Traffic noise is 'bad for foraging bats'

Noise "degrades" bat habitat for 50-60m either side of a busy highway

Traffic noise reduces bats' ability to locate their prey, say scientists.

Researchers in Germany found that road noise affected the bats' ability to listen for the "rustling sound" of the beetles and spiders they feed on.
This is the first study to examine the impact of traffic on predators that listen for their prey.
The researchers report in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B that the same effect could be true for other "acoustic predators", including owls.
Greater mouse-eared bats eat large, ground-running creatures, such as carabid beetles, hunting spiders and centipedes.
With their remarkably sensitive hearing, the bats detect and track down their prey by listening for the faint rustling sounds they produce when walking.
The bats are protected under the European Habitats directive, so the scientists' aim was to measure how any planned highways might affect their habitat.
To do this, they set up a flight test.
"We attempted to simulate the bats' foraging behaviour in our flight room," explained lead researcher Bjorn Siemers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen.
In the wild, the bats fly about one metre above ground listening for rustling sounds.

The flight experiment simulated the foraging behaviour of bats

"We had an array of 64 plates [on the floor of the flight room] each containing a speaker through which we could play this rustling sound," explained Dr Siemers.
When a bat landed on the right plate - the one from which the sound was being played - there would be a food reward waiting for it.
"On average it took five seconds for the bats to find the right plate," said Dr Siemers.
But when the team introduced traffic noise - via more loud speakers - into the flight room, the bats' performance declined.
Under the "strongest noise profiles" - which mimicked the sound of a busy highway just a few metres away - the bats took an average of 25 seconds to locate their treat.
'Degraded habitat'
And in almost half of those trials, the animals failed to locate the food.
"But even with the sound of a busy highway seven and a half metres away, they could still forage," said Dr Siemers.
"We were astonished by how well they coped with the noise, but their efficiency was greatly reduced."
Noise levels mimicking traffic up to 50m away affected the bats' ability to locate a meal.
This means, the researchers say, that each highway "degrades" an area of 50-60m of foraging habitat either side.
"It might not sound like much," Dr Siemers said, "but when you look at the thousands of kilometres of highway in a country like Germany, it adds up to quite a lot.

New Zealand: Emperor penguin 'recovered' after surgery

 

"Happy Feet", the lost penguin, could get back to Antarctica early next month

 

A young emperor penguin found washed up on a New Zealand beach is recovering well and could swim home next month.

Staff at Wellington zoo said results of an X-ray and blood test showed "Happy Feet", as it has been named, is fine after endoscopic surgery.
The penguin was found on Peka Peka beach, about 60km (37 miles) north of Wellington - some 3,000km from its home in Antarctica.
Experts had been reluctant to intervene as the bird appeared to be healthy.
However, it later grew lethargic and was operated on to remove sand from its stomach.
A Zoo spokeswoman, Kate Baker, said the penguin has gained about 4kg (9lb).
It was given a first swim at the zoo earlier this week, in salt water that was cooled to below 0C (32F).
Crowds have been flocking to the zoo to see the bird - the first such arrival of an Emperor penguin in New Zealand in at least 44 years.
The bird's plight has attracted worldwide attention.
Hundreds of people had gathered to watch a leading gastroenterologist from Wellington Hospital perform the endoscopy on the bird at the zoo in late June.
To help it feel more at home, the penguin is being kept in a room chilled to about 8C. There is a bed of ice for it to sleep on.
Zoo staff said the bird would probably be released offshore from the south end of the country early next month.

Dark winters 'led to bigger human brains and eyeballs'

 

Researchers measured skulls from the 1800s

Humans living at high latitude have bigger eyes and bigger brains to cope with poor light during long winters and cloudy days, UK scientists have said.

