Well, this is just horrible.

Scientists have discovered parasites can drive fish from inside their eyeballs – to their own death.

In fact, the parasites, eye fluke Diplostomum pseudospathaceum, control their host for most of its life cycle.

The first stage was discovered back in 2015 by Mikhail Gopko at the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution in Moscow, who found that young rainbow trout infected by young eye fluke were less active and less likely to be caught by dip-nets.

That works for the young eye fluke because they need their host to survive.

They "are too young and innocent to infect a next host", Gopko told New Scientist.

It’s not the parasite in question, but here’s a pretty horrible example of another type of a fluke living in the eye of a freshwater bully, a fish native to New Zealand:

But a new study by the same team shows the creepy way in which the eye fluke escapes a watery grave as it gets older in order to keep the life cycle turning.

When the eye fluke is ready to reproduce, the host fish suddenly starts swimming a whole lot more, and closer to the surface of the water.

Eye flukes might live inside fish, but they reproduce inside birds. And forcing their hosts to the top of the water makes them a whole lot more likely to find their way into a bird’s gut system.

And when the team simulated bird swoops over the fish, the fish froze, as was natural, but the infected fish started swimming again sooner than those not infected.

Once in the bird’s gut, eye fluke reproduce and their eggs are shed in the bird’s faeces, and hatch in water. They then seek out snail hosts, multiply in the snails, and then start searching for a host fish.

Once they land and penetrate the fish’s skin, the young fluke starts working their way towards the eye lens, where they can strongly influence their host’s behaviour to suit their reproductive needs.

Exactly how they do that is yet to be determined.

Isn’t nature wonderful?

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NOW WATCH: Animated map of what Earth would look like if all the ice melted

Shannon D. asks: How come people who smell really bad can never seem to smell their own stench?

Have you ever sat next to a person who lost their sense of smell? Or, at least, you assume so as the eye-watering fragrance wafting from them is so overpowering that the nausea it induces makes you appreciate the subtle scent of a dryer sheet… If so, you might wonder, what causes a person to become blind to their own smell?

Technically referred to as olfactory fatigue, olfactory habituation, or odor adaptation, being “nose-blind” might appear to be something of a defect, but the ability to have the scent of a specific fragrance (such as your own) dwindle over time is very beneficial. Imagine tip-toeing through the tulips, enjoying the lovely aroma around you along with your own equally lovely stench. If these smells didn’t diminish over time, you might miss the new smell of a cougar about to use you as a tasty meal. Or, perhaps you’re the hunter and are trying to pick up the scent of your prey. In these sorts of scenarios that our sweaty, hunter-gatherer ancestors with deodorant-less armpits frequently found themselves in, scanning for new smells was much more useful than continuing to experience their own. The drawback is, of course, in more modern times perfume-Peggy doesn’t realize the overpowering nature of her cougar-scent…

But how does this work?

To begin with, in the back of your nasal cavity, about 2 ¾ inches or 7 centimeters above and behind your nostrils, lies a special grouping of cells called olfactory epithelium. These cells are attached to the olfactory bulb within the brain by olfactory neurons. At the end of each neuron lies a receptor cell. When microscopic molecules circulating within the air or molecules broken down in the act of chewing your food come into contact with a receptor cell, they attach. The process is called protein-ligand binding. Once attached, it will cause an electrical signal to be transmitted down the neuron to your brain. The signal your brain receives gives us the perception of smell.

There are around 350 genes (from the nearly 1,000 olfactory genes) that make olfactory receptors. Each gene produces a different type of receptor. Each specific receptor will react to a specific group of structurally similar molecules- molecules from coffee, tomatoes, or Peggy’s generously applied perfume, for example. A combination of several different receptors being activated will also be perceived as a different type of smell. In this way, your body can distinguish countless number of different odors.

(And note: it was once thought that humans were only able to recognize around 10,000 different fragrances. Dr. Leslie Vosshall and her colleagues at Rockefeller University, however, have recently shown humans are actually able to detect at least 1 trillion different smells, and this number might be too low by a long shot. Dr. Vosshall’s study only used 128 different types of odor molecules to achieve the nearly 1 trillion different sensations of smell. She points out that there are many more odor compounds found in nature than just the 128 she used.)

In any event, now that we know how our brains perceive smell, we can better understand olfactory fatigue. When an odor molecule attaches to a specific protein on a receptor cell (guanine nucleotide protein-coupled receptors), it causes a rush of sodium and calcium into the cell. This will create an electrical differential across the cell membrane that creates the impulse your brain perceives (depolarization). This rush of sodium and calcium (ions) goes through pathways known as CNG channels (cyclic nucleotide-gated ion channels).

The rapid influx of calcium will begin a cascade of chemistry that causes CNG channels to close. Once closed, similar odor molecules will be unable to activate the receptor and it will no longer send the electrical signal for the brain to perceive as smell. Specifically, the CNG channels associated with olfactory adaptation are CNGA4 and CNGB1b.

And for those who like the ultra-technical description, Dr.’s Jonathan Bradley, Dirk Reuter and Stephan Frings in their 2001 report published in the journal Science, explain:

We find that only in the presence of CNGA4 and CNGB1b, the two modulatory CNG sub-units of the olfactory CNG channel, can Ca2+-CaM bind rapidly to the open state… In ORNs, where CNG channels reach high levels of Po, the CNGA4 subunit facilitates Ca2+-CaM binding to open channels and, hence, transforms the negative feedback by Ca2+-CaM into the rapid and state-independent control mechanism that is needed for olfactory adaptation…

So, in more layman’s terms, olfactory fatigue occurs such that when you sense a specific odor, the receptors associated with that molecule can no longer be stimulated by similar molecules because the channels that create the electrical impulse will ultimately close. The result leaves only receptors that get stimulated by other molecules (different types of odors)- thus, your propensity to sense new smells more strongly, and the ones you get consistently bombarded with eventually no longer being detected at all. Congratulations, you’re now nose-blind.

This brings up the question of how one can rapidly reverse the effect of nose-blindness? Well, this is easier said than done reliably.

You might have seen that perfume shops often have bowls of coffee beans that they say will help reset your nose- a nasal-palate-cleanser so to speak. The theory behind this seems legitimate. If attached odor molecules cause nose-blindness, simply knock off those molecules and you should be good as new. There are around 28 different types of molecules associated with coffee odors. If one or more of these odorants are stronger than the ones causing the nose to be blind, then maybe they will help reset the neurons.

Unfortunately for perfume shop coffee bean suppliers, studies on the effectiveness of coffee on odor adaptation have shown that coffee is no better at reducing the effects of olfactory fatigue than simply taking in a deep breath of fresh air.

Another theory on reversing olfactory fatigue revolves around returning your olfactory receptors to their baseline, namely, the smell of your own skin. You achieve this by inhaling unscented portions of your skin. Once the system is more or less “reset,” this should allow for the new smell to be better perceived.

