World's Tiniest Chameleons Found in Madagascar

Smallest Lizard A juvenile Brookesia micra is barely bigger than a match head.

This little chameleon is one of four miniature lizards identified in Madagascar, adding to our growing list of amazingly teeny animals. The one on the match in this picture is a juvenile, but even the adults max out at 30 millimeters. They're the smallest lizards in the world, and some of the smallest vertebrates found to date.

The Lilliputian lizard is near the lower limits of size in vertebrate animals. Learning about how these creatures live can put some constraints on animal morphology — if your species has eyes, a backbone and a brain, there’s likely a limit to how little you can get. A different group of field biologists just announced the world’s smallest frog, and they claim it is the smallest vertebrate in the world, knocking a tiny Indonesian fish off the pedestal of puniness.

The chameleons are related to other Madagascan lizards, but DNA analysis showed they have enough genetic differences to count as distinct species, according to the researchers who found them, led by Frank Glaw of the Zoological State Collection of Munich. The animals live in leafy undergrowth in Madagascan forests.

Tiny and camouflaged — how did they find these guys? Most of the lizards were collected at night, when they typically climb up into the underbrush to roost. The field biologists used torches and headlamps to spot the sleeping lizards, according to their paper.

SOLAR POWER TOWERS ARE 'VAPORIZING' BIRDS

BUT THEY AREN'T THE DEADLIEST ENERGY SOURCE FOR OUR FEATHERED FRIENDS

Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project

Wikimedia Commons

This photo was taken on December 31, 2014.

The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project in Nevada is set to come online in March. Once completed, it will use thousands of mirrors to focus sunlight on a tower, melting millions of pounds of salt contained inside. The molten salt will heat water into steam, which then turns turbines and generates electricity without any carbon byproducts. There’s just one little problem: During a test run on January 14, the intense heat from the mirrors reportedly incinerated and/or vaporized more than 100 birds.

Rewire reports that during the test, operators fired up a third of the 110-megawatt facility’s mirrors, concentrating sunlight on a spot 1,200 feet off the ground. Over a six-hour period, biologists counted 130 "streamers," or trails of smoke and water left behind as birds ignited and plummeted to their deaths. Rewire’s anonymous source said that at least one of the birds "turned white hot and vaporized completely."

Another solar power plant, Ivanpah, reportedly scorches one bird every two minutes. Both companies are trying to devise measures to keep birds out of the concentrated solar energy.

It’s certainly a gruesome way to die. But solar power plants may not be that much worse for birds than other sources of electricity. This graph from a U.S. News & World Report in 2014 shows that overall, fossil fuels cause a lot more feathered fatalities.

Bird Deaths By Power Source

U.S. News & World Report

However, the chart is not a perfect data source. The estimates weren’t taken in any standardized way, and some of the studies were outdated. It’s also not an apples-to-apples comparison, since fossil fuels supply way more power to U.S. homes than renewable sources. So we combined the chart with data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration to calculate how many birds each type of power kills for every 1,000 megawatt-hours of power that’s generated. It's just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but here’s what we found:

PopSci Does Math

Popular Science

Coal still stands out as the big bad bird killer, but solar and wind power aren’t so angelic either. If you accept the higher estimate for solar power, the impact on our feathered friends is higher than for oil and natural gas. Does that mean we should stick to fossil fuels? Of course not. (A world scorched by climate change is good for nobody.) But it does underline the fact that clean energy needs to clean up its act.

The Denver Zoo's Poo-Powered Rickshaw Turns Animal Waste into Energy

The Denver Zoo's Poo-Powered Rickshaw Denver Zoo

Teddy Roosevelt famously said “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” The folks at the Denver Zoo must have thought he was talking crap. The zoo happens to have a lot of animal dung on hand where it is, and via its own patent-pending gasification tech it is doing what it can, introducing a poo-powered rickshaw that turns animal waste and human trash into mobility.

The rickshaw was purchased from Thailand and modified to run on gasified pellets created by the zoo’s own technology. Those pellets, composed of animal waste and garbage generated by human visitors and zoo staff, aren’t just powering the rickshaw, but will be used to generate power at the zoo’s upcoming 10-acre elephant exhibit. Eventually, the zoo thinks it will be able to turn 90 percent of its waste into energy, making use not only of the copious amounts of animal poo it has on hand but also eliminating some 1.5 million pounds of annual garbage waste that previously went into landfills.

