Tag: BBC

UK invests in graphene technology

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The UK government has pledged £50m towards developing spin-off technologies from the super-strong material graphene.

The announcement comes exactly a year after two Manchester-based scientists were awarded the Nobel-prize for its discovery.

The money is hoped to give researchers more bench space to explore the material’s commercial potential.

Funds will be available in the next few months, said the UK science minister.

Graphene, the “miracle material” of the 21st Century, is so far the strongest material known to science, and better at conducting electricity than copper.

It could have a large number of potential application; scientists say it could find uses from transparent touch screens to solar cells, from aircraft wings to optical communication systems, like broadband.

The Chancellor, George Osborne, in his speech at the Conservative Party conference said: “…We will fund a national research programme that will take this Nobel Prize-winning discovery from the British laboratory to the British factory floor.

“We’ve got to get Britain making things again.

“Countries like Singapore, Korea, America are luring [researchers] with lucrative offers to move their research overseas,” he added.

The funds for graphene R&D are in addition to £145 million “earmarked” for the establishment of more UK-based supercomputers, along with funding to support more computer-scientists and facilities to house them, the University and Science Minister David Willetts told BBC News.

He said: “I’m very happy; even in tough times we are investing in science”.

In response to the announcement, Professor Sir Peter Knight, President of the Institute of Physics, said: “We’re delighted that the Government recognises the role science can play in creating a vibrant, diverse economy for the future of the UK – investment in science delivers great returns economically and intellectually”.

“We applauded the Government’s decision to ‘invest intelligently’,” said the director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering (Case) Imran Khan in a statement.

However, he cautions: “These new investments are coming in the wake of enormous cuts to the nation’s science and engineering base.

“Last month [Case] released an analysis showing that £1.7bn will have been cut from research and development funds by 2014-15.”

Without a long-term strategy to put science and engineering at the heart of the UK’s economic recovery, said Mr Khan, home-growth discoveries like groundbreaking research into graphene could be a thing of the past.

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Flowers bloom for a second time this year

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UK plants are flowering for a second time this year because of the unseasonably warm weather.

With temperatures soaring, plants such as foxglove and cowslip, which usually flower in the spring, are in full bloom six to eight months early.

Cold nights experienced across the UK in August are thought to have led to the early onset of autumn colours.

This warmer spell now has plants acting like it is spring.

Gardeners at the Kew’s Wakehurst Place gardens in Sussex said they are working from a “new rule book” to keep up.

“It is a very unsual year…I’ve been gardening for 30 years and have never seen anything like this,” said Wakehurst Place’s head Andy Jackson.

“We are increasingly seeing that plants are not synchronised with what the weather is doing,” he added.

In the last year, the UK experienced a severe drought, then lots of rainfall and a cold snap in the summer, all before this warm spell explained Mr Jackson.

From mid-August, gardeners were seeing trees turning yellow and orange; it is unclear what will happen now with temperatures reaching into the thirties (eighties) in parts of the South, East and the Midlands.

The BBC’s meteorologist Liam Dutton explained that the position of the jet stream north of the UK has allowed high pressure to build, bringing in the very warm air from western Europe.

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Fish shrinkage probed in lab

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Scientists are starting a novel project to investigate whether overfishing alters fish behaviour and changes their pattern of development.

Overexploitation of stocks has already been shown to select for smaller fish.

A team reporting at the meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology in Germany will deliberately remove the largest individuals from populations of lab-bred guppies.

The experiment is designed to uncover what is happening in our oceans.

“There are clear indications that almost all… commercial fish are shrinking,” said marine biologist Carl Lundin, who directs the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Global Marine and Polar Program.

For mass spawning fish such as cod, there is a great advantage to maintaining older, larger females because they are very efficient at restocking the population.

And if industrial fishing selectively removes the largest individuals, explained Dr Lundin, the industry suffers as populations are reduced to the smallest fish.

However, smaller seafood is unlikely to be the only consequence of industrial fishing; research has also shown that fish in the oceans are reproducing earlier.

Experimental evolution

Now evolutionary biologist Beatriz Diaz Pauli and her colleagues from the University of Bergen, Norway have begun an experiment that they hope will help uncover what other changes we can expect to see in the oceans’ fishes.

The team established nine populations of guppies, each comprising 500 to 900 individuals. Over the next few years, Ms Diaz plans to remove all the fish that measure over 16mm from three of her tanks.

In the remaining tanks, Ms Diaz will purge fish under 16mm, or take fish independent of their size – regimens that will act as a control for the effects of changing the density of fish in the tanks.