While this oft’ suggested method seems reasonable enough, unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any studies looking at how well this works, or if it actually works at all. You will, however, find countless anecdotal accounts advocating for its effectiveness.

In the end, being nose-blind can be both helpful, as in the case of filtering out your own garlic breath (see: Why Does Garlic Make Your Breath Smell Bad?) so you don’t have to smell it, or annoying, as in the case of other people having to smell your garlic breath because you aren’t aware of it… or on a similar note, perfume-Peggy and her incessant need to bath in Chanel #5 because she’s become immune to the scent. And if you want to reverse the effect to actually be able to smell a noxious odor about yourself (so-as not to become perfume-Peggy or garlic-Greg), unfortunately, it appears at least for now that there isn’t any scientific silver bullet method to reliably achieve this.

This once again leaves us with the age-old method of just asking someone nearby, “Do I smell bad?” and hope they ignore normal social graces and answer honestly.  Perhaps in future our robotic personal assistants will have the necessary sensors built in to be able to help us out there without concern for committing a social faux pas.

SEE ALSO: Scientists are turning loose 40,000 sex-hungry mosquitos in Florida to fight Zika

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NOW WATCH: Here’s how tracking dogs know which direction to go

Early in his career, Justin Schmidt realized he had a problem. There was no scale that measured the pain of insect stings.

Schmidt, a budding entomologist, had just returned to the University of Georgia from a trip around the country with his zoologist wife.

They'd been collecting different species of harvester ants —"nasty stinging insects whose venom chemistry was unknown," as he describes them in his fascinating book, "The Sting of the Wild."

To learn the details of the venom for his dissertation on the chemistry of harvester stings, they had to analyze large numbers of the creatures, which meant getting up close and personal with them.

Debbie, Schmidt's wife, describes her first harvester sting in the book as a "deep ripping and tearing pain, as if someone were reaching below the skin and ripping muscles and tendons; except the ripping continued with each crescendo of pain."

After collecting buckets of the creatures, the plan was to analyze them and compare the venoms from different specimens. To assess venom, Schmidt needed to evaluate both toxicity and pain. Toxicity was straightforward —  existing measures could be used. But the pain scale had to be created.

Thus was born the "Schmidt Pain Scale for Stinging Insects." It's a four-point system, with a four being most painful. The scale is anchored by the well-known sting of a honey bee (rating a two) — something people all over the world could be familiar with. To go up or down a full point, a sting has to be discernably more or less painful than the stings on another level. Half points can be used for pricks that fall somewhere between levels.

Over the years, Schmidt added new species to the list. He mostly didn't try to get stung. It just happened, more than 1,000 times, from at least 83 different species that have been evaluated on the index.

We've picked out insects that will illustrate the full scope of the scale, including a few that demonstrate the worst of the worst:

SEE ALSO: A man who has been stung more than 1,000 times reveals the one bug you really want to avoid

Red fire ant

Scientific name: Solenopsis invicta

Range: Native to South America

Description: "Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch."

Pain level: 1

Western cicada killer

Scientific name: Sphecius grandis

Range: North America

Description: "Pain at first sight. Like poison oak, the more your rub, the worse it gets."

Pain level: 1.5

Western honey bee

Scientific name: Apis mellifera

Range: Native to Africa and Europe

Description: "Burning, corrosive, but you can handle it. A flaming match head lands on your arm and is quenched first with lye and then sulfuric acid."

Pain level: 2 (In the special case that you get stung on the tongue, that level rises to a 3 — "It's crawled into your soda can and stings you on the tongue. It's immediate, noisome, visceral, debilitating. For 10 minutes life is not worth living.")

In an article adroitly headlined "F*cked Up Video of a Clam," Kelly Faircloth of Jezebel introduced the Twitterverse to an unnerving video of a geoduck wriggling its way into a mound of sand.

The video, originally posted to Facebook by Oregon fly-fishing guide Kate Taylor to Facebook, is entrancingly awful to watch. 

The creature in the video is a Pacific razor clam, though it looks enough like a geoduck to befuddle even a knowledgeable biologist:

Digging into wet sand is a survival technique for the critter, according to Earth Touch News. If it stayed above the sand after being exposed by the waves, the clam would dry out. The moist beach can protect it.

Here's Earth Touch's explanation of the digging motion:

That wriggling noodle on the right side of the clam is the muscular foot, a structure that both pushes sand out of the way and acts as an anchor to pull the animal to the desired destination. On the other end is one of the siphons, tube-like straws that move water over the gills ... which brings us to the momentous eruption at the end of the clip. While many commenters online have suggested the clam is expelling the remnants of a large meal, that brown eruption is a combination of water and sand.

You can watch Taylor's full video below. You're going to want to watch until the end.

SEE ALSO: France's president-elect once blasted Trump in a message to US climate scientists: 'Please, come to France'

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NOW WATCH: Watch this time-lapse of two people eating Red Lobster's 'Endless Shrimp' for 8 hours

I recently came across an article by a fellow Inc. contributor that claimed waking up at 5 AM increases productivity. It sounds like solid advice. After all, Benjamin Franklin said, "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a person healthy, wealthy, and wise."

As a behavioral scientist, I had to ask: Is this true? Will you actually be better off waking up at 5 AM? After examining the research, I have to disagree. We're not all early risers. Unless you are biologically wired to wake early, you shouldn't force yourself. Here are three reasons why:

1. It could reduce happiness

A lot of successful people wake up early to get a head start on their work. According to circadian neuroscientist Russell Foster, there is no research that says waking up early makes you more productive. It also doesn't mean you'll be richer — there's no difference in socioeconomic status between late and early risers.

In fact, in a survey on what makes people happiest, the number one factor was getting enough sleep. Far below that was social interaction.

2. It goes against your biological nature

Dr. Michael Breus, also known as "The Sleep Doctor", stresses that our bodies are programmed to function best at certain times of the day. This time preference varies from person to person because we each have different biological clocks. In "The Power of When", Dr. Breus separates these preferences into four Chronotypes or categories — Dolphin, Lion, Bear, and Wolf.

• Lions are morning people that tend to rise with the sun.
• Bears are the most common or normal sleep pattern, in which you sleep at night and are up during the day.
• Dolphins never sleep well at all. In nature, dolphins only let half of their brain sleep at a time.
• Wolves stay up late at night working and are most productive during those hours.

Our biology influences what times of the day we are most productive. The overwhelming majority of all people are not built to consistently wake up at 5 AM.

Unless you are a Lion, built for waking up early, don't force yourself. You may be able to do it for a short time, but it is not sustainable. Eventually, you are going to crash.

3. You lose productivity

Waking up at an unnatural time for you can cause sleep deprivation. When you are tired, you lose productivity. You become more irritable and are less functional.

Studies estimate that the effects of sleep loss can mirror those of intoxication. In fact, one study found that after 17 to 19 hours without rest, people performed the same as or worse than someone who had a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level of 0.05 percent. Reaction times were 50 percent slower in people that were sleep deprived in comparison to those that had been drinking.