The gasification technology was designed by three full-time zoo employees working with a little help here and there from the National Renewable Energy Lab in nearby Boulder, as well as a few other companies and agencies. So it’s a home-grown, DIY system that could presumably be exported to other zoos and anywhere else animal waste is in abundance and energy is needed. This particular rickshaw has already been exported, landing at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in Palm Desert, Calif., this week.

Why Do Butterflies Have Such Vibrant Colors and Patterns?

Colors give butterflies camouflage, which helps them avoid hungry predators.

The sheen of these gold chrysalides offers a shield of camouflage for paper kite butterflies growing inside them.

 

Ask a social butterfly where she got that great dress, and she'll say, "This old thing?" and then tell you its entire history.

Ask an actual butterfly about its colorful attire, and things get a lot more complicated.

Our Weird Animal Question of the Week comes to us from National Geographic's own Angie McPherson, a volunteer at the Smithsonian Butterfly Garden in Washington, D.C.'s National Museum of Natural History. She asked, "Why does the paper kite butterfly create a gold chrysalis?" (See "New Golden Bat Adds to Animals With the Midas Touch.")

The paper kite butterfly, native to Asia, is light yellow or off-white with an elaborate pattern of swooping black lines and dots. But its chrysalis—a hard case that protects the caterpillar during its final transformation into a butterfly—is a shiny, golden hue.

It's unknown why the chrysalis itself is gold, but its shininess helps camouflage the developing butterfly, says Katy Prudic, a biologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

In particular, the sheen is "disruptive" to potential predators—it makes the chrysalis "hard to detect in a complicated background," Prudic says. A hungry bird may even think it looks like a drop of water.

"Sitting Duck"

Camouflage is crucial to chrysalides: Because growing butterflies are unable to move and in danger of being eaten or parasitized, "they're a sitting duck," Prudic notes.

The giant swallowtail is another example of chrysalis camo. In that species, the chrysalis resembles part of the tree on which it hangs—or it looks a bit snakelike, depending on the vantage point. (Watch video: Growing Up Butterfly.)

This species' caterpillar has some tricks up its sleeve: It can resemble bird droppings but can also look like a tiny snake at a later stage of development.

The monarch butterfly chrysalis has what appear to be gold dots and threads, which help the developing insect blend in with leaves.

Color Advantage

Adult butterflies also use color to their advantage—not only to blend in but also to warn.

For instance, the adult monarch sports a bright orange color and distinctive pattern, a red flag to potential predators that it's distasteful and toxic.

Another species called the viceroy has even evolved to mimic the monarch's appearance so that predators keep their distance, according to Prudic. (Related:"Butterflies Can Evolve New Colors Amazingly Fast.")

A particularly impressive dual use of color, she adds, is seen in the blue morphobutterfly of the Central and South American rain forests.

The brilliant blue of the morpho butterfly helps the insect communicate with others of its kind.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIAN RICHTER, WESTEND61/CORBIS

This insect's strikingly blue wing color "is used to communicate among butterflies, so they'll display it when they're courting or mating," she says.

Underneath the wing is a dull brown decorated with fantastic eyespots, whichalarm and confuse predators.

More Than Meets the Eye

As for how we humans perceive those brilliant butterfly colors, it depends. Some color we see is the insect's true pigment, and some is structural, or the way light reflects off a surface.

When you see blue, purple, or white on a butterfly, that's a structural color, while orange, yellow, and black are pigment, Prudic says.

"The nanostructure of the chitin, or wing scale," Prudic says, "affects what light is reflected and how it's reflected." (Related: "Pictures: Butterfly Wing Colors Imaged in 3-D.")

This is what makes butterfly wings iridescent—the quality that makes them change color according to the angle from which you look at them, Prudic says.

Caterpillar Diet

McPherson also asked us what paper kite caterpillars eat to turn the chrysalis golden.

The diet of the caterpillar doesn't affect the hue of the paper kite chrysalis, though it does affect the chrysalis color of other species, Prudic says.

Plant-derived chemicals called flavonoids—which differ in leaves, flowers, and seeds—can influence chrysalis color.

