I was recently invited by the founder of Barnmice.com (a successful international equestrian community) to contribute to their website with a weekly equine science news column.
The column will be coming out every Friday and will be a round-up of the latest science news from the equestrian world and it will also feature an equine science trivia question at the end.
My first post has just gone live on the website, so make sure you check it out here.
Research published today in Science Express has discovered why Scotland’s Soay sheep have become smaller despite the evolutionary benefits of having a large body.
The study was unveiled at the 2009 World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ) today and links climate change to the shrinking sheep.
Image Courtesy of Wikipedia
Scientists first reported that the wild breed of Soay sheep had become smaller in 2007, but the reason behind the shrinking on the Scottish island of Hirta was a mystery. Now researchers from a range of British Universities have collaborated to discover that due to climate change, the conditions on Hirta are becoming less challenging.
This means that slower-growing, smaller sheep are now more likely to survive the harsh winters than before – climate change has effectively changed the evolutionary process. When this is combined with the newly discovered ‘young-mum effect’ in which young ewes are producing smaller offspring the scientists were able to fully understand why the average sheep size was falling.
According to traditional evolutionary theory, over time sheep size should increase since larger animals are more likely to survive and reproduce than smaller sheep and their offspring usually inherit their larger size. But researchers found that among the Soay sheep their average body size has decreased by 5% over the last 24 years.
Professor Tim Coulson, from Imperial College London, believes the shrinking sheep are a direct result from the shorter, milder winters caused by global climate change. The warmer weather means that lambs no longer need to put on as much weight in their first months of life to survive to their first birthday.
“In the past, only the big, healthy sheep and large lambs that had piled on weight in their first summer could survive the harsh winters on Hirta. But now, due to climate change, grass for food is available for more months of the year and survival conditions are not so challenging.”
This work was carried out in collaboration with scientists from the Universities of Leeds, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Standford and was funded in the UK by the National Environment Research Council.
One of my dogs - does she look guilty?
New research has suggested that the “guilty look” on a dog’s face is purely the imagination of the human owner.
Researchers at Barnard College in New York believe their new research shows that dog-owners wrongly claim they can read the tell-tale guilty look on their pet’s face when it has done something wrong.
The scientists found that they were able to trick owners into thinking their innocent pets has misbehaved and then the owners would claim to see this guilty look. They also discovered that pet owners are not able to read their dogs’ body language as well as they themselves might have thought.
The study, led by Alexandra Horowitz’s, assistant professor at Barnard College, looked at how dog owners interpreted their pets’ expressions when they were led to believe that the dog had stolen and eaten a forbidden treat. The researchers found that owners projected human values onto their pets and their perception of this ‘guilty look’ had to link with whether the dog had really stolen the treat. If the owners were informed their dog had stolen the treat, even when they had not done anything wrong, they claimed to see this guilty expression.
When there was any change in the dogs’ expression it was seen to be a subsequent reflection of changes to the human’s emotions and if the dog was told of (despite being innocent) then some dogs seemed to show an “admonished” look which their owners mistakenly took as an admission of guilt.
As a keen horse-rider, I’ve always advocated that riding is good for your health and fitness, but now it seems research carried out on horses could have real impact on the world of injured sportsmen and women.
Researchers at Cambridge have discovered that a revolutionary stem cell treatment for equine tendon injuries could have some impact on human injuries.
VetCell Bioscience in Cambridge carried out tests on more than 1,500 horses with tendon problems and found that half of them were less likely to re-injure themselves over a three-year period. Traditional treatments, involving box rest, icing and anti-inflammatory drugs were not found to be as effective.
The stem cells used in the treatment come directly from the patient themselves and do not carry the same controversy as those generated from embryos. Millions of the patient’s stem cells are injected directly into the injured tendon or ligament to aid the body’s natural healing process.
If human trials in 2011 are found to be successful, the development could mean that footballers and other athletes will be able to come back to full fitness more quickly following injury. David Mountford, chief operating officer of VetCell Bioscience in Cambridge also hopes that “the treatment could alleviate or cure long-term tendon injuries in older human patients, such as prolonged shoulder injuries.”
Professor Nicola Maffulli, a sports medicine and orthopaedic consultant believes it is inspiring that clinical veterinary science is providing novel approaches for human medicine. She told Horse & Hound:
“We normally see the translation happening the other way around. I am very excited to be involved in the human studies and hope that the results will herald a new era in the treatment of musculoskeletal soft tissue injuries. At present the management of human tendinopathy [tendon injury] is more an art than a science but this approach could potentially reverse that situation.”
Researchers in South Korea announced at the end of last week that they had successfully created four beagle puppies that can glow red after using cloning techniques.
An innocent looking Beagle
Each of the four dogs is named “Ruppy” (a combination of the words “ruby” and “puppy”) and initially look like normal beagle puppies. On closer inspection it can be seen that the dogs’ nails and thick-skinned abdomens look red to the naked eye and when under ultraviolet light glow red.
Although previous experiments have accomplished the same feats in rats, mice and cats the researchers at Seoul National University are the first to create transgenic dogs carrying fluorescent genes.
Using skin cells from a normal beagle, the scientists added fluorescent genes and then inserted the cells into eggs which were implanted in a surrogate mother (a mixed breed bitch).
The significance of this experiment is that it shows scientists are capable of successfully inserting genes with a specific trait. This could lead to them being able to manipulate their knowledge of genetic engineering so that they can implant other (non-fluorescent genes) to treat specific diseases.
However this experiment raises many questions. As well as the ethical concerns of engineering animals in seemingly pointless and humorous ways it leads to concerns of the ways in which scientists can engineer living creatures. In years to come will it be possibly for quirky parents to not only make their children clever, tall and healthy, but will quirky characteristics – maybe glowing green so that they can spot them amongst their friends easier? As farcical as it may sound, it may indeed be possible in years to come – humans may start looking less human-like and more alien.