For those few people that are biologically predetermined early risers, waking up at 5 AM may be natural and helpful. However, the majority of us are built to sleep on a different cycle and trying to change it is like trying to fight gravity. No matter how high you jump you will always be pulled back down. Never feel bad because you aren't waking up at the crack of dawn. You wouldn't benefit from forcing yourself to do it anyway. In the long-term, it could negatively disrupt your biological sleep cycle and decrease happiness — without making you more efficient or giving anything truly valuable in return.

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NOW WATCH: This man spent 6 weeks working undercover in an iPhone factory in China — here's what it was like

Imagine being one of the paddle-boarders shown in a video released May 10 by the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

It's a clear, sunny day as you plod along on the water, when suddenly a police helicopter begins circling overhead. Within moments, a man's voice booms through a loudspeaker.

"Attention in the water, attention in the water: This is the Orange County Sheriff's department. Be advised state parks is asking us to make an announcement to let you know you are paddleboarding next to approximately 15 great white sharks," the voice says. "They are advising that you exit the water in a calm manner."

The helicopter then flies away, leaving you with this harrowing information.

Maintaining a "calm manner" would be next to impossible as you scramble to shore. However, a look at the statistical likelihood of dying from a shark bite should give you some solace. Sharks injure more people than they kill, but both events are extraordinarily rare — especially compared to other threats that people face.

In 2013, sharks killed only 10 people out of about 7 billion. In 2014, just three people lost their lives to the predators.

The numbers are getting lower each year as more sharks die as by-catch in fishing operations and get hunted for their dorsal fins.

The odds your death will be caused by a shark attack

Below is the average American's lifetime odds of death from a shark attack (in bold) compared to other threats we face.

The risks are ordered from the least likely to the most likely causes of death:

• Illegal immigrant terrorist — 1 in 138 million
• Shark attack — 1 in 8 million
• Asteroid strike (regional impact) — 1 in 1.6 million
• Stinging by hornets, wasps, and bees — 1 in 309,000
• Lightning — 1 in 174,00
• Bus, train, or streetcar — 1 in 160,000
• Earthquake — 1 in 130,000
• Dog attack — 1 in 115,000
• Legal execution —1 in 111,000
• Asteroid strike (global impact) — 1 in 75,000
• Cataclysmic storm — 1 in 63,700
• Tornado — 1 in 60,000
• Terrorism (foreign-born, all forms) — 1 in 45,800
• Sharp objects —0 1 in 30,900
• Animal attack or accident — 1 in 30,200
• Exposure to electricity, radiation, heat, and pressure — 1 in 14,700
• Heat wave — 1 in 10,800
• Airplane and spaceship incidents — 1 in 9,740
• Police/law enforcement — 1 in 8,360
• Accidental gunshot — 1 in 7,950
• Bicycling — 1 in 4,340
• Choking on food — 1 in 3,410
• Any force of nature — 1 in 3,120
• Assault by sharp object — 1 in 2,450
• Fire or smoke — 1 in 1,450
• Poisoning (liquid, gas, and solid) — 1 in 1,360
• Drowning — 1 in 1,180
• Motorcycle — 1 in 949
• Walking — 1 in 672
• Suffocation (choking, strangulation, blocked airway, etc.) — 1 in 608
• Car, van, and truck incidents — 1 in 565
• Assault by gun — 1 in 358
• Murder — 1 in 249
• Falling — 1 in 133
• Any motor vehicle incident — 1 in 113
• Suicide — 1 in 98
• Kidney disease — 1 in 85
• Influenza and pneumonia — 1 in 70
• Diabetes — 1 in 53
• Alzheimer's disease — 1 in 47
• Stroke — 1 in 31
• Accidents — 1 in 31
• Chronic lung disease — 1 in 27
• Any injury — 1 in 21
• Cancer — 1 in 7
• Heart disease — 1 in 7

These odds above are based on a previous analysis by Business Insider, and the data primarily come from a 2016 report by the National Safety Council and the National Center for Health Statistics' final 2013 report on causes of death in the US, which was released in February 2016.

However, these odds don't factor in a person's individual behaviors, age, sex, location, or other things that can affect risks — they're averages of the entire US population.

SEE ALSO: Here's how much sugar is crammed into the bestselling drinks in America

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NOW WATCH: These maps show where you're most likely to run into American wildlife that could kill you

Narwhals are an endangered species, with most of them residing in remote areas of Canada. Not much is known about the species of whale but new drone footage reveals at least one purpose for their mysterious tusks. 

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Recently, I spent a nasty several days cleaning out an apartment infested with bedbugs.

The bedbugs landed in my partner's former apartment (which she shared with her cousin) just weeks before she was supposed to move into mine. The critters announcing their arrival with a splash of red welts along her cousin's back. 

We spent a weekend taking apart furniture, spraying everything down with rubbing alcohol, and stacking piles of their possessions in the middle of the apartment for the exterminators. 

For me, the best part of the cleaning weekend was when the one-eyed Plott hound that lived in their apartment started retching uncontrollably, possibly from the stench of alcohol in the air, and I got to escape for a few hours to walk her to the vet. The vet mentioned that bedbugs don't really feed on or impact most household pets. Unlike lice, ticks, and fleas, bedbugs are an especially human-adapted species. They love our bald skin and penchant for draping our dens with all kinds of comfy hidey-holes where females can lay one to five nearly invisible eggs a day.

That got me wondering where and how our two species stumbled into our current, mutually-antagonistic relationship.

A bedbug infestation is as much an infestation of your mind as your house or apartment. Bedbugs don't leave behind any diseases, just ugly marks. And the critters are tiny, with even the adults nearly impossible to spot. Some people are immune to bedbug bites, and others won't find them for weeks after the deed was done. Even one pregnant female left alive can start an infestation from scratch.

The human-bedbug story between goes back more than 200,000 years. As Brooke Borel, who literally wrote the book on bedbugs, explained in 2015 for Popular Science, bedbugs do infest at least one other species: bats.

When early humans started sharing caves with bats, it seems, some bat-bed-bugs made the leap to humans. And some of those bedbugs enjoys the taste of our flesh enough to come out of those caves with us. They followed us through history, from ancient Egypt to England, Germany, and Greece, and then, by way of colonists, to North America.

The modern bedbug is human-adapted, and genetically distinct from the cousins it left behind with the bats.

We nearly had them beat in the 20th century. Growing up in the '90s and early 2000s, I never heard the creatures mentioned, except in that fragment of nursery rhyme Goodnight, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite.

That's because of the success of DDT. Invented in Germany in 1874, the colorless, nearly odorless synthetic chemical was put to work during World War II clearing cities and countrysides of mosquitoes, ticks, and, yes, bedbugs. Rates of infestation fell all over the world.

But DDT was a poisoned apple. As Rachel Carson first popularly claimed in her famous 1962 book Silent Spring, the chemical that saved so many lives from malaria and other bug-borne illnesses was also wiping out wildlife and threatening human populations with cancer. Decades of science have confirmed Carson's claims. (It's a hardy poison though; chemical signals of DDT still turn up in 99% of people tested by the Centers for Disease Control, as well as in the food supply.)

