London Superlab Gets Local Approval

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LONDON—Plans to build a £500 million medical research institute in the heart of London were approved yesterday by the key local development committee overseeing the location. The U.K. government hopes that the mammoth lab facility, construction of which should begin in the spring, will keep Britain at the forefront of global biomedical research. The approval by the Camden Town Council panel, on an 8-4 vote (with one abstention), came despite scores of registered objections, mostly by local people concerned about the loss of prime real estate previously earmarked for affordable housing.

The new facility, dubbed the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation (UKCMRI), will have the capacity to house 1500 staff including 1250 scientists, and it is hoped that it will attract many early-career doctors, nurses, biologists, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, computer scientists, and engineers seeking to work in a multidisciplinary institution. The four founding research organizations behind the new center—the Medical Research Council (MRC), Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK (CRUK), and University College London—have all contributed substantially to the funding of the building, with both MRC’s National Institute for Medical Research and CRUK’s London Research Institute intending to close their existing facilities and sell off the land to fund the new lab, which will be next to the St. Pancras train station, which has connections to the rest of Europe.

In a statement today, Wellcome Trust Director Mark Walport welcomed the council approval, saying: “UKCMRI will be a world leading institute tackling the most challenging issues facing our health and wellbeing today.” The new development, he added, is “strategically positioned amidst the cluster of outstanding research and medical institutions in Camden and close to the international transport hub at King’s Cross and St. Pancras.”

The center, set to begin its work in 2016, has outlined a number of strategies to engage the public in its work and will provide educational benefits to schools locally and nationally. “We look forward to working closely with the Council and the local community to develop the Institute, which will complement the regeneration of the local area and bring to it tangible benefits,” Walport states.

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Do Chimps Play With Dolls?

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In the tropical rainforest of Uganda’s Kibale National Park, a young female chimpanzee seems to have adopted a stick. She’s holding it close to her abdomen and carrying it with her everywhere she goes. In a new study, the first to document this behavior in the wild, researchers argue that stick cradling may be akin to human children playing with dolls. And because the team observed it far more frequently in female chimps, the findings suggest that certain gender-specific behaviors are hard-wired.

Making the observations was no easy task. Harvard University primatologist Richard Wrangham and colleagues spent 12 hours a day—much of it crouched behind vegetation—tracking a group of 68 chimps through thick rainforest. During the study period, they observed about 300 instances of chimps picking up sticks. In 40% of cases, the chimps cradled the sticks in the crook of their arm or tucked between their abdomen and thigh (see picture), whereas the rest of the time they used sticks to probe trees and fight each other. More than three-quarters of the stick cradlers were female, the team reports online today in Current Biology. Females were also 10 times more likely to use the sticks as tools than males were—the first time such a large disparity has been reported.

Wrangham says stick cradling reminded him of doll play in girls. And because chimp mothers don’t play with sticks, young female chimps probably aren’t learning the behavior from watching their moms. Instead, it may be hard-wired. Given the close evolutionary relationship between chimps and humans, the implication is that doll playing and other gender-specific behaviors seen in young human children may be hard-wired as well, he says.

Rebecca Jordan-Young isn’t willing to go that far. A sociomedical scientist who studies sex, gender, and sexuality at Barnard College in New York City, Jordan-Young says she doesn’t think anyone should draw sweeping interpretations about innate differences between the sexes from this study. She says that the researchers cannot rule out that females carry sticks because they are mimicking the behavior of other adolescent females. It could also just be a cultural fad.

In addition, Jordan-Young questions the emphasis the authors placed on the doll-carrying observations. Just as intriguing, she says, is the fact that female chimps use tools much more often than males do. But those types of findings, she says, don’t grab headlines.

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The Secret of the Glowing Snail

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Talk about an inner glow. The marine snail, Hinea brasiliana, radiates green light to startle predators, so the snail can make a quick—or at least relatively quick—get away. But there’s a mystery to this bioluminescence: The snail’s body sports just a handful of glowing cells, yet its entire shell lights up. To shed light on the puzzle, researchers shed some light on the snails. They focused a tight beam of light through the shell’s opening, mimicking the light emitted from the animal’s cells, and found that the entire snail lit up. The trick appears to be that the mollusk’s shell scatters light. This allows the snail to turn a tiny glow into a much larger one, making it seem more formidable to predators. Understanding how the shell’s internal structure produces this luminosity could inspire lighting designs of the future, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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Poop Scoop

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New baby? Feeling like you’re waist deep in dirty diapers? Forget diaper-collection services; just volunteer your infant for a poop study and researchers will take them off your hands for free. Dirty diapers, it seems, hold the key to measuring infant hormone levels.

Sex hormones, such as estrogen, are important for babies’ healthy development. But some endocrinologists worry that children are exposed to too much additional estrogen via soy formula, plant fertilizers, and even plastics, which could cause faster-than normal development and future problems with reproduction. However, few infants tolerate a frequent finger or heel prick, and so “very little is know about hormone levels in infants,” explains Michelle Lampl, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

Diapers, however, can be collected frequently and over a long period of time, perfect for a
longitudinal study. Practicing on eight to 10 diapers collected from each of 32 largely breast-fed
infants over 6 months, Lampl’s group perfected a technique for extracting hormone levels from the
poop, they reported online last month in Frontiers in Systems Biology.

