Why Some Penguins Wear a Blue Tuxedo

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Feeling small and blue today? Eudyptula minor goes through its whole life that way. This Australian bird—the smallest of all penguins at around 30 cm high—sports a notable blue tint in its feathers, hence its common name, the Little Blue Penguin. Using high-powered microscopes, researchers have now discovered that nanometer-sized fibers in the bird’s wing feathers provide the unusual blue hue. Made from keratin, the same material as human hair, these nanofibers are packed together like bundles of uncooked spaghetti, the team reports online today in Biology Letters. The penguin’s color is due to blue light that is scattered when it hits the fibers, while all other wavelengths of light just pass through the feathers. This is a new mechanism for giving feathers a blue color, the authors say; similar nanofibers are found in the blue skin of other birds, such as Emus, but those fibers are made of collagen. What advantage the colorful feathers provide for Little Blue remains unknown, but they certainly aren’t being caught dead in the same black and white tuxedo as most of their relatives.

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Six-Pack Crabs

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Hermit crabs have been fighting over housing since long before humans ever got involved in real estate. The crustaceans (Pagurus bernardus) make their homes in marine snail shells, and when these shells becomes too tight, the crabs bang them against the larger shells of other crabs (see video), hoping to evict them. This furious rapping is thought to represent the attacking crab’s stamina, but researchers wondered if it actually represented brawn. And indeed, as the team reports online today in Biology Letters, crabs with bigger muscles relative to their body sizes were more likely to be victorious—both at winning a shell and at resisting eviction—while muscle stamina (as judged by protein concentration) had no impact. The results suggest that muscle strength, and not endurance, is key in this war of attrition.

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Parasite Invasion Caught on Camera

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For the first time, the tiny malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, has been caught on camera breaking and entering a red blood cell. High resolution 3D images reveal that once the three components of the parasite—nucleus (blue), other organelles (red), and the green pore the parasite brings with it and through which it invades (green)—have attached to the cell, a switch is triggered and the parasite is free to burrow through the cell’s membrane. From this point on, the parasite is unstoppable, multiplying within the cell until it breaks out of its host to invade fresh red blood cells. The new imaging technique will allow researchers to see the effects of novel drugs on this final stage in the parasite’s invasion strategy, researchers report online on this week in Cell Host & Microbe. They hope that this will help scientists develop better drugs to alleviate the suffering of the 400 million people who contract malaria each year.

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Don’t Take That Cookie!

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Stop it! Don’t touch that! Sit down and be quiet! Whether you heeded these commands as a child could help predict your future. A new study suggests that people who show less self-control as young children are more likely to have failing health, greater debt, and run-ins with the law later in life.

The idea that willpower is important for success is not new. In the late 1960s, Walter Mischel, a psychologist at Columbia University, tested whether 4-year-old children could resist nibbling Oreo cookies when left alone with a plate of them. He and colleagues found a huge range in willpower, and those children better at resisting the temptation went on to do better in school, scoring higher on the standardized tests. Their parents also judged them to be more attentive, competent, and intelligent. Intrigued, psychologist Terrie Moffitt of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and her colleagues sought real-life data to test whether individuals with more willpower and not just self-discipline when offered cookies, achieved greater success in life.

The international team tracked approximately 1000 New Zealand children, born in 1972 or 1973, from the age of 3 years until their early 30s, and another 500 British fraternal twins, born in 1994 or 1995, from the ages of 4 years to 12 years. They used a range of measures to assess the children’s self-control, including their impulsivity, persistence at a task, patience while waiting in line, and hyperactivity.

Compared with their more disciplined twins, children who had less self-control at age 5 were more likely to have begun smoking, performing badly in school, and acting out at age 12, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. And these problems continued in later life. Controlling for socioeconomic status and IQ, the researchers determined that people who showed the lowest willpower as children went on to be more than twice as likely to have health problems in their 30s, including high blood pressure, weight problems, lung disease, and sexually transmitted diseases. By the age of 32, they also earned 20% less and were about three times more likely to be dependent on tobacco, alcohol, or harder drugs and to have been convicted of a crime.