The team will then painstakingly record the changes that they see in the fish’s growth rate, age and size of maturation, reproductive effort, and mating and feeding behaviours.

The team hopes to unpick whether the shifts they see are a result of fish moulding themselves to a new environment – a so-called plastic response – or are a consequence of genetic changes.

Plastic responses are not inherited. For example, an organism might reach a smaller body size if it gets little food as a juvenile, but its young would not inherit this propensity to be small.

Genetic responses, by contrast, are inherited, and even if a future generation is returned to an environment where food is plentiful, it would remain small.

Determining the nature of the changes in the fish will help scientists understand how stocks might recover if overexploitation stopped or breeding grounds were protected.

“If we set aside 20-30% of the habitat where reproduction… of key commercial fish stocks [occurs], we are much more likely to avoid these types of problems,” said Dr Lundin.

He added that carrying out experiments of this type allows researchers to control other factors that could affect the fishes’ survival and concentrate on just the consequences of overexploitation.

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Plant has evolved a specialist bird perch

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New research sheds light on the world’s most specialised bird perch.

The researchers suspect that the vertical, branchless stem of a South African plant – locally called the Rat’s Tail – has evolved to encourage pollinating birds to visit its flowers.

The birds hang upside down from this perch and fertilise the plant when they thrust their beaks into the red flowers to drink nectar.

The international team reports the findings in the Annals of Botany.

Plants go to great lengths to attract animals to pollinate them; they seduce insects, birds and small mammals with colourful, shapely, sweet-smelling flowers.

Some plants even wave at passing pollinators.

On first seeing the deep red, long-tubular flowers of Babiana ringens in 2003, botanist Spencer Barrett from the University of Toronto, Canada, suspected that he was dealing with a plant that was pollinated exclusively by birds.

But the position of the flowers at the base of the plant perplexed him.

Most birds avoid feeding on or close to the ground to keep clear of ground-dwelling predators; plants reliant on bird-pollination tend to keep their flowers up high.

Dr Barrett and his colleague Bruce Anderson from University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, wondered if the curious perch-like structure had evolved to give pollinating birds a foothold from which to feed.

Crouching among the shrubs of the Cape of South Africa, binoculars in hand, Dr Barrett and his team confirmed that the flowers were exclusively pollinated by sunbirds.

“When we saw a bird visiting we were completely enchanted,” said Dr Barrett.

Relaxed selection

Still unconvinced that the stick-like protrusion had evolved as a perch, the team set about to gather further evidence.

They set out to look at the full distribution of B. ringens across the Cape, and found that in the east, where sunbirds have a greater variety of flowering plants to choose between, B. ringens‘ perches were smaller than in the west, where plants can rely on regular visits from sunbirds.

Dr Barrett suspects that in the absence of pollinating birds, the plants do not need to invest in maintaining the perch, and so it shrinks over many generations – an example of what is called relaxed selection.

With time, this branch might return to its ancestral form, which the researchers suspect was a central stem with flowers at its top, much like many of B. ringens’close relatives.

“It’s a fascinating piece of work,” said plant biologist Professor Simon Hiscock from the University of Bristol.

This study poses questions about the influence of pollinators on the structures of flowers and on plants’ reproductive strategies, he added.

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Waving robotic crab arm attracts females

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A vigorous wave of the claw can be the key to mating success for male fiddler crabs, report researchers at the 13th Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology.

Male crabs advertise their quality as a potential mate to passing females by waving their large yellow claws.

Using robotic arms, researchers evaluated how the size and speed of the waving claw affected mating success.

The results may help explain why males protect their smaller neighbours.

To the fiddler crab Uca mjoebergi, the Australian mudflats in the north of the country are a heaving dance floor, where a male must rely on his moves to attract a mate.

Males stand outside their burrows and use their enlarged claw to attract females by moving it in circles.

If a female likes the look of a male, she will come closer and disappear down his burrow in the sand, possibly staying to mate.

Wave of waving

When a female wanders through a neighbourhood, “you see part of the mudflat light up” with waving yellow claws, said ecologist Sophie Callander from the Australian National University in Canberra.

Dr Callander and her colleagues used a fully adjustable robotic arm – called Robocrab – to determine what female crabs are looking for in a mate.

Dr Callander set up three robotic arms around a female crab, and sat beneath the unforgiving Australian sun for many hours recording the females’ reactions to different combinations of wave speeds and claw size.

Females approaching from 20cm preferred males with a higher wave rate and larger claws. Intriguingly, this preference increased in strength when the male was flanked by more slowly waving, smaller-clawed crabs.