The Oxford University team said bigger brains did not make people smarter.
Larger vision processing areas fill the extra capacity, they write in the Royal Society's Biology Letters journal.
The scientists measured the eye sockets and brain volumes of 55 skulls from 12 populations across the world, and plotted the results against latitude.
Lead author Eiluned Pearce told BBC News: "We found a positive relationship between absolute latitude and both eye socket size and cranial capacity."
The team, from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, used skulls dating from the 1800s kept at museums in Oxford and Cambridge.
The skulls were from indigenous populations ranging from Scandinavia to Australia, Micronesia and North America.
Largest brain cavities The largest brain cavities came from Scandinavia, while the smallest were from Micronesia.
Eiluned Pearce said: "Both the amount of light hitting the Earth's surface and winter day-lengths get shorter as you go further north or south from the equator.
"We found that as light levels decrease, humans are getting bigger eye sockets, which suggests that their eyeballs are getting bigger.

 

Barn owls are nocturnal hunters

 

"They are also getting bigger brains, because we found this increase in cranial capacity as well.
"In the paper, we argue that having bigger brains doesn't mean that high-latitude humans are necessarily smarter. It's just they need bigger eyes and brains to be able to see well where they live."
The work indicates that humans are subject to the same evolutionary trends that give relatively large eyes to birds that sing first during the dawn chorus, or species such as owls that forage at night.
Co author Prof Robin Dunbar said: "Humans have only lived at high latitudes in Europe and Asia for a few tens of thousands of years, yet they seem to have adapted their visual systems surprisingly rapidly to the cloudy skies, dull weather and long winters we experience at these latitudes."
The team took into account the overall body size of each individual by measuring the foramen magnum - the hole in the base of the skull that attaches to the spinal column.
They also controlled for the possibility that the larger eye sockets were needed for extra fat around the eyeball to insulate them from freezing temperatures.
The team intends to do more work on establishing a firm link between eyeball size and enhanced visual processing areas in the brain, and to replicate the link found in the 55 original skulls with further study on specimens from other museums.

Less educated 'will age faster'

 

X chromosome: Telomeres are shown in red

People with fewer qualifications are prone to age more quickly, a study which looked at 400 men and women says.

DNA evidence suggests cellular ageing is more advanced in adults with no qualifications compared with those who have a university degree.
Experts think education might help people lead more healthy lives.
The British Heart Foundation said the London-based study, in journal Brain, Behaviour and Immunity, reinforced the need to tackle social inequalities.
The connection between health and socioeconomic status is well established.
Those from poor backgrounds are more likely to smoke more, take less exercise and have less access to good quality healthcare, compared with more wealthy people.
But the new study suggests that education might be a more precise determinant of a person's long term health rather than their current income and social status.
The researchers suggest that education may enable people to make better decisions that affect their long term health.

It's not acceptable that where you live or how much you earn - or lesser academic attainment - should put you at greater risk of ill health”

Professor Jeremy Pearson Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation

They also speculate that well qualified people might be under less long-term stress, or be better able to deal with stress.

Professor Andrew Steptoe, from University College London, who led the study, said: "Education is a marker of social class that people acquire early in life, and our research suggests that it is long-term exposure to the conditions of lower status that promotes accelerated cellular ageing."
Professor Steptoe's team took blood from more than 400 men and women aged between 53 and 75.
They then measured the length of sections of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes.
These sections - called "telomeres" - cap chromosomes, protecting them from damage. Shorter telomeres are thought to be an indicator of faster ageing.
The results showed that people with lower educational attainment had shorter telomeres, indicating that they may age faster.
They also indicated that telomere length was not affected by a person's social and economic status later in life, as was previously thought.
Social factors Professor Stephen Holgate, chairman of the Medical Research Council's Population and Systems Medicine Board, said the key implication of the study backs up the main message from long-term studies funded by the Medical Research Council for over half a century.
"Your experiences early in life can have important influences on your health," he explained.
"Whilst - as with all observational research - it is difficult to establish the root causes of the findings, this study does provide evidence that being educated to a higher level can benefit you more than in the job market alone."
Professor Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said the research reinforces the need to tackle social inequalities to combat ill-health.
He said: "It's not acceptable that where you live or how much you earn - or lesser academic attainment - should put you at greater risk of ill health."
The researchers were based primarily at University College London, but also collaborated with experts at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff and the University of California, San Francisco.

