Distinguished frogs
It seems, say Chatmongkon Suwannapoom and Maslin Osathanunkul, that a great way to differentiate one sort 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 “rapid and accurate identification of six species of Limnonectes of the L. kuhlii complex”.
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 sort of frog.
Eyeballing, the technologically less complicated approach utilized by frog scientists again when frog scientists had 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 after they gave 12 cats two oral doses of a hashish natural extract (the acronym for which is CHE). Some cats acquired 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 categorical shock concerning the cats: “Salivation shortly after dosing was observed in two cats in the high dose group; these animals had substantially lower cannabinoid concentrations than other cats in this group.”
The staff speculates concerning the mechanism that precipitated the drooling. “Cats are notorious for ‘spitting up’ oral medications which they conceal in their oral cavity, and it could not be confirmed that all cats swallowed the entire CHE dose,” the researchers write. “Any oil-based CHE retained in the oral cavity may have prompted the cat to salivate, and subsequently been expelled from the mouth.”
This surprising twist within the who-drools knowledge hints that the connection between starvation and hashish consumption in cats could also be complicated.
Or that these two explicit cats had been eccentric, a method or one other.
A sticky problem
At sea, there’s spice. Suggestions nonetheless delights in how oceanographers determined that some ocean water might be referred to as “spicy” and different ocean water “minty” (8 October 2022). Right here’s additional delight: within the air, there’s “stickiness”.
Reader Earle Spamer brings information of the latter. “Here’s a paper that brandishes a ‘new’ variable in climate studies: stickiness,” he writes. “An awful lot of mathematics to explain what my grandmother knew just by sitting on the front 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, revealed 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 specific humidity” to the extra conventional means of measuring temperature.
Phrase by widespread 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 current insights on ketchup (16 March) set no less than one reader’s coronary heart racing.
David Watson writes: “Years ago, before the advent of disposable adhesive electrodes, I was having an electrocardiogram [ECG]. The electrