Distinguished frogs
It seems, say Chatmongkon Suwannapoom and Maslin Osathanunkul, that a great way to tell apart one form of fanged frog from one other is to do melting evaluation.
Their report, “Distinguishing fanged frogs (Limnonectes) species (Amphibia: Anura: Dicroglossidae), from Thailand using high resolution melting analysis“, explains how they achieved the “fast and correct identification of six species of Limnonectes of the L. kuhlii complicated”.
The factor they melted was a selected area of RNA from the ribosomes of every frog. Plotting the temperatures at which the frogs’ ribosomes’ RNA does or doesn’t soften creates a separate, simply distinguishable curve for every form of frog.
Eyeballing, the technologically easier method utilized by frog scientists again when frog scientists have been referred to as “naturalists”, has its limits. Melting exceeds a few of these limits.
Cats on hashish
The complete results of hashish – like, come to consider it, the total results of something – on people nonetheless maintain some mysteries.
So it’s with hashish and cats. Chloe Lyons and her colleagues on the College of Saskatchewan, Canada, have made some progress concerning the cats.
Writing in Frontiers in Veterinary Science, they describe what occurred once they gave 12 cats two oral doses of a hashish natural extract (the acronym for which is CHE). Some cats obtained a dosage greater than double what the others received.
Reader Stefan Lalonde factors out a research spotlight: a photograph of a lavishly drooling cat. A second cat additionally drooled. The report states: “these two cats clearly hypersalivated”.
The scientists specific shock concerning the cats: “Salivation shortly after dosing was noticed in two cats within the excessive dose group; these animals had considerably decrease cannabinoid concentrations than different cats on this group.”
The workforce speculates concerning the mechanism that induced the drooling. “Cats are infamous for ‘spitting up’ oral medicines which they conceal of their oral cavity, and it couldn’t be confirmed that every one cats swallowed the complete CHE dose,” the researchers write. “Any oil-based CHE retained within the oral cavity could have prompted the cat to salivate, and subsequently been expelled from the mouth.”
This sudden twist within the who-drools information hints that the connection between starvation and hashish consumption in cats could also be complicated.
Or that these two specific cats have been eccentric, a technique or one other.
A sticky concern
At sea, there may be spice. Suggestions nonetheless delights in how oceanographers determined that some ocean water will be referred to as “spicy” and different ocean water “minty” (8 October 2022). Right here’s additional delight: within the air, there may be “stickiness”.
Reader Earle Spamer brings information of the latter. “Right here’s a paper that brandishes a ‘new’ variable in local weather research: stickiness,” he writes. “An terrible lot of arithmetic to elucidate what my grandmother knew simply by sitting on the entrance porch.”
The paper is “Stickiness: A new variable to characterize the temperature and humidity contributions toward humid heat” by Catherine Ivanovich at Columbia College and her colleagues, printed within the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.
“We derive a novel thermodynamic state variable named ‘stickiness’,” they write. That is “analogous to the oceanographic variable ‘spice’ (which quantifies the relative contributions of temperature and salinity to a given water density)”. Stickiness “quantifies the relative contributions of temperature and particular humidity” to the extra conventional manner of measuring temperature.
Phrase by frequent phrase, scientific specialties adapt acquainted, sticky previous concepts and names to assist expose and discover the easy-to-overlook complexities of the universe.
Ketchup cardio declare
Suggestions’s latest insights on ketchup (16 March) set at the very least one reader’s coronary heart racing.
David Watson writes: “Years in the past, earlier than the appearance of disposable adhesive electrodes, I used to be having an electrocardiogram [ECG]. The electrodes then have been little rubber cups suckered onto your pores and skin utilizing a conductive gel. I remarked to the heart specialist that the gel was most likely ridiculously costly. He mentioned it was, and a gaggle had researched cheaper alternate options. They discovered one with the fitting mixture of floor rigidity, viscosity and conductivity. Sadly, it was low on affected person acceptability – ketchup, in fact.”
Documentation of that physician’s declare (which can have been only a jest) appears scarce. Suggestions has to date discovered solely a pooh-poohing, in a 1981 research by Andrew P. B. Lee, “Biotechnological principles of monitoring“, printed in Worldwide Anesthesiology Clinics.
Lee wrote: “Most electrode jellies offered are not any simpler than Ok-Y jelly or tomato ketchup at reducing the skin-electrode impedance.”
In case you discover convincing proof in favour of ketchup’s use as a conductive gel for electrocardiograms, please ship it over.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the journal Annals of Inconceivable Analysis. Earlier, he labored on uncommon methods to make use of computer systems. His web site is improbable.com
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