Molecular scalpel hope for Duchenne muscular dystrophy

 

Muscle fibres (purple) are replaced by fat (black) in muscular dystrophy.

A 'molecular scalpel' shows promise in patients with a deadly muscle wasting condition, according to researchers.

The gene for the protein dystrophin is damaged in people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
A drug trial on 19 children, published in the Lancet, used the 'scalpel' to removed the damage and restore dystrophin production.
The charity Muscular Dystrophy Campaign said there was "real hope for the future".
Duchenne muscular dystrophy affects one in every 3,500 newborn boys.
Throughout life the muscle wastes away and children can need a wheelchair by the age of 10. The condition can become life-threatening before the age of 30, when it affects the muscles needed to breathe and pump blood around the body.
New approach The instructions for making a protein are in the genetic code, but this can be disrupted by mutations or deletions in the code.
Stem cell and gene therapy research has tried to find ways of introducing a functional dystrophin gene.
This study tried to do the best it could with the damaged code.

Muscular dystrophy

• Muscular dystrophies are a group of more than 20 different genetic neuromuscular disorders
• The most common, Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), affects about one in 3,500 boys
• About 100 boys are born with the condition in the UK each year.
• Duchenne muscular dystrophy is caused by problems in a gene on the X chromosome that makes a protein called dystrophin, found in muscle fibres
• Muscle fibres break down and are gradually lost
• Another form - Becker muscular dystrophy - has similar but milder symptoms

The researchers at the Institute of Child Health at University College London injected tailored pieces of antisense RNA - the scalpel.

This removed a piece of the genetic code allowing it to be matched up either side of the mutation.
The result is a shorter, but still functional, dystrophin.
In the trial, seven out of the 19 children had some degree of dystrophin production restored - all of them were receiving the highest doses.
Professor Francesco Muntoni, lead researcher, told the BBC: "The best result was 20% of normal dystrophin levels. That is quite remarkable considering the study was for 12 weeks.
"I've worked with patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy for many years and this is the first time we can say with confidence that we've made a significant breakthrough towards finding a targeted treatment."
However, he said that as the scalpel was tailored to a specific mutation it could not benefit everyone, in this case around 13% of patients.

"The second most common mutation affects 11% - which needs another scalpel."
Dr Marita Pohlschmidt, director of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, said the study was "quite a big deal".
"If we can change severe symptoms in Duchenne into something milder, that would be fantastic.
"We have fought to find a treatment for this devastating condition for the past 50 years. Today we can say with real confidence that we're going to win that battle. Parents of these boys can have real hope for the future."

Fossil 'is first pregnant lizard'

 

The lizard was just days from giving birth when it died and was buried

A 120-million-year-old fossil is the oldest pregnant lizard ever discovered, according to scientists.

The fossil, found in China, is a very complete 30cm (12in) lizard with more than a dozen embryos in its body.
Researchers from University College London, who studied the fossil, say it was just days from giving birth when it died and was buried during the Cretaceous period.
The team reports the findings in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

When I examined it under the microscope, I could see all these little babies”

Prof Susan Evans University College London

 

The fossil is especially interesting to scientists because it is a reptile that produced live young rather than laying eggs.

Only 20% of living lizards and snakes produce live young, and this shows it is an ancient, if unusual, trait.
"I didn't think much of the fossil when I first saw it," said Prof Susan Evans, joint lead author of the paper, from University College London.
But when her colleague, Yuan Wang, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, examined the fossil he spotted the tiny remains of at least 15 almost fully developed embryos inside it.
"Sure enough, when I examined it under the microscope, I could see all these little babies," Prof Evans recalled.