Fiddler crabs also use these claws in displays of dominance and fighting prowess.

Previous work has shown that larger males sometimes go to the aid of smaller males when an intruder is trying to steal a smaller male’s burrow.

This behaviour is unlikely to be an altruistic form of neighbourhood watch, and Dr Callander thinks that her experiment could offer an explanation.

“If larger males can retain smaller neighbours they might… increase their mating success,” she told BBC News.

For fiddler crabs at least, it pays to keep close to the small and weak.

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Bed bugs protect their sperm from bacteria

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Bed bugs protect their sperm against sexually transmitted infections by producing germ-busting ejaculates, scientists have found.

Bacteria covering bed bugs’ bodies are transmitted to the female, along with the sperm, during mating.

The new work shows that without the protection of antibacterial agents in the bug’s ejaculate, 40% of sperm die.

The results were presented at the 13th Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology.

Bed bugs, and the related bat bugs that live in African caves, are renowned for their bizarre sex lives.

‘Traumatic insemination’

Males, instead of penetrating the female’s vagina, pierce her underside and deposit sperm inside the female, where it swims through the insect’s blood system to the ovaries to fertilise the eggs.

Female bed bugs protect themselves against the diseases that males transmit with a structure on their bellies that guides the penis into a mass of germ-fighting cells.

Males, it seems, have also evolved a way to fend off the effects of sexually transmitted infections, evolutionary biologist Oliver Otti from the University of Sheffield, UK, told conference attendees in Germany.

Suspecting that males load their ejaculates with proteins that protect sperm, Dr Otti carefully extracted sperm from a number of male bed bugs, being sure not to mix it with the seminal fluid that usually makes up the rest of the ejaculate.

He then mixed the sperm with a “soup” of micro-organisms that he had collected from the outer skin of the bed bugs.

To half of these samples he added lysozyme, a bacteria-killing enzyme known to be active in bed bugs, and saw that 40% more sperm survived in its presence.

Females didn’t gain any protection from these introduced bacteria-busting enzymes, he explained; the presence of lysozyme in the ejaculate seemed to be purely to protect sperm.

But other work by Dr Otti’s colleague Michael Siva-Jothy, who is also based at the University of Sheffield, shows that females protect themselves from the infections introduced during sex with their own lysozymes.

In fact, females ramp up their lysozyme activity just before they are about to feed. Dr Siva-Jothy explained that this is probably because in the bed bug world, feeding is generally always followed by mating.

“Wounding is a very frequent event during and after copulation, and generally genitals are not that clean, ” Dr Otti told BBC News.

He explained that the research that has focused on human sexual transmitted diseases has tended to ignore the microbes that coexist with us on our skin; these microbes are likely also transferred during sex.

“It is not clear what the cost of having them around is,” Dr Otti added.

The advantage of studying bed bugs, he said, is that we share many components of our immune system. As a result, scientists can learn much from manipulating the bugs’ sex lives to study the consequences on lifespan and offspring production – some of these trade-offs could be relevant to humans.

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Insects use antibacterial secretions to protect young

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Scientists have confirmed that so-called burying beetles coat their young’s food with an antibacterial substance to guarantee their survival.

Burying beetles lay their eggs on the carcasses of small animals, such as birds and rodents.

The researchers show that without the anti-microbial secretions the young fail to gain weight and die.

The results were presented the 13th Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology.

Most animals try to do the best for their young, but burying beetles, in the genus Nicrophorus, which are found in temperate regions in Europe and North America, are truly doting parents.

As a prospective parent, burying beetles find a dead animal, such as a mouse or bird, and roll the carcass into a ball.

They then bury the carcass, hiding it from predators that might eat it or fancy it for a nursery for their own young – no small feat for a beetle that is only 15mm long.

The beetles then lay their eggs in the flesh of the animal and wait to welcome their young into the world.

But a buried carcass is not going to stay fresh for very long, and the bacterial communities that colonise it are likely to threaten the beetle’s developing larvae.

Germ-free

So burying beetles use secretions from their anal glands to coat the fur or feathers with substances that guarantee the carcass stays germ-free and fresh for longer.

Now scientists from the University of Manchester have worked out what makes these secretions so good at killing germs.

The researchers extracted secretions from the anal glands of a species of burying beetle called Nicrophorus vespilloides, and showed that when this substance was added to bacterial cells, they were destroyed.

Evolutionary biologists Andres Arce, who led the study, and his colleagues, suspecting that they were dealing with a enzyme that “chops up microbial cell walls”, investigated and confirmed that the secretions were rich in lysozymes.

These are anti-microbial enzymes, and a common component of animals’ immune systems.

