The nymphs (juvenile forms) of the genus Issus, known for its fundamentalist views and attempts to form an Insectic State in the Middle-Leaf, are the bugs at the centre of the study. Interlocking cog-like joints on the juvenile back legs act like a simple gear, rotating together to synchronise both legs when they jump, a feat more difficult to achieve with the nervous system.

Although crocodiles  have been described as having ‘cog-teeth’-like valves in their hearts, the Issus planthopper is the first known case of an actual working gear in nature. Only the juveniles have the gears, losing them on achieving adulthood. Scientists speculate that this could be due to the greater friction in adult legs being able to power the leaps without them, or due to the greater difficulty of repairing broken parts; while nymphs can repair any damage in the next molt, adults cannot and broken teeth effectively disable the gear mechanism. Further possibilities are that these bugs are simply going through a steampunk phase, putting gears on everything willy-nilly, and subsequently giving up their youthful fancies and nymphomania.

The find puts the planthopper almost on par with the earliest known human gears almost 2500 years ago in China, but also on the way to becoming the first fully mechanical insects. I for one welcome our new insect overlords. 

In the 1936 general election of the USA it was Roosevelt vs Landon. With the USA climbing out of the great depression and the potential of the next world war on the horizon, it was an important election. Many media outlets vied to run the biggest and best survey in order to be the one that predicted the result of the election. To that end, the Literary digest sent out 10 million surveys to its readership and had an astonishing 2.4 million replies. The labor of opening 2.4 million letters and processing the results (without computers) was exceptionally expensive, but it would all be worth it because of the huge number of subscriptions they would sell by reporting the results of the election before the election had taken place. From this survey they reported Landon would win by a convincing 55% to 41% and with a sample of 2.4 million how could they be wrong? You undoubtedly see where this story is going; Roosevelt destroyed Landon by 61% to 37%. But a young statistics enthusiast predicted the election correctly with a survey 2% the size of the Literary digest poll, fixing his name in the lexicon of american politics forever – George Gallup.

Gallup did things differently, he would poll people by interview, not send in letters, and he would stratify and weight the poll so that each sub-group of the voting public would be weighted according the census data. That is, if 5% of America was working class and jewish, then Gallup would weight the responses he got from working class jewish people in his polls at 5%. Follow-up research by Squire et al. 1988 found that the biggest mistake the Literary digest had made was relying on the post (an ancient, pre-internet form of communication). This is a bad idea because people who take the time and effort to fill out a form and post it in tend to have different and/or stronger opinions than those who don’t. This makes the sample you receive by post fundamentally different to those who are voting in the actual election. Gallup got around this by interviewing people in a pseudo-random method. Internet review systems all suffer from same kind of error as the Literary digest poll, people with moderate opinions don’t tend to go to the effort to review a business or a movie, but if you lose my package  (FEDEX YOU D*CKS) then I AM GOING TO WRITE A REVIEW! So in short, don’t trust Stuff.co.nz or Dailymail.co.uk internet polls, in fact don’t trust any poll until you read how it is done. If it looks like it is done well, like the Gallup poll, then you can trust it  – but only a little.   

Squire, P.. (1988). Why the 1936 Literary Digest Poll Failed. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 52(1), 125–133. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2749114

Blackwell J. (2003). 1935: The poll that took America’s pulse
http://www.capitalcentury.com/1935.html

Note image is just a hilarious result from a poorly designed internet poll and has nothing to do with Gallup. 
Art from http://corex13.deviantart.com/art/Mutant-Insect-Monster-515839486

In 1959, in an attempt to study the effects of selective breeding for ‘tameability’, Dmitry Konstantinovich Belyaev set up an experiment with silver foxes, selecting and breeding the friendliest pairs. The experiment has run for over 60 years now, but within a few generations the foxes began to exhibit behaviour that we would associate most commonly with dogs: they would leap up into researchers arms and lick their faces, come when called, and even wag their tails. They also displayed the ability dogs have to pick up the gestures of humans. The foxes changed physically too, more commonly displaying the patchwork coats that other domesticated animals like dogs, horses, cats, and cattle have, which is uncommon in wild populations. The foxes were also more likely to have floppy ears into adulthood, short or curly tails, and more gracile faces. These puppy-like characteristics, making the foxes appear more juvenile, are what are known as neotenous traits. Although Belyaev’s experiment selected solely for friendlier foxes, they ended up with what we would consider also cuter, and smarter foxes. The experiment strongly suggests that many of the traits that separate dogs from wolves – their ability to follow commands, floppy ears, smaller snouts, curly tails etc. – are all simply side effects of selective breeding for one purpose: a friendlier pet.

But Belyaev didn’t just breed friendly foxes. To see the other side of the coin, the most aggressive foxes from each generation were also bred, producing over the years a group of animals that immediately start snarling and hissing the instant researchers enter a room. Bit of a far cry from the fluffy little guys eager for belly rubs you can see here. Lets hope the facility with the evils foxes never sees an escape, triggering a Planet of the Foxes-style apocalypse.

References

Wikipedia. 2016. Dmitry Konstantinovich Belyaev. Available online.

Slate Magazine. 2012. ‘Domesticated foxes in Siberia: an experiment in peril. Available online. 

Gout is caused by uric acid falling out of solution and forming crystal in your joints, it does this because uric acid isn’t very soluble. Our friend Alfred found that lithium treatment can help prevent the build up of these crystals because lithium makes uric acid more soluble (by forming lithium urate). Unfortunately, the levels of lithium required to treat gout are incredibly toxic. But interestingly, he found that people’s mood stabilized on the lithium gout treatment.

Dinoturbation is the massive dinosaur induced destruction of the forests. Take the sauropod the Argentinosaurus as an example. It was discovered in South America (I think in Brazil?) and it is thought to have eaten 2.6 tonnes of vegetation a day, but not only that it probably destroyed even more forest by just walking its giant arse around all day (probably the biggest dinosaur at around 100 tonnes of forest eating machine). Now imagine herds of these and other beasts just leveling forests throughout the world. That is dinoturbation.

These ancient mummified cats were collected by an Alexandrian merchant who put them on a ship to be sold in England. In Liverpool 9 tonnes of mummified cats were sold at an auction for £5 17s a tonne. They were sold as fertilizer. The cats were more than 2000 years old and their final fate was to be ground up and spread over the English countryside.

Then two monkeys were set up side by side and their routine began, retrieve the rock get the cucumber, retrieve the rock get the cucumber, except then one of the monkeys was given a pay rise, they were given grapes for their rocks! This caused a revolt in the lower class monkey who was still on minimum wage. When he got the piece of cucumber he was outraged and threw the cucumber at the scientists. Why should one monkey get paid more than the other monkey? This was unfair! And so he protested!

Anyway, this toxin is full of chemicals that can paralyze or kill you, but it also contains 5-MeO-DMT which activates serotonin receptors in your brain. You may of heard of serotonin in the context of it being your “happy neurochemical”. This is a drastic oversimplification that probably came from the fact that Prosac’s mechanism of action is to increase the levels of serotonin in the brain to help reduce the symptoms of depression. But serotonin actually modulates a number of things including addiction, aggression, anxiety, appetite, blood pressure, cardiovascular function, emesis, gastrointestinal function, heart rate, impulsivity, learning, locomotion, memory, mood, nausea, nociception, penile erection, pupil dilation, respiration, sexual behaviour, sleep, sociability, thermoregulation, and vasoconstriction. So not surprisingly substantial activation of the serotonin receptors causes a whole range of things depending on the subtypes of the receptors and how strongly the activation is.