 

The heads of at least 15 lizard embryos are visible inside the body of the fossil

 

The fossil is so well preserved that the minuscule teeth of the developing young are visible on very close inspection.
"This specimen is the oldest pregnant lizard we have seen," said Prof Evans.
"It implies physiological adaptations, like adequate blood supply to the embryos and very thin shells - or no shells at all - to allow oxygen supply, evolved very early on."
Up until now the fossil records only contained examples of marine lizards giving birth to live young.
Scientists thought that, in extinct reptiles, live birth was restricted to aquatic species, such as marine ichthyosaurs. These creatures would have been able to move through water with relative ease, even when heavily pregnant.

 

Most lizard species, such as iguanas, lay eggs

 

Prof Evans said: "We do know that this lizard lived near to water and we think it likely that they could swim even though they primarily lived on land.
"This would make sense as a pregnant lizard would be less constrained by carrying offspring - she'd be able to escape into water if a hungry dinosaur came along."
The fossil comes from world famous rocks of the Jehol Group in north-eastern China, where the fine limestone there has been worn away to gradually reveal hundreds of exquisite specimens of dinosaurs, but also fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, plants and invertebrates.
The mother lizard has been identified as a specimen of Yabeinosaurus, a large, slow-growing and relatively primitive lizard.

Chimpanzees' 66 gestures revealed

Previous studies estimated that chimps used about 30 different gestures

Wild chimpanzees use at least 66 distinct gestures to communicate with each other, according to scientists.

A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews in Scotland filmed a group of the animals in order to decipher this "gestural repertoire".
The team then studied 120 hours of footage of the chimps interacting, looking for signs that the animals were intentionally signalling to each other.
The findings are published in the journal Animal Cognition.
Previous studies on captive chimps have suggested the animals have about 30 different gestures.
"So this [result] shows quite a large repertoire," lead researcher Dr Catherine Hobaiter told BBC News.
"We think people previously were only seeing fractions of this, because when you study the animals in captivity you don't see all their behaviour.
"You wouldn't see them hunting for monkeys, taking females away on 'courtships', or encountering neighbouring groups of chimpanzees."
Dr Hobaiter spent 266 days observing and filming a group of chimpanzees in Budongo Conservation Field Station, Uganda.
"I've spent two years studying these animals, so they know me,"
she said. "I follow them through the forest and they just ignore me completely and get on with their daily lives."
She and her colleague, Professor Richard Byrne, scrutinised the footage and categorised each distinct gesture.
They looked for clear signs that the animals were making deliberate movements that were intended to generate a response from another animal.
"We looked to see if the gesturer was looking at their audience," explained Professor Byrne.
"And we looked for persistence; if their action did not produce a result, they would repeat it."
The team is still studying the footage for the next stage of their project - to figure out what each gesture means.
For some of these gestures, the meaning seems obvious to us, perhaps because - as great apes- we make similar movements. A chimp will often beckon to another group member, or a youngster will hand shake at another juvenile to entice it to play.
Gesture dictionary

Chimpanzees' 66 gestures revealed

In one piece of footage captured by Dr Hobaiter, a mother reaches with her left arm towards her daughter.
"The mother wants to move away and is gesturing to request that her daughter 'climbs on' her," Dr Hobaiter explained.
"She could just grab her daughter, but she doesn't. She reaches and holds the gesture while waiting for a response."
When the youngster starts to approach, the mother repeats the gesture and adds a facial expression - a "bare-teeth grin", at which point the daughter climbs on and they move away.
"But actions often have effects that their maker did not intend," said Professor Byrne.
"So to understand the intended meaning, it's no good just discovering a gesture's typical effect. We have to look for what effect makes the signaller stop gesturing and appear satisfied and content with the outcome, to be sure that that was what they intended."
The results have provided clues about the origins of chimps' gestures, suggesting that they are a common system of communication across the species, rather than each movement being a learned custom or ritual within one social group.
In fact, by comparing these observations with those of gestures made by gorillas and orangutans, the researchers showed there was significant overlap in the signals used throughout the family of great apes.
Dr Hobaiter said: This supports our belief that the gestures that apes use (and maybe some human gestures too) are derived from ancient shared ancestry of all the great ape species alive today."