Lysozymes are also secreted in mammals’ breast milk and in human tears.

The team showed that larva raised in the absence of either their parents secretions were 40% more likely to die before adulthood.

Dr Arce explained that for a non-social insect, these burying beetles are already known to show quite substantial levels of parental care.

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Lager-brewing yeast identified in Argentina

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Scientists have identified a yeast that led to the discovery of lager.

The researchers isolated the new species in the frozen forests of Patagonia in South America.

Their discovery suggests that this yeast crossed the Atlantic hundreds of years ago and combined with one traditionally used in Europe to make ale.

The discovery is described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A lucky find

The workhorse of brewing, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is used worldwide to ferment fruit and grains to make wine, cider and ale.

Lager, which is fermented more slowly and at lower temperatures than ale, is presumed to be a later invention, and was likely stumbled upon when Bavarian monks moved their beer barrels into caves for storage.

In those caves, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which prefers to grow just above room temperature, is presumed to have been outcompeted in the fermenting beer by a species that thrived at cooler climes.

The modern-day lager-brewing yeast, Saccharomyces pastorianus, which is a fully domesticated species, is probably a hybrid of this cool-loving strain and the ale-brewing species, and survives because brewers keep back a little of the lager each time to seed the next batch with the same yeast.

Lager’s cradle

“The hybrid almost definitely formed accidentally and people adopted it because the beer came out differently,” said evolutionary biologist Chris Hittinger from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, US, who was one of the team behind the discovery.

But researchers have long wondered where the original cool-loving yeast species came from.

That is until Dr Hittinger and his colleagues isolated it from a beech tree in the forests of Patagonia this year.

These forests, where daily lows average around -2C, are the perfect cradle for modern-day lager-brewing yeast. The species has been designated Saccharomyces eubayanus.

“I personally prefer lagers to ales, and I am very grateful that these two distant cousins met up in a Bavarian cellar hundreds of years ago,” Dr Hittinger told BBC News.

Knowing the ancestral strain to the modern day lager-brewing yeast will help scientists pinpoint the effects of domestication in the genome of brewing yeasts.

And there is also the possibility that there are other undiscovered species of yeast in those Patagonia forests that could become the next best brew.

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Species flee warming faster than previously thought

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Animals and plants are shifting their natural home ranges towards the cooler poles three times faster than scientists previously thought.

In the largest study of its kind to date, researchers looked at the effects of temperature on over 2,000 species.

They report in the journal Science that species experiencing the greatest warming have moved furthest.

The results helped to “cement” the link between climate change and shifts in species’ global ranges, said the team.

Scientists have consistently told us that as the climate warms we should expect animals to head polewards in search of cooler temperatures.

Animals like the British comma butterfly, for example, has moved 220km northward from central England to southern Scotland in the last two decades.

An uphill struggle

There is also evidence that more species seem to be moving up mountains than down, explained conservation biologist Chris Thomas from the University of York, UK, who led the study.

But studies had stopped short of showing that rising temperatures are responsible for these shifts in range, he added.

Now he and his team have made this link.

Analysing the range shifts of more than 2,000 species – ranging from butterflies to birds, algae to mammals – across Europe, North and South America and Malaysia over the last four decades, they show that organisms that experience the greatest change in temperatures move the fastest.

The team found that on average organisms are shifting their home ranges at a rate of 17km per decade away from the equator; three times the speed previously thought.

Organisms also moved uphill by about 1m a year.

“Seeing that species are able to keep up with the warming is a very positive finding,” said biologist Terry Root from Stanford University in California, US.

She added that it seemed that species were able to seek out cooler habitats as long as there was not an obstacle in their way, like a highway.

Out of range

But what about the animals that already live at the poles, or at the top of mountains?

“They die,” said Dr Thomas. Take the polar bear, it does most of its hunting off the ice, and that ice is melting – this July was the lowest ever recorded Arctic ice cover – it has nowhere to go.

However, the loss of this one bear species, although eminently emblematic, seems insignificant when compared to the number of species that are threatened at the top of tropical mountains.

On Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, Dr Thomas’ graduate student, I-Ching Chen, has been following the movement of Geometrid moths uphill as temperatures increase. Their natural ranges have shifted by 59m in 42 years.

These moths “don’t have options; they are being forced up, and at some point they will run out of land,” reflected Dr Thomas.

The British scientist said that it was really too early to start generalising about the characteristics of the species that had shifted their distribution to stay within their optimal temperature range.

“But we know that the species which have expanded the most and fastest are the species that are not particularly fussy about where they live,” he told BBC News.

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