By 2001, countries all over the world were ready to get on board with a DDT ban. At that year's Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, the pesticide was outlawed all over the world with few exceptions.

The year 2001 is also a good marker for when bed bug infestations, almost unheard-of in the wealthy nations of the world at that point, began to climb. These days, over 99% of exterminators report that they've dealt with bedbugs in the last year, and about one in five people in the US has had them in their homes.

It's an especially big problem in dense urban areas, where cities are writing laws and pouring funds into efforts to limit the epidemic.

No one has a good solution beyond fallible containment schemes. Search the very active network web forums devoted to clearing out bedbugs, and you'll even find folks who advocate bringing back DDT, cancer rates and bald eagles be damned.

Even if we did risk bringing back DDT to American life, it probably wouldn't work. When we were busy spraying DDT everywhere, bedbugs were busy mutating. Most are now resistant to the stuff.

For now, the best thing any of us can do is thoroughly check our clothes and suitcases when we return from trips, respond immediately when we do find bedbug bites on our bodies, and scoot our chairs surreptitiously away from anyone who mentions their home is infested.

So given the alternative, if bedbugs are a sign of falling DDT use, it's a good thing we have them.

SEE ALSO: This revolting video of a spurting clam is going viral

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NOW WATCH: Bedbugs are evolving right before our eyes

In the late Pleistocene period, approximately 11,500 years ago, the area near what's now downtown Los Angeles was a dangerous place.

Dire wolves — not a "Game of Thrones" invention, but now-extinct predators that were like present-day wolves, but bigger — and sabre-tooth cats chased down or ambushed prey animals in the region, killing bison, horses, and even the calves of mammoths and mastodons.

We know this because the La Brea tar pits in the area hold a treasure trove of the skeletons of these creatures. A recent analysis of thousands of their bones, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, reveals new details about how those creatures hunted – and about the injuries they suffered while taking down prey.

From just one pit, researchers were able to analyze thousands of bones from hundreds of the predators, which were lured to their deaths in the tar as they ventured onto the treacherous ground, trying to reach prey animals that had become trapped.

So many have been found that staff and researchers who work with the tar pits realized the bones could help tell the stories of these hunts by demonstrating the ways predators were hurt by the animals they hunted.

"It helps us imagine what an ecosystem is like when you have very different types of predators," says Caitlin Brown, a graduate student at UCLA and lead author of the new study. "We see the way predators may have specialized with different tactics to take down prey."

Since researchers think dire wolves ran down their meals like modern wolves, Brown says they expected to see significant injuries to the skulls and teeth of the wolves, which would have come from being kicked by their prey.

Surprisingly, these fractures were rare, with cranial injuries found in less than 2% of specimens. But they did find a high proportion of neck injuries, meaning it's likely the wolves would latch onto their massive prey to drag it down. We see the same injuries in grey wolves today after they sink their teeth into the hindquarters of bison and moose.

The wolves did have leg injuries that match what we'd expect to see in animals that spend their lives on the run. There were signs of ligament and tendon injuries, pulled muscles, and even arthritis. "I'm struck by how relatable a lot of these injuries are," says Brown.

Sabre-tooth cats (Smilodon fatalis, also known as the sabre-toothed tiger, though it wasn't closely related to modern tigers), on the other hand, were injured more frequently than wolves. The researchers think this was because they were more likely to be solo predators, taking down those same big animals all on their own.

Sabre-tooth cats, however, seemed to be experts at avoiding injuries to their heads and to those massive teeth they were famous for, which Brown says were actually "somewhat fragile," since they were long and thin. Instead, the cats had more shoulder and back injuries, which the researchers think came from wrestling their prey to the ground. Once they had their meal pinned down with their forelimbs, they could have used those long teeth to deliver a killing blow to the neck or belly.

It's perhaps the most accurate picture of a prehistoric hunt we have so far, and one that helps confirm researchers' suspicions that dire wolves were pursuit predators and the big cats were more likely ambush hunters.

The other surprising thing about these findings, according to Brown, is that it was possible to conduct the study in the first place. The UCLA and La Brea researchers looked at more than 35,000 bones, which came from just two species in one single tar pit. A similarly detailed in-depth analysis of existing predators today would be impossible, since you wouldn't be able to get access to the same wealth of data.

"Predators today are severely endangered," says Brown. "If we wanted to do this today, we'd be faced by [the fact of] not having enough samples of modern animals."

SEE ALSO: Scientists discovered a new 'shin-destroying' armored dinosaur — and named it after Zuul from 'Ghostbusters'

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NOW WATCH: Animated map of what Earth would look like if all the ice melted

It's common for children who go through radiation or chemotherapy to end up with damaged ovaries, incapable of supporting a healthy hormone balance or functional reproductive system. 

If you want to fix that problem, one approach would be to build new ovaries from scratch. Medical science is on the way to doing just that.

A team of biologists, pediatricians, and engineers at Northwestern University have devised and executed a method for constructing new ovaries for mice. That's the first step toward prosthetic ovaries in humans.

The follicles printed from a machine in the lab of Ramille Shah, a materials science professor at Northwestern. One thread fell across another, and soon implanted cells started growing in the space between them. Those threads are thin strings of gelatin, joined together at precise angles by a 3D printer. All together they add up to an organic scaffold the shape of a mouse ovary.

Researchers then implanted tiny oocytes taken from the mouse — the immature seed cells of the female reproductive organ — in the spaces between those cells. With time, those oocytes reproduced from pore to pore, filling up the empty spaces in the scaffold. A new organ emerged, with engineered gelatin guiding the mouse's own cells in an act of regeneration impossible under normal circumstances.

In a neighboring lab, doctor and biologist Monica Laronda worked with a team to implant the prosthetic ovary in the original mouse (the two it was born with having been removed for the experiment). They found that by letting the mouse heal and allowing the ovary to grow to maturity, the mouse ended up with a fully functioning reproductive system again. When it mated with another mouse, it gave birth.

Here's a graphic detailing the process, including images of the prosthetic-ovary-born mice.

Laronda and Shah published a paper detailing that process Tuesday in the journal Nature Publications.

It's a big deal, and not just for the science-fiction appeal of a 3D-printed organ turning out baby mice. A successful start-to-finish mouse trial of a lab-grown mouse ovary opens the door to future experiments. It might be years before a similar successful prosthetic ovary is grown for a human being, but this is science marching forward in a big way.

You can watch a video detailing the process here:

SEE ALSO: A massive solar storm could wipe out almost all of our modern technology without warning

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NOW WATCH: Here's what popular dog breeds looked like before and after 100 years of breeding

The strongest bite force on Earth today belongs to the biggest reptile on the planet. The massive saltwater crocodile — which grows to 17 feet and can weigh more than ton — that lives on the coasts of southeast Asia and northern Australia chomps down with a bite measured at around 3,700 pounds of force.