Moffitt explains that people didn’t fall into two categories—disciplined or undisciplined—but existed on a spectrum. “It means all of us could benefit from improving our self-control,” she says.

Moshe Bar, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston who was not involved in the study, is impressed by the long-term data set but cautions that the study is observational and can’t establish that self-control breeds success. Still, parents of cookie nibblers shouldn’t despair, he says. He was intrigued to read that some of the children in the study improved their self-control. Bar and his 7- and 10-year-old children “play a game of ‘waiting’ with unwrapping a candy for no other reason than practicing a delay,” he says. “It works,” he says, but then, as he points out, he has a sample size of only two.

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U.K. Neuroscientists Complain Funding Cut Penalizes Them for Success

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LONDON—At a briefing here today, the British Neuroscience Association (BNA) warned that a planned 20% cut in funding for neuroscience by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) will drive an estimated 100 researchers in the field from the United Kingdom and weaken the nation in a scientific discipline in which it has traditionally excelled. In a letter addressed to Tom Blundell, chair of the council of the BBSRC, which more than 100 neuroscientists put their name to, BNA protested the funding cut and called for its reconsideration.

In January, BBSRC revealed its plans to prioritize particular research disciplines that it believes will help address major challenges to future society. BBSRC’s favored themes include: food security, bioenergy and industrial biotechnology and basic bioscience underpinning health and wellbeing. The Council said that meant that neuroscience, which currently accounts for 13% of grant funding (amounting to £150 million), will receive less funding. BBSRC’s head Douglas Kell recently defended the cut in a blog post.

BNA says that BBSRC’s reprioritization smacks of a desperate measure to balance the books, and that the field of neuroscience is being penalized for being successful. British neuroscientists contend that they have a great track record, helping to explain brain illnesses such as motor neuron, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s diseases, and develop many important drugs such as Fluoxetine, the widely used antidepressant known as Prozac. Eli Lilly, a U.S.-based pharmaceutical company, found that neuroscience research in the south of England was the most cited globally.

David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London says that there has been no explanation by BBSRC for their dramatic change in strategy, and no consultation on these cuts. The effects will be felt immediately, he says. It just seems like an “arbitrary exclusion.” “I don’t know what to tell my PhD students … I don’t see jobs for them,” he remarks.

Duncan Banks, the director of BNA , argued that the BBSRC’s funding cut, amounting to about £4 million in spending on neuroscience, will particularly affect opportunities for young scientists, he explains.

BBSRC cuts come at a time when the funding for basic neuroscience in the United Kingdom is already threatened with a move by the Medical Research Council to fund more clinically relevant science, explains Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford and former head of the Medical Research Council. Yet one-third of global health issues are related to neurological problems, such as depression, pain, and the diseases of the aging brain. BNA points out that what really drives new treatments is basic research. Blakemore remarks, “Neuroscience remains one of the least understood areas of biology.” “An aging population should be very worried about cuts in neuroscience,” he says.

The strength of the U.K.’s basic research was what originally attracted pharmaceutical companies to the United Kingdom, notes Blakemore. Yet that attraction may be fading, especially in the neuroscience. Recent closures of many pharma-funded institutes working in the field of neuroscience—Pfizer, GSK, Astra Zenica, and Merck have all closed institutes in the last year—may also force neuroscientists out of the United Kingdom.

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Finnish Ecologist Clinches Crafoord Prize

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This year’s Crafoord Prize has gone to Finnish ecologist Ilkka Hanski of the University of Helsinki for his contributions to understanding the impact of habitat fragmentation on species’ survival. Although Hanski has spent much of his time as a field biologist in remote regions of places such as Borneo, Greenland, and Madagascar, the prize was awarded specifically for his development of an array of mathematical models in ecology that have had great bearing on how conservationists manage natural environments.