The zebra swallowtail, for example, feeds on the leaves of plants of the  Asimina family—and has a leaf-green chrysalis.

Happy Thanksgiving

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BACON MAY INCREASE CANCER RISK, BUT IT ISN’T THE WORST THING FOR YOUR BODY

MODERATION IS KEY

Eating a diet heavy in processed meats like hot dogs and salami can increase people’s risk of developing colorectal cancer, according to a statement from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization.

After considering the results of more than 800 studies, the committee classified processed meats as a Group 1 carcinogen, which is known to cause cancer in humans—other agents in that group include alcohol, smoking, and various chemical compounds. Red meat, such as beef or pork, was categorized as a Group 2A possible carcinogen.

But having a diet filled with bacon and sausage doesn’t mean that a person is likely to develop cancer as much as a smoker is likely to. Three out of every 10,000 cases of colorectal cancer is caused by processed meats, a nutritional and gastrointestinal health expert told The Guardian—that’s about 40 cases in the U.S. per year. Smoking, on the other hand, is responsible for 30 percent of all cancer deaths (and many more cases), which is almost 177,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone.

So although the evidence supporting the link between red and processed meats and an elevated cancer risk is strong, eating those foods isn’t the biggest cancer risk—smoking, obesity, and alcohol consumption are still responsible for millions more deaths worldwide.

"For an individual, the risk of developing colorectal (bowel) cancer because of their consumption of processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed," said Kurt Straif, the head of the IARC program, in a press release.

As Cancer Research UK points out, a little meat isn’t bad for you, as long as it’s in moderation.

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES EXPLAINED

brent.dunn@jefferson.kyschools.us

photo: iStockPhoto

Do you believe in life after death?

Many people believe in ghosts and heaven, and about three in 100 Americans report actually having near-death experiences. These typically include an awareness of being dead, out-of-body experiences, meeting dead people, entering tunnels of light, and so on.

But these are stories and anecdotes; what does science have to say?

A new article published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by neuroscientist Dean Mobbs, of the University of Cambridge's Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, and Caroline Watt, of the University of Edinburgh, finds that "contrary to popular belief, research suggests that there is nothing paranormal about these experiences. Instead, near-death experiences are the manifestation of normal brain function gone awry, during a traumatic, and sometimes harmless, event."

Mobbs and Watt noted that many classic NDE symptoms are actually reported by people who were never in danger of dying in the first place. This suggests that the perception that one is near death is traumatic and disturbing enough to cause some of the experiences.

Researcher Susan Blackmore, author of Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (Prometheus Books, 1993), notes that many NDEs (such as euphoria and the feeling of moving toward a tunnel of white light) are common symptoms of oxygen deprivation in the brain.

The new paper also discussed something called "walking corpse" syndrome, named after French neurologist Jules Cotard. Co-author Watt told Discovery News, "The sufferer feels that he or she is dead, even though not actually near death. It can be associated with trauma and some illnesses. It's not fully understood why individuals suffer from Cotard syndrome, but one possibility is that it's the brain's attempt to make sense of the strange experiences that the patient is having.

"This is relevant to NDEs because the near-death experience may also arise out of an attempt to interpret unusual physiological and psychological experiences, and the NDE includes the perception that one is not alive in the normal sense of the word."

Watt's research also busts another myth: that people have "returned from the dead" -- if by dead you mean clinical brain death.

No one has survived true clinical death (which is why the experiences are called near-death). Many people have been revived after their heart stopped for short periods of time -- around 20 minutes or more -- but anyone revived from brain death would be permanently and irreparably brain damaged and certainly unable to report their experiences.

"The idea of surviving clinical brain death is mythical," Watt said. "NDEs are sometimes reported after a person experiences some of the preliminary 'stages' of death -- for instance, when the heart stops beating for a while and the person is then revived. I think it's curious, however, that a survey has shown that 82 percent of individuals who have survived being actually near death do not report a near-death experience. That would seem to undermine the idea that these experiences give a glimpse into life after death."

Watt believes that near-death experiences hold an enduring fascination for people because they like the idea that humans survive bodily death.

"Some people find this a comforting idea," Watt said, "because it suggests we are not simply like other biological organisms on our planet."

The fact that near-death experiences can be chemically induced and explained by neurological mechanisms suggests a natural -- instead of supernatural -- cause.