Those crocs are remarkably similar to their prehistoric ancestors, which lived more than 85 million years ago. But if we go back into prehistory to the end of the Cretaceous period, we find a predator that could bite down with more than double that amount of crushing force: Tyrannosaurus rex.

In a study newly published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers report that T. rex was capable of biting down with almost 8,000 pounds of force, with parts of certain teeth delivering a shocking 431,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. That bite force gave T. rex its ability to practice what the researchers describe as "extreme osteophagy," or extreme bone eating.

The well-known dinosaurs "stand out for habitually biting deeply into bones, pulverizing and digesting them," the authors write in the study. The ability to eat bones allowed them to get the most nutrition possible out of bones, but it's a feat that's surprising to find in animals with a reptilian sort of mouth. Normally only mammals like grey wolves and hyenas can pulverize bone in that way, though they rely on elements of tooth structure instead of pure force.

"Having high bite force doesn't necessarily mean an animal can puncture hide or pulverize bone — tooth pressure is the biomechanically more relevant parameter," paleobiologist Gregory Erickson says in a press release emailed to Business Insider. "It is like assuming a 600 horsepower engine guarantees speed. In a Ferrari, sure, but not for a dump truck."

In the case of the T. rex, Erickson and lead study author Paul Gignac found that with the powerful bite force, tooth pressure, and repetitive bites to the same area (documented in fossil records), the dinosaurs could crush and shatter bones like mammals do now.

To figure that out, the researchers generated a model of the T. rex bite relying on the fossil records and their data from analyzing crocodilian bites and using elements of crocodilian and bird (modern dinosaur) physiology.

In a way, the results were a surprise, with the overall force estimates being lower than other researchers previously predicted, according to the study. Still, their model explained the dinosaurs' prodigious bone-eating capacity — there was enough force to get the job done. The dinosaurs also had a stomach pH of less than 1.5, allowing them to digest bones.

"It was this bone-crunching acumen that helped T. rex to more fully exploit the carcasses of large horned-dinosaurs and duck-billed hadrosaurids whose bones, rich in mineral salts and marrow, were unavailable to smaller, less equipped carnivorous dinosaurs," Gignac said in the emailed press release.

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This post from Natalie Engelbrecht, psychotherapist, naturopathic doctor, and researcher, originally appeared on Quora as an answer to the question, "Why do we kiss?" 

The scientific study of kissing is called “philematology” (philos in ancient Greek = earthly love). During a kiss, couples exchange 9 mg of water, 0.7 mg of protein, 0.18 mg of organic compounds, 0.71 mg of fats, and 0.45 mg of sodium chloride, along with 10 million to 1 billion bacteria according to one estimate [1].

Kisses use as little as two muscles, burning only 2 to 3 calories, while passionate kissing involves up to 34 facial muscles along with 112 postural muscles and burns around 26 calories per minute [2].

The original theory was that primate mothers chewed their food for their babies. However, as evolution continued the kiss began to be used to pass on information regarding biological compatibility of a mate via pheromone chemical signals as well as promote social bonding and expressing love, with the ultimate goal of procreation.

With the kiss, partners are able to get close enough to each other to assess essential characteristics about each other, none of which are consciously processed. Although the vomeronasal organs—which are responsible for pheromone detection and brain function in animals—are thought to be vestigial and inactive in humans. Research indicates we do communicate with chemicals.

One study found that when women were asked to smell T-shirts of different men and choose their favourite, the choice was not made randomly but was based on the man whose major histo-compatibility complex (MHC)—a series of genes involved in the males immune system—was different from their own. The importance of this is that different MHCs mean less immune overlap which indicates more healthy offspring.

While men are not selective in terms of kissing, women are very choosy. This is because on an evolutionary level women were looking for a mate to raise their offspring with, and kissing could be an unconscious but accurate way for women to assess the immune compatibility of a mate, before she invests too much time and energy in him.

While males will have sex with women without kissing them beforehand as well as have sex with a woman who is not a good kisser, most women will never have sex without kissing first [3]. Men tend to initiate French kissing and research suggests this is because saliva contains testosterone and this increases the sex drive of their mate. Furthermore, men are able to sense a woman’s level of estrogen which is a predictor of her fertility [4] .

“There is evidence that saliva has testosterone in it,” said Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, “and testosterone increases sex drive. And there is evidence that men like sloppier kisses with more open mouth. That suggests they are unconsciously trying to transfer testosterone to stimulate sex drive in women.” [5]

Hormone levels change after kissing. Specifically cortisol (stress) levels decreased in men and women after kissing, and the longer a couple is together the lower their stress hormones get. Interestingly oxytocin levels increase in men, however women’s levels decreased.

One theory is that women need more than a kiss to stimulate attachment and bonding. Kissing raises testosterone which increases sex drive, and also increases dopamine promoting romantic love, and oxytocin (men only) which promotes bonding.

Other benefits includes a modest increase in blood pressure and heart rate which helps our cardiac health, increased saliva produced during active kissing which helps to prevent tooth decay, and men who kiss their wives in the morning live 5 years longer on average and also make more money.

Footnotes

[1] Philematology: The Science of Kissing. A Message for the Marital Month of June

[2] Philematology: The Science of Kissing. A Message for the Marital Month of June

[3] A Kiss is Still a Kiss -- or is it?

[4] Saliva: Secret Ingredient in the Best Kisses

[5] http://"There is evidence that s...

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Fish are weird, beautiful, alien things.

They move through Earth's streams, lakes, and oceans, displaying an astonishing range of colorations, forms, and lifestyles.

They also share some striking similarities to Pokemon. Hear me out — just about every fish starts off looking almost nothing like it will as an adult. Those baby, larval swimmers can be almost totally transparent or so tiny that it's hard to believe they're related to their adult forms.

Here are eight particularly bizarre (and beautiful) examples.

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A 'leptocephalus,' or larval eel, looks like a clear plastic ribbon. Below is a conger eel.

Here's what the conger eel looks like as an adult

The baby moray eel is even more dramatic-looking.

A question flamingo researchers get asked all the time — why the birds stand on one leg — may need rethinking. The bigger puzzle may be why flamingos bother standing on two.

Balance aids built into the birds’ basic anatomy allow for a one-legged stance that demands little muscular effort, tests find. This stance is so exquisitely stable that a bird sways less to keep itself upright when it appears to be dozing than when it’s alert with eyes open, two Atlanta neuromechanists report May 24 in Biology Letters.

“Most of us aren’t aware that we’re moving around all the time,” says Lena Ting of Emory University, who measures what’s called postural sway in standing people as well as in animals. Just keeping the human body vertical demands constant sensing and muscular correction for wavering.  Even standing robots “are expending quite a bit of energy,” she says. That could have been the case for flamingos, she points out, since effort isn’t always visible. 

