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Lunar marriage may have given Jupiter a ring
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IN BRIEF Moon marriage gives Jupiter a ring
Gorillas will deliberately lose a game to keep a playmate CAJOLING bored friends to keep playing with you is not limited to humans. A gorilla that wants to continue a game will also try to do this, and will even deliberately lose if necessary. This hints that gorillas may have “theory of mind” – the capacity to attribute mental states to others. Richard Byrne and Joanne Tanner of St Andrews University in the UK videoed gorillas at San Francisco Zoo. As well as engaging with a toy and another gorilla, the animals seemed aware of their playmate’s interaction with the toy. “The gorillas could encourage their playmates when they were losing interest, or self-handicap if there
was a danger of winning the game,” says Byrne (Animal Cognition, DOI: 10.1007/s10071-009-0308-y). This is the first time animals have been observed following a playmate’s interaction with a third object – a skill picked up by humans at 9 months old. With dogs, cats, lions and bears “the animal wants to win the game, rather than keep it going”, Byrne says. “This is different to throwing a stick for your pet dog.” Because the gorillas seem to be taking account of the thoughts of others, they are showing some theory of mind competence, says Byrne, although they do not pass a standard theory-of-mind test called the false belief test, which looks at the ability to infer another’s perspective. Nevertheless, Byrne says that taking another individual’s thoughts into account might not be unique to humans.
‘Wasabi sense’ detects rattlers’ prey WHAT does a rattlesnake’s night vision have in common with the taste of wasabi sauce? It turns out that when some snakes “thermally image” their prey, they employ receptors similar to those we use to sense the pungency of wasabi. Unlike our receptors, which respond to odour molecules, the snakes’ thermal receptors respond directly to heat, triggering nerve impulses that 16 | NewScientist | 20 March 2010
their brain interprets as an image. “It’s hard to know exactly what the snake ‘sees’, but one assumes that the thermal image in some way depicts the relative thermal intensity of an object or animal,” says David Julius of the University of California, San Francisco, whose team has found the link (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08943). “It’s probably not unlike a thermal camera.”
Julius’s team compared gene activity in different types of nerve cell from diamondback rattlesnakes, which all have shallow pits on their faces that detect heat. They found that in nerves that feed the pits, a gene called TRPA1 was 400 times more active than elsewhere. The gene makes a protein that activates the cells when it detects heat from objects at more than 27 °C. Boas and pythons have similar molecules on their snouts.
JUPITER may have a new ring that was created by a smash between moons. The possible ring appears as a faint streak near Jupiter’s moon Himalia in an image taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. It is unclear if it reaches all the way around the planet. No one knows when it formed, but the Galileo spacecraft didn’t spot it before the end of its mission in 2003, says Andy Cheng of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The structure may be the result of an impact that blasted material off Himalia, suggest Cheng and colleagues in a study presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, earlier this month. One of Jupiter’s moons called S/2000 J11 went missing after its discovery in 2000 and could have crashed into Himalia, destroying itself in the process, says the team.
Fusion fears bite the dust FEARS that “toxic dust” could choke efforts to get power from nuclear fusion have been allayed. Hot plasma in fusion reactions bites pieces from the reactor walls, creating metallic dust. The worry is that this could clog instruments and even choke reactions in the experimental reactor ITER, set to fire up in southern France in 2019. Michael Coppins of Imperial College London noticed that dust grains in existing reactors are often spherical, implying that they had been molten. He calculates that in ITER’s plasma such liquid drops should be torn apart by electrical forces before they can cause trouble (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/ physrevlett.104.065003).
IN BRIEF Moon marriage gives Jupiter a ring
Gorillas will deliberately lose a game to keep a playmate CAJOLING bored friends to keep playing with you is not limited to humans. A gorilla that wants to continue a game will also try to do this, and will even deliberately lose if necessary. This hints that gorillas may have “theory of mind” – the capacity to attribute mental states to others. Richard Byrne and Joanne Tanner of St Andrews University in the UK videoed gorillas at San Francisco Zoo. As well as engaging with a toy and another gorilla, the animals seemed aware of their playmate’s interaction with the toy. “The gorillas could encourage their playmates when they were losing interest, or self-handicap if there
was a danger of winning the game,” says Byrne (Animal Cognition, DOI: 10.1007/s10071-009-0308-y). This is the first time animals have been observed following a playmate’s interaction with a third object – a skill picked up by humans at 9 months old. With dogs, cats, lions and bears “the animal wants to win the game, rather than keep it going”, Byrne says. “This is different to throwing a stick for your pet dog.” Because the gorillas seem to be taking account of the thoughts of others, they are showing some theory of mind competence, says Byrne, although they do not pass a standard theory-of-mind test called the false belief test, which looks at the ability to infer another’s perspective. Nevertheless, Byrne says that taking another individual’s thoughts into account might not be unique to humans.
‘Wasabi sense’ detects rattlers’ prey WHAT does a rattlesnake’s night vision have in common with the taste of wasabi sauce? It turns out that when some snakes “thermally image” their prey, they employ receptors similar to those we use to sense the pungency of wasabi. Unlike our receptors, which respond to odour molecules, the snakes’ thermal receptors respond directly to heat, triggering nerve impulses that 16 | NewScientist | 20 March 2010
their brain interprets as an image. “It’s hard to know exactly what the snake ‘sees’, but one assumes that the thermal image in some way depicts the relative thermal intensity of an object or animal,” says David Julius of the University of California, San Francisco, whose team has found the link (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08943). “It’s probably not unlike a thermal camera.”
Julius’s team compared gene activity in different types of nerve cell from diamondback rattlesnakes, which all have shallow pits on their faces that detect heat. They found that in nerves that feed the pits, a gene called TRPA1 was 400 times more active than elsewhere. The gene makes a protein that activates the cells when it detects heat from objects at more than 27 °C. Boas and pythons have similar molecules on their snouts.
JUPITER may have a new ring that was created by a smash between moons. The possible ring appears as a faint streak near Jupiter’s moon Himalia in an image taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. It is unclear if it reaches all the way around the planet. No one knows when it formed, but the Galileo spacecraft didn’t spot it before the end of its mission in 2003, says Andy Cheng of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The structure may be the result of an impact that blasted material off Himalia, suggest Cheng and colleagues in a study presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, earlier this month. One of Jupiter’s moons called S/2000 J11 went missing after its discovery in 2000 and could have crashed into Himalia, destroying itself in the process, says the team.
Fusion fears bite the dust FEARS that “toxic dust” could choke efforts to get power from nuclear fusion have been allayed. Hot plasma in fusion reactions bites pieces from the reactor walls, creating metallic dust. The worry is that this could clog instruments and even choke reactions in the experimental reactor ITER, set to fire up in southern France in 2019. Michael Coppins of Imperial College London noticed that dust grains in existing reactors are often spherical, implying that they had been molten. He calculates that in ITER’s plasma such liquid drops should be torn apart by electrical forces before they can cause trouble (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/ physrevlett.104.065003).