They also perfected their diaper-collection technique. “It took years to fi nd the right nappy
and work out how you get the diaper fresh from the home to the lab,” says Lampl. The secret: a
cotton diaper, a Ziploc bag, and an ice pack.

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Sleepy Bees Lose Their Rhythm

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Sleep deprived and having trouble communicating? You aren’t alone. Drowsy honey bees (Apis mellifera) are incoherent, too, researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Every morning, the bees set off on their daily foraging trips and return to the nest to perform a waggle dance. The angle of the bee’s body relative to the sun indicates the direction its comrades must fly in to find the good flowers, and the duration of its dance tells how far away they are. Sleep-deprived bees—kept up all night by researchers agitating them—made more errors when communicating the direction of the flower than did well-rested bees; at least until they had caught up on their sleep. Experiments to demonstrate whether bee insomnia is bad for the colony’s survival are underway; until the results are in, worker bees are advised to be tucked up in a hive, with a hot cup of nectar by 9 p.m.

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Whistling Caterpillars Shake Off Predators

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When in danger, whistle. It works for the walnut sphinx caterpillar (Amorpha juglandis). The fat, juicy larvae of butterflies and moths tend to be experts at predator avoidance, using camouflage, rolling themselves in leaves, and even flicking their own poop to discourage birds, frogs, and small mammals from eating them. Whistling is just another string in their bow, researchers report online this week in The Journal of Experimental Biology. When the team used forceps to simulate the peck of a bird’s beak, the caterpillars forced air through the small holes on either side of their body—normally used for breathing—to produce a high-pitched whistle. When yellow warblers heard the noise, these natural enemies of the caterpillars hesitated, jumped back, or flew off. The sound may have startled them, or perhaps they found the tune indigestible.

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How to Feed a 180-Ton Whale

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For the blue whale, feeding is an Olympic event. The largest animal on Earth dives 500 meters at speeds of up to 3 meters per second, U-turns toward the surface, and then opens its colossal mouth to scoop up clouds of krill and filter them from the water with its brushlike teeth. A new study reveals that this massive energy expenditure is worth it. Although the whales are feasting on some of the smallest creatures on the planet, the dive fills them with enough sustenance to survive.

To understand the energetics of the blue whale’s feeding behavior, Robert Shadwick, a biomechanic at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and colleagues analyzed data collected from digital tags suctioned-cupped to the whales’ back. The tags, which travel with the animal on its descent to the clouds of shrimplike krill, measure the animal’s speed, depth, orientation and the number of times it beats its tail; they then pop off and float to the surface, ready to be retrieved by pursuing biologists. Combining data from these tags with measurements of whale jaws from museum specimens, the team modeled the drag experienced by the whale as it performs its complex underwater acrobatics.

The whales use about 63,000 kilojoules of energy on each dive, the researchers report online today in The Journal of Experimental Biology. But they also eat about 1260 kilograms of krill, as calculated from the average number of krill present in the 80 metric tons of water they gulp. And that provides the whales with about 100 times more energy from the tiny creatures than they spend capturing them.

Blue whales need that extra energy because they devote such a small proportion of their lives to feeding, says Ann Pabst, a functional morphologist at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, who was not involved with the study. She notes that the animals spend many months either migrating to and from feeding grounds or reproducing, and during these periods they must survive off their fat reserves.

Pabst adds that the new study was possible only because of new tagging technologies, which were developed by the U.S. Navy to measure pressure deep in the ocean. The tags provide so much information that “we can almost visualize what is going on at [these] depths,” she says.

The researchers hope the work aids conservation efforts. Due in part to increased human consumption of krill as fish stocks run low, blue whale numbers are only 3% of what they were in the 1800s. The data could help conservationists make a stronger argument for how much krill the whales need to survive.

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Sharks Chew Off More Than They Can Bite

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Teenage great white sharks might look all grown up, but they don’t have the awesome bite of a fully grown adult, researchers report online today in the Journal of Biomechanics. The team built a computer model based on measurements taken of the head of a young great white shark and its cousin, the sand tiger shark (seen here chomping down on a bait fish). Based on the structure of the sharks’ cartilage and muscle, the model indicates that the jaws of young great whites haven’t fully stiffened. This means that, although their gape is wide enough, the sharks can’t feast on the flesh of seals and other large mammals without damaging their jaws. The researchers hope the work helps conservation biologists better understand the sharks’ feeding behavior and protect their prey species.

See the movie of the biting shark.

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Odor Exposure in the Womb Primes the Palate

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Moms, want your children to eat their greens? Then you have to eat them, too, at least while you’re pregnant. Researchers have found that offspring of mouse mothers fed a diet enhanced with cherry and mint flavors during pregnancy continued to prefer these flavors into adulthood, while mice from mothers fed on a bland diet had no food preference. The rodents with a penchant for mint-cherry food developed larger glomeruli, the region of the brain responsible for processing odor—the first evidence that exposure to odors in the womb alters the way the brain develops. From the fetus’ point of view, this is a good evolutionary strategy; eat the foods that your mother ate because they are probably safe. It is likely that all mammals, including humans, develop their sense of taste in this same way, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, so expectant moms, be careful the next time you have a hankering for anchovies with chocolate sauce.

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