Ting and Young-Hui Chang of the Georgia Institute of Technology tested balance in fluffy young Chilean flamingos coaxed onto a platform attached to an instrument that measures how much they sway. Keepers at Zoo Atlanta hand-rearing the test subjects let researchers visit after feeding time in hopes of catching youngsters inclined toward a nap — on one leg on a machine. “Patience,” Ting says, was the key to any success in this experiment.

As a flamingo standing on one foot  shifted to preen a feather or joust with a neighbor, the instrument tracked wobbles in the foot’s center of pressure, the spot where the bird’s weight focused. When a bird tucked its head onto its pillowy back and shut its eyes, the center of pressure made smaller adjustments (within a radius of 3.2 millimeters on average, compared with 5.1 millimeters when active).

Museum bones revealed features of the skeleton that might enhance stability, but bones alone didn’t tell the researchers enough. Deceased Caribbean flamingos a zoo donated to science gave a better view. “The ‘ah-ha!’ moment was when I said, ‘Wait, let’s look at it in a vertical position,’” Ting remembers. All of a sudden, the bird specimen settled naturally into one-legged lollipop alignment.

In flamingo anatomy, the hip and the knee lie well up inside the body. What bends in the middle of the long flamingo leg is not a knee but an ankle (which explains why to human eyes a walking flamingo’s leg joint bends the wrong way). The bones themselves don’t seem to have a strict on-off locking mechanism, though Ting has observed bony crests, double sockets and other features that could facilitate stable standing.

The bird’s distribution of weight, however, looked important for one-footed balance. The flamingo’s center of gravity was close to the inner knee where bones started to form the long column to the ground, giving the precarious-looking position remarkable stability. The specimen’s body wasn’t as stable on two legs, the researchers found.

Reinhold Necker of Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, is cautious about calling one-legged stances an energy saver. “The authors do not consider the retracted leg,” says Necker, who has studied flamingos. Keeping that leg retracted could take some energy, even if easy balancing saves some, he proposes.

The new study takes an important step toward understanding how flamingos stand on one leg, but doesn’t explain why, comments Matthew Anderson, a comparative psychologist at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He’s found that more flamingos rest one-legged when temperatures drop, so he proposes that keeping warm might have something to do with it. The persistent flamingo question still stands.

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If you've never woken up unable to turn your head without pain, those of us with an intimate understanding of the term "crick in the neck" are extremely jealous.

But why does that neck tweak happen? Why are there days we wake up unable to turn our heads to the left or right? Stress, posture, or some combination of the above?

"It's an age-old question that has probably plagued mankind since its existence," says Dr. Charles Kim, a musculoskeletal expert and assistant professor in the departments of rehabilitative medicine and anesthesiology at NYU School of Medicine who specializes in integrative pain management, physiatry, sports medicine, and medical acupuncture.

Kim says cricks can be caused by a variety of things, but most involve a minor injury to the system of muscles, joints, ligaments, and tendons that hold your head on top of your body. A muscle or ligament strain is the usual culprit in younger people, while arthritis is more likely to be a factor for older patients.

The Causes

We put extra strain on the muscles and ligaments in our neck whenever we have our heads or necks twisted or bent out of a neutral, natural position.

Sadly, this mostly happens during the activities we spend most of our time engaged in: working and sleeping.

At work we frequently spend much of the day with our heads bent forward, looking down at a screen or a desk. This is the exact same effect that we've seen described as"text neck." Since our head weighs 10-12 pounds, the muscles in our neck have to work extra hard to hold it up whenever it isn't in a neutral position, as shown in the graphic below.

Kim explains that though it's frequently described as a new phenomenon, "text neck" is just another name for an overuse injury, where one part of our body is strained beyond its capacity. The muscles in our neck can be compared to a rope-and-pulley system, he says, and if we lean forward all day we may put too much strain on one part of that system.

Stress can also be a contributing factor, either at work or at home.

We have a fight-or-flight response to stress that causes muscles to tense and posture to stiffen, but while that response would have been helpful when escaping a lion on the savanna, it now sabotages us.

Since we can't always "escape" the thing that causes this stress response — a job, for example — the constant tension can lead to our musculoskeletal system being strained beyond its capacity.

Even when we sleep, we aren't home free. We tend to move around during much of the night, rolling from one side to another and onto our backs or stomachs. While doing so, it's easy to tilt the head too far forwards, backwards, or to the side, which means that some other body part has to compensate for that unnatural position.

How To Treat It

It's not all bad news. Even though a neck crick is pretty awful when it first shows up, it usually subsides within a few days.

In the meantime, Kim recommends light stretches to ease pain. He says you should generally be able to loosen some of the tension that way. Gently massaging that sore part of your neck in a hot shower can help, especially if the injury caused some inflammation. A short course of acetaminophen or ibuprofen should reduce your discomfort in that case, too.

Bad inflammation can make the pain easily last a week.

You should see a doctor if the pain lasts longer than a couple weeks, or if it's accompanied by numbness, tingling, or arms falling asleep — that's potentially a sign of a pinched nerve, an injury that can cause especially sharp and lasting pain and can cause further damage if untreated. In those extreme cases, a doctor will sometimes prescribe muscle relaxants.

How To Avoid It In The Future

If this happens more than occasionally, it may be a sign that you need to make some changes.

To start, set up a workstation that allows you to keep your spine in a neutral position. Have your computer monitor at eye level.

"Your workspace should fit you like a shoe," Kim says.

Focusing on posture is important, too. A standing desk can help, but even better is a workstation that allows you to alternate between sitting and standing.

In bed, changing pillows can help. If you use too many pillows, your head will bend one way, while one very soft pillow might not provide enough support.

A specifically designed ergonomic pillow is probably not necessary, according to Kim. It may help, but that improved situation could probably have been achieved with another pillow change too, and one that wasn't quite as expensive.

Finally, exercise is key. While athletes generally strain their muscles more than the rest of us, they're usually well conditioned enough that their muscles are less likely to suffer these office-derived overuse injuries. Spend some time strengthening your back, neck, and core, and your body will thank you.

Unfortunately, the problem may simply be a common consequence of the modern lifestyle.

"We're not designed as humans to be sitting in front of a computer all day, we need to be active," says Kim. "You may think that inactivity doesn't cause pain, but it causes a lot of pain."

A version of this post originally appeared in December of 2014.

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Precisely when and where did our species emerge? Anthropologists have struggled with that question for decades, and scattered clues had suggested the answer lay somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa about 200,000 years ago.

But new evidence outlined in twopapers published in the journal Nature challenges that hypothesis. Instead, the authors describe recently discovered remains that suggest the first Homo sapiens showed up more than 100,000 years earlier than we thought in a place many experts didn't suspect.

The fossils could represent the earliest known examples of H. sapiens ever found (if confirmed by further research), and they serve as evidence that members of our species lived beyond sub-Saharan Africa.

Skulls in the dust

In 1961, a crew of miners was plowing into a dense wall of limestone in a hilly region west of Marrakesh when they struck a soft patch. The hardened beige surface gave way to a mound of cinnamon-colored dirt. Peeking out of the earth was a sliver of human skull.

