skulls lived significantly longer and raised more offspring to adulthood – though it’s still not clear why this is so. They also found that the ratio of skull volume to body size was a heritable trait that red deer can pass on to their offspring (Royal Society Open Science, DOI:10.1098/ rsos.160622).
17/24/31 December 2016 | NewScientist | 15