The “awwww, how cute” part of this article

We couldn’t pass this article by—river turtle embryos that communicate with each other to coordinate when they hatch! The research, published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, demonstrates that Murray River turtles speed up to catch up with their faster developing siblings. Wired UK reports:

Achieving this synchronicity isn’t easy. Although the eggs are always laid at the same time in the same nest, those at the top of the nest near the sun-drenched soil develop much faster than those buried deeper in the cooler soil. However, Murray River turtles are able to tell whether their fellow hatchlings are more or less advanced and adapt their pace of development accordingly, allowing the slow-coaches to play catch-up.

The study authors are still unsure how and why the turtle embryos do this. Stay tuned…

Just as cute are photos of developing Anolis lizards on New Scientist. Researchers hope that images like these will help us understand more about vertebrate development.

Our favorite traveling worm, C. elegens

This week, Universe Today noted that the worm Caenorhabditis elegans (or C. elegans) could be the first earthling to Mars. C. elegens is no stranger to space travel, its traveled a few times on various space shuttle missions. They do well in space, developing and reproducing normally. So how about deep space travel? Universe Today says lucky worms, but there is a broader purpose:

Similar biologically to humans in some ways, they are being studied by scientists at the University of Nottingham in the UK to help see how people are affected by long-duration space travel.

Kepler 21-b

Might this be C. elegens’ destination after Mars? Not likely. The latest confirmed exoplanet is 350 light years (2000 trillion miles) away and hot, hot, hot! It orbits its parent star much closer than Mercury orbits the Sun, but it is Earth-like in its size and mass. So what makes this one so special? We’re getting closer, says Discover’s Bad Astronomer:

this is an amazing detection; the planet is pretty small, very far away, and its parent star very luminous. These all combine to make this a tough world to detect, but that goes to show you: we’re getting really good at this sort of thing.

How long before we find another Earth this way? I’m guessing not very long. A few years at most. If they’re out there, they can’t hide forever.

Locally, NASA Ames is holding the first Kepler conference next week, with more exoplanet discoveries to be discussed. If you’re in the area, try and catch their public talk on Tuesday evening, should be most exciting!

Image: Judy Cebra-Thomas and Scott Gilbert/Swarthmore College/NSF

The squid are part of an experiment to see if, like some collegiate females on spring break, good bacteria “go wild” in the microgravity of space. Bobtail squid use bacteria called Vibrio fischeri to generate light. According to Discovery News:

That light helps the squid hunt for prey in dark waters. It also provides camouflage from any organisms trying to eat him, because the squid doesn’t cast a telltale shadow on the ocean floor as a result of the moon’s rays shining down into the water.

Previous shuttle experiments have shown what happens to harmful bacteria in space, but this will be the first experiment with beneficial bacteria.  Scientists are hoping that these results with squid will translate to beneficial bacteria with humans.

The NASA press kit reports that worms are part of the mission:

One NASA experiment known as Biology (Bio) will use, among other items, C. elegans worms, that are descendants of worms that survived the STS-107 space shuttle Columbia accident.

Haven’t these worms been through enough?!

Wired UK has a breakdown of other microbes joining STS134:

The microbes on-board Endeavour include the tardigrades (nicknamed Water Bears) which are large extremophiles that can withstand temperatures as biting as absolute zero, and as hot as 150 degrees Celsius. They’re joined by the Deinococcus radiodurans (which NASA dubbed “Conan the Bacterium“) which can survive upward of 15,000 Gy of radiation — 10 Gy is more than enough to kill an average human.

Haloarcula marismortui (Old Salty) loves salt, and lives in levels of high salinity that would kill other organisms. Pyrococcus furiosus (Fire Eater) is all about heat, and thrives in temperatures over 100 degrees Celsius. Cupriavidus metallidurans (which doesn’t have a nickname, unfortunately) plays a vital role in the formation of gold nuggets, thanks to its love of gold tetrachloride: a compound that is toxic to most other microorganisms.

Finally there’s Bacillus subtilis (The Average Joe), which is a model organism used in hundreds of biological experiments. It’s been into space many times before, so it’ll be a good comparison point for other studies.

You know, Dorothy only had lions and tigers and bears to face in Oz…

Image by Hans Hillewaert/Wikimedia

That’s not aliens speaking to humans, but rather scientists speaking to worms, Caenorhabditis elegans, to be exact.

Poor C. elegans. It’s often researchers’ favorite choice because of its optical transparency and its well-defined nervous system of exactly 302 neurons. This time two different groups are using optogenetics, a way to control cell function with light, to manipulate the worms locomotion and behavior.

A group of scientists from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Massachusetts Medical School have come up with CoLBeRT (Controlling Locomotion and Behavior in Real Time) that uses colored lasers to control the worm while it’s moving.

“This optical instrument allows us to commandeer the nervous system of swimming or crawling nematodes [worms] using pulses of blue and green light—no wires, no electrodes,” says Aravinthan Samuel, a professor of physics and affiliate of Harvard’s Center for Brain Science. “We can activate or inactivate individual neurons or muscle cells, essentially turning the worm into a virtual biorobot.”

“If you shine blue light at a particular neuron near the front end of the worm, it perceives that as being touched and will back away,” says co-author Andrew M. Leifer, a PhD student also in Harvard’s Department of Physics and Center for Brain Science. “Similarly, blue light shined at the tail end of the modified worm will prompt it to move forward.”

(A video is of this mind-control is available here.)

By stimulating neurons associated with the worm’s reproductive system, they were even able to rouse the animal into secreting an egg.

A team from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that by using LCD projectors, they could also manipulate the worms’ movements. Apparently, according to Science News there are benefits to both technologies. CoLBeRT works as the worm is moving, and the Georgia Tech system has more precise targeting.

Both studies are published in the recent edition of Nature Methods. A subscription is needed to read the articles (Harvard et al and Georgia Tech), but an entire feature on optogenetics is available for free.

Image: Leifer et. al. / Nature Methods