A bit more digging revealed a nearly-complete skull, which the miners turned over to their field doctor. As word about the discovery spread, researchers flocked to the area. They uncovered more remains, including several pieces of jaw bone and a fragment of an arm. At the time, scientists pegged the fossils as roughly 40,000 years old, a few thousand years before our extinct European relatives, the Neanderthals, were thought to have vanished.

But they hadn't dug deep enough.

Roughly 40 years later, anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin and his team from the Max Planck Institute excavated the half-dozen layers of soil beneath the land where the skull and arm bones had been discovered. There, the team found remains that they say belong to at least five individuals, along with a set of flint blades which had likely been burned, perhaps by nearby cooking fires. 

Using a dating technique that measures how much radiation had built up in the flint since it was heated, Hublin and his team say the ancient bones belong to people who lived roughly 300,000-350,000 years ago. 

"These dates were a big wow," Hublin said on a recent call with reporters.

Still, the biggest discovery didn't come until the team looked more closely at the skulls.

A striking resemblance

When Hublin peered into the cavernous eye sockets of one of the skulls, he was astonished.

Instead of the robust features he was accustomed to seeing on the faces of an ancient human ancestor like Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis, this face bore a striking resemblance to his own. Where an erectus skull had a single, protruding brow ridge, these individuals had smaller, separated ones. Rather than a large face and a flattened skull, these people had small faces and rounder skulls.

"The face of these people is really a face that falls right in the middle of the modern variation," said Hublin. "They had a skull that is more elongated than most of us, but I’m not sure these people would stand out from a crowd today."

Their braincase (shown below in blue) also seemed to fall somewhere between what one might expect in an ancient human ancestor and a modern human, albeit slightly more similar to those of our archaic ancestors.

This unique combination of advanced and archaic features suggests something profound, Hublin said — he's convinced the Moroccan specimens "represent the very root of our species."

In other words, all of the Homo sapiens ever found — including those uncovered far beyond Africa — may trace their ancestral linkages to the land that is today's Morocco. 

That suggestion contradicts the prevailing anthropological logic that our species evolved somewhere deep in sub-Saharan Africa, in what some researchers have referred to as a "Garden of Eden," then gradually moved out to other parts of the world. Instead, Hublin and his team argue that Homo sapiens could have been living in terrain across Africa.

"There is no Garden of Eden in Africa, or if there is, it is all of Africa," Hublin said.

According to Sonia Zakrzewski, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Southampton, Hublin's discovery could encourage other archaeologists to change the way they think about human origins. "It really sets the world alight in terms of the possibilities for understanding the evolution of Homo sapiens," she said. "It certainly means that we need to rethink our models."

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In theory, sleep takes up about 8 out of every 24 hours, one-third of our lives. But many of us don't actually sleep that much and are tired all the time — more than a third of Americans don't get the seven to nine hours of sleep a night that the CDC recommends.

Yet we spend additional time worrying about our sleep. According to research by the National Sleep Foundation, more than a third of Americans say their sleep quality is "poor" or "only fair."

But how much sleep do we really need?

First, let's get the bad news out of the way: there isn't going to be a one size fits all answer — sleep needs really do vary from person to person.

You could be one of those incredibly rare people that can actually get by on a few hours of sleep a night (almost definitely not), or you could be on the opposite end of the spectrum, what doctors refer to as a "long sleeper," who might need 11 hours a night.

But there are some things we do know about sleep, and these can help you figure out how much sleep you actually need — and how to better get a night's rest.

Here are five facts that will help you figure out what your personal sleep patterns are and how they compare to the rest of the population.

1. There's a reason that doctors usually recommend seven to nine hours of sleep.

The amount of sleep that people need falls into a bell curve type distribution, with the vast majority of the population needing between seven and nine hours of rest each night to be refreshed.

The chart to the right, from the book "Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You're So Tired" by German chronobiologist Till Roenneberg, shows the general distribution of sleep needs. (Chronobiology is the science of our internal clocks.)

2. You have a natural chronotype, or body clock, that determines when you are most comfortable sleeping and being awake.

Most of us think of ourselves as morning or night people, but those divisions aren't scientific — they're just ways of comparing ourselves to one another. 

"Where you define owl or lark is really arbitrary," says Dr. David Welsh, an associate professor studying circadian clocks at UC San Diego. Welsh says that if you look at large surveys of populations, you get a normal distribution of chronotypes — most people have fairly "average" chronotypes, some prefer to get up a bit earlier or later, and small groups naturally rise extremely early or late. There's no line that distinguishes different chronotypes.

But we all do have an internal schedule that makes us feel awake or sleepier at different times of day. Because of factors including hormone levels, genetics, and light exposure, some of us are more alert in the mornings and some of us prefer times later in the day.

If your schedule isn't aligned with your chronotype, you will feel tired and out of sync.

3. The amount of sleep you need changes throughout your life.

The seven to nine hour recommendation is standard for adults, but kids need much more sleep, while some older people need less.

This chart by the National Sleep Foundation shows how these requirements change as kids grow up.

In addition to length of sleep needs changing, chronotypes change throughout life as well.

According to Roenneberg's book, young children naturally tend to be more morning oriented. Around puberty, they're more likely to shift into a night owl chronotype, which tends to shift back to an earlier chronotype after age 20.

4. There are some things you can do to adjust your natural chronotype.

While your sleep needs (both chronotype, when you are alert, and length, how much sleep you need) are mostly genetic, there are certain things you can do to adjust your schedule and at least make it a bit easier to get up earlier.

Our bodies respond to light, especially the powerful natural light of the sun. Being exposed to that light in the morning tells our body that it's time to be alert and moving. At night, sitting in the dark stimulates the production of the hormone melatonin, which helps us relax and fall asleep (we mess with this process by looking at bright light from smartphones).

But we can adjust this to a degree by controlling our exposure to light. This process, called entrainment, is what our bodies have to do when we go to a different time zone — this is why we get jet lagged. But we can also use this to train our bodies to get up and go to sleep earlier by exposing ourselves to natural light in the morning and avoiding bright light at night.

This won't turn you into a morning person, but it can make prying the covers loose just a little less painful.

5. Your sleep needs are personal; try to figure out what works for you.

Sometimes new research will come out, and people will claim something like "studies have found that seven hours is the optimal amount of sleep — not eight."

But as interesting as any sleep research is, we do know that people are different and have different needs. The findings of one study don't translate into recommendations for everyone. In the case of sleep, experts recommend figuring out what personally works best for you.

If you can let yourself sleep naturally for a few days to a week, going to bed when you are tired and waking up whenever is natural, preferably while limiting alcohol and caffeine, you'll have a better idea of your individual needs. Get some sun during the day, along with some exercise.

If you do all that but still have trouble sleeping, it might be time to talk to a doctor. You could be one of the large percentage of the population with undiagnosed sleep apnea, especially if you snore. Or you could have some other disorder that can be addressed.

It's worth taking the time to figure out what you can do to sleep better though. Not getting enough raises some serious health concerns.