“Hanski is the leading ecologist of his generation; he has transformed the way we understand how ecological processes work in real landscapes,” says evolutionary biologist Charles Godfray of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Hanski has spent much of his 30-year career assessing the risk of local extinctions in environments subject to growing human influence. (Here’s a link to his Web site.) In particular, he has studied the impact of habitat fragmentation on the Glanville Fritillary (Melitaea cinxia), a European butterfly that has been declining in number over the past few decades. Hanski thanks his wife for some of his success, noting she gave him a book on Finnish butterflies for his birthday many years ago. Without this book, Hanski says, he might not have stumbled over the Glanville Fritillary, which turned out to be a perfect animal with which to examine habitat fragmentation.

The Crafoord Prize, begun 29 years ago by Anna-Greta and Holger Crafoord to honor fields that are not covered by the Nobels—alternating each year between astronomy, mathematics, geosciences, and biosciences—will be awarded in May to Hanski in Stockholm by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Hanski says that winning the Crafoord Prize is the biggest recognition that he can imagine getting. “It shows that it is possible to do good science in small countries,” he adds. Hanski was out for dinner with a colleague when the news came, and his wife sent his son running around the local restaurants to find him and fetch him to the house, where he learned of the award over the phone. Hanski says he has not yet decided what he will do with the 4 million kroners (approximately $600,000) that comes with the prize, but he suspects that he will buy a plot of forest in Finland to save it from future development.

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A Woman’s Tears: The Anti-Viagra?

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For many a man, few things deflate his passion faster than the sight of a woman crying. But tears may do more than visually tell a man it’s not time for romance. A woman’s tears contain substances that reduce men’s sexual arousal, a new study indicates. It’s the first evidence that human tears contain chemical signals.

Tears have largely been considered just a visual signal among people: Studies have shown that people looking at a sad face perceive it as sadder when tears are added. In contrast, some animals seem to use their waterworks to communicate chemically. The tears of male mice, for example, contain a protein that makes females more receptive to mating. But given that people, unlike rodents, don’t preen each other, researchers assumed that we rarely come in close enough contact to perceive chemical cues in tears.

Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, wasn’t convinced. Human tears shed under duress differ chemically from those shed to clear the eye of irritants, and he wondered whether human tears might also carry messages for the opposite sex.

To find out, he recruited two women who claimed they could cry on demand. He showed them a sad film—a scene from Franco Zeffirelli’s 1979 film The Champ, in which a son cries over the body of his dying father, a boxer—and collected their tears in vials (see video). Within minutes, the vials were handed to 24 men, aged 23 to 32, who took 10 deep breaths over the open receptacles. Researchers also stuck a tear-soaked cotton square under each man’s nose for the duration of the experiment. As a control, Sobel and his team did the same with saline solution, which they trickled down the women’s cheeks to account for perfumes and face creams they might have been wearing.

The men were then asked to judge the emotion and attractiveness of images of women’s faces that had been made emotionally ambiguous by morphing together happy and sad faces. The men couldn’t smell the difference between tears and saline, and the tears did not influence how sad they thought the faces seemed. Nevertheless, the men found the women less attractive after smelling the tears, the researchers report online today in Science.

The men’s heart and breathing rates, skin temperature, and testosterone levels also sank, indicating a drop in sexual arousal. Peering into the subjects’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers found that on average the regions of the brain that usually light up when an individual is aroused, the hypothalamus and fusiform gyrus, responded normally to moderately erotic images. However, this neural activity was dampened when the men were exposed to the tears.

Shedding tears is just another way, along with pheromones and body language, that the sexes can communicate, says Sobel. Women shed tears significantly more often during menstruation, when there is a low chance of conceiving, he notes. “This makes perfect sense because it is signaling that sexual activity is inappropriate from an evolutionary point of view,” says Sobel.

The study’s results expose “a hidden, underlying origin” for tears, says Adam Anderson, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Tears originally functioned to simply shed irritants from the eyes. They were then co-opted to contain chemosignals and then perhaps further co-opted to express sadness, Anderson says.

But many questions remain, says Kazushige Touhara, a molecular biologist at the University of Tokyo who works on biochemical signaling among mice. The substances that dampen male arousal remain unidentified, and it’s not clear whether the men sensed them with their olfactory system or through their skin. Without knowing such details, says Touhara, it is difficult to know how important tears are as a biochemical signaling route in human interactions.

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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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