There are already some concerns about the dog breeding industry (look at the BBC’s retraction of television coverage of Crufts) – will this piece of research be the start of more breeding manipulation – will pink Labradors soon be the latest fashion with the likes of Paris Hilton?
Image by Ernesto Azuar Valenzuela (Wikipedia)
…sadly not any time soon, but scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology have managed to create a power-generating jacket which when worn by a hamster can produce very small amounts of renewable (and relatively waste free!) electricity.
Professor Zhong Lin Wang a researcher in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering confirmed that:
“We believe this is the first demonstration of using a live animal to produce current with nanogenerators….This study shows that we really can harness human or animal motion to generate current.”
Their work also involved using the same nanotechnology to harness energy from finger tapping (such as users of hand-held mobile devices like phones and Blackberry) and convert it into electrical currents. It is hoped that in the future the users’ own typing might be able to power some of the device using the conversion of human biomechanical energy into electrical.
Image courtesy of Science Daily and Zhong Lin Wang
Their work, published online in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters, involved a nanogenerator powered by the piezoelectric effect. This effect is the ability of some chemicals to generate electrical charges (and thus a current) when they experience a mechanical stress, for example when they are bent or flexed. Wang and his colleagues made the nanogenerators using zinc oxide wires coated in the a flexible polymer and these single-wired generators could then be attached to the joint of an index finger, or in the hamster’s case, 4 could be combined into a jacket which could be worn by the hamster.
Although their research is certainly interesting, it is worth nothing that to power a Bluetooth headset thousands of these single-wire generators would be required. So the future of biomechanically produced electricity and a world where we can power our lives through our own movement is still a long way away.
Researchers from China and Japan have discovered that butterflies have small solar ‘cells’ on their wings.
Their work published in the issue of ACS’ Chemistry of Materials journal discusses their discovery that butterfly wings have tiny scales which are capable of collecting solar energy. They hope their findings might provide new ways to design more efficient solar cells for use on homes and businesses.
Currently the most efficient solar cells are known as Grätzel cells (after their inventor Michael Grätzel) which are a type of dye-sensitized solar cell. These work using semiconductor technology and are thin-film solar cells, which are cheap to produce and can be made to be flexible. These engineered cells are the most efficient at converting light into electrical energy of those currently used – they have an efficiency as high as 10%.
Copyright of Michael Apel
However, the scientists work has discovered that particular scales on the wings of butterflies are ‘nanobiologically-tuned’ such that they can absorb sunlight and allow the butterfly to survive in colder conditions or regions of higher-altitude. The efficiency of these cells is even higher than the Grätzel cells.
Researcher Di Zhang and his colleagues used the butterfly wings as moulds (having to soak them in chemicals and bake them in an oven at 500 degrees Celsius) to produce a suitable photoanode which electricity generated from light could pass. They were then able to study the structure of these photoanodes using scanning and transmission microscopes. The hope is that the scientists will be able to use the structure of the butterfly wings to help develop commercially viable solar cells based on similar principles.
In the meantime, environmentalists and green activists will have to bite their tongues and refrain from outcries of butterfly cruelty if they wish for renewable energy research to continue!
Since I was 7 years old I’ve ridden horses and for the last 9 years been the proud owner of my very own, so a knowledge of the gaits of horses and other four-legged animals is pretty much second nature to me now, so I was interested in this article on Science Daily which discusses the results of a new study that shows a rather alarming number of anatomists, taxidermists and, perhaps less surprisingly, toymakers do not get the walking gait of horses and other animals such as dogs correct.
The study which was published in Current Biology on 27th January, was carried out by Hungarian researchers following on from previous research which had discovered that horses’ limbs were often wrongly illustrated. The scientists decided to see if such errors also applied to museums, veterinary books and toy shops by collecting hundreds of walking portrayals and seeing if the limbs were correctly positioned.
With the correct walking behaviour of quadruped animals described and published over 120 years ago by the pioneer Eadweard Muybridge in the 1880s, the researchers were rather alarmed to discover that over 50% of their samples showed errors:
We found that almost half of the depictions are wrong. This high error rate in walking illustrations in natural history museums and veterinary anatomy books is particularly unexpected in a time where high-speed cameras and the internet offer ideal possibilities to obtain reliable quantitative information about tetrapod walking.
[Horváth, G. et al, "Erroneous quadruped walking depictions in natural history museum", Current Biology 2009]
The method of walking is virtually universal between all four-legged animals since it provides maximum stability. Small differences only in the exact timing of the steps exist between animals. All four-legged animals step first with their left hindleg, then their left foreleg before finally their right hindleg and lastly their right foreleg. When walking fairly slowly, the dog or horse’s body is supported by 3 of it’s feet – effectively forming a triangle. They are more stable if their centre of mass is closer to the centre of the triangles 3 points. If children’s toys followed the biomechanics more closely, it would be likely that they would fall over less. However, ignoring this practicality, it is rather more imperative that natural history museums and anatomical textbooks follow the scientific correctness more rigorously!
Interestingly, despite the carelessness of some toymakers, Horváth did observe that Holloywood movies, such as Lord of the Rings, generally do a more accurate job of depicting walking animals!
Anyone who would like to read a little more about the biomechanics should read the article on Discover Magazine’s website called “The Flesh of Physics” which has some great graphical illustrations and also some slow-motion video clips of horses galloping allowing their footfall to be accurately observed (NB. The footfall during galloping is obviously not the same as when walking despite them both being a four-beat movement)