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Scientists have uncovered an incredible specimen in Myanmar that has given us a glimpse of life from 100 million years ago — a piece of amber containing the remarkably preserved remains of an ancient bird hatchling.

Inside the amber, you can make out the head, tail, and neck of the bird, but it's the wings and feet that are the real marvels — the chunk of fossilized tree resin has perfectly preserved the bird's feathers, flesh, and claws, and gives us insight into a doomed group of prehistoric species called the "opposite birds".

"It's the most complete and detailed view we've ever had," one of the team behind the discovery, Ryan McKellar from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, told New Scientist.

"Seeing something this complete is amazing. It's just stunning."

The team suspects that the little bird fell into a pool of conifer sap soon after it hatched, and got trapped in the tar-like liquid.

Interestingly enough, despite being such an important part of our understanding of the prehistoric world, scientists still aren't entirely sure of the exact chemistry at play in the amber preservation process.

What we do know is that after animals get stuck in tree resin, it starts to harden, and if you have the right levels of pressure and temperature, it will transform into a semi-fossilized substance called copal.

"The speed of this process varies tremendously depending on the conditions,"Brian Palmer explains for The Washington Post.

"Scientists don't agree on when resin officially becomes copal, or when copal officially becomes amber. Some say that amber must be at least 2 million years old, but that cutoff is arbitrary."

Unfortunately, while it looks almost good as new, sitting in that amber, the bird's flesh will have likely broken down into pure carbon, which means its DNA is probably long gone.

But what we can glean from this specimen is the fact that it was probably a member of the so-called opposite birds, or Enantiornithes— a group of prehistoric birds, thought to have evolved at the same time as the ancestors of modern birds, but for some reason died off with the non-avian dinosaurs.

"In appearance, opposite birds likely resembled modern birds, but they had a socket-and-ball joint in their shoulders where modern birds have a ball-and-socket joint — hence the name,"Michael Le Page reports for New Scientist.

"They also had claws on their wings, and jaws and teeth rather than beaks — but at the time the hatchling lived, the ancestors of modern birds had not yet evolved beaks either.

You can see the rest of the images of the amber below:

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• Black pods with tendrils that wash up on beaches are not kelp — they're typically the egg cases of fish called skates.
• Some of these egg cases contain live embryos.
• Holding a light up to a fresh, unhatched case will reveal the fish embryo inside.

I grew up in Ohio, a state that does not border a salty sea.

So any summer that my parents crammed our family into a car and drove to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I was in heaven. Day after day, my brother, sister, and I would play in the warm surf of the Atlantic Ocean. We met a zoo's worth of marine life during those beach excursions, including clams, crabs, copepods, fish, birds, dolphins, and jellyfish.

But there was one common yet fascinating animal we completely overlooked: a weird, rectangular object with a pair of pokey tendrils on either side.

For years I assumed these were kelp pods or some strange-looking pieces of seaweed.

Nope.

These black pods are actually the egg cases or capsules of a skate, a flat, funny-looking fish.

Skates are related to rays and sharks, and like both they have no bones — only cartilage. As adults, skates have thorny fins on top of their bodies and eat whatever small creatures they can find on the sandy ocean bottom, including shrimp and tiny fish.

Should you find a fresh skate egg case on a beach, perform this simple experiment — it will blow your mind (and likely freak out squeamish friends and family).

First, find a skate egg that is not dried to a crisp. Your best shot is to check the wrack line, where high-tide waves deposit junk from the sea. Spring storms will often rip the egg cases from the seaweed they attach to in deeper waters and wash them ashore.

Since these egg cases are made of collagen, a protein that takes forever to break down, you're likely to find many more empty ones than fresh ones. As a general rule: the more wet, slimy, bubbly, pliable, and translucent, the better.

Once you've got one in hand, grab a smartphone, turn on its LED light, and then move the egg in front of the light. If you're lucky, you will see something like this:

The pink mass is a skate embryo attached to its yolk sac.

Depending on the age of the skate egg you've found, you can sometimes see its head or a devilish tail flicking around. You might even see more than one embryo.

Dave Remsen, a bioinformaticist and scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, showed me this little guy (or girl) when I visited the lab:

"I like to show these to kids and tell them they used to look like that," Remsen told Business Insider. (It's a good joke to a scientist, since all embryonic animals look remarkably similar during early stages of development.)

Some shark species also lay egg cases, but those are much rarer to find on a beach, since mother sharks lay them in the deeper ocean.

If you don't have an LED light handy, there's a great substitute in the sky: the sun. This video shows what a skate egg case looks like when you hold it up to the light:

Some aquatic centers and aquariums go even further.

For example, the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco cuts out a panel of the egg case and super-glues on a piece of transparent plastic. That way, visitors can clearly see the embryos inside as they develop:

It can take months for embryos like these to develop, so if you're fortunate enough to find an egg case, give it a good toss back into the ocean.

Even if it doesn't hatch, it will at least make a good meal for another sea creature.

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Here's proof of how far we've come in science - in a world-first, researchers have recorded up-close footage of a single DNA molecule replicating itself, and it's raising questions about how we assumed the process played out.

The real-time footage has revealed that this fundamental part of life incorporates an unexpected amount of 'randomness', and it could force a major rethink into how genetic replication occurs without mutations.

"It's a real paradigm shift, and undermines a great deal of what's in the textbooks,"says one of the team, Stephen Kowalczykowski from the University of California, Davis.

"It's a different way of thinking about replication that raises new questions."

The DNA double helix consists of two intertwining strands of genetic material made up of four different bases - guanine, thymine, cytosine, and adenine (G, T, C and A).

Replication occurs when an enzyme called helicase unwinds and unzips the double helix into two single strands.

A second enzyme called primase attaches a 'primer' to each of these unraveled strands, and a third enzyme called DNA polymerase attaches at this primer, and adds additional bases to form a whole new double helix.

You can watch that process in the new footage below:

The fact that double helices are formed from two stands running in opposite directions means that one of these strands is known as the 'leading strand', which winds around first, and the other is the 'lagging strand', which follows the leader.

The new genetic material that's attached to each one during the replication process is an exact match to what was on its original partner.

So as the leading strand detaches, the enzymes add bases that are identical to those on the original lagging stand, and as the lagging strand detaches, we get material that's identical to the original leading strand.

Scientists have long assumed that the DNA polymerases on the leading and lagging strands somehow coordinate with each other throughout the replication process, so that one does not get ahead of the other during the unraveling process and cause mutations.

But this new footage reveals that there's no coordination at play here at all - somehow, each strand acts independently of the other, and still results in a perfect match each time.

The team extracted single DNA molecules from E. coli bacteria, and observed them on a glass slide. They then applied a dye that would stick to a completed double helix, but not a single strand, which means they could follow the progress of one double helix as it formed two new double helices.

While bacterial DNA and human DNA are different, they both use the same replication process, so the footage can reveal a lot about what goes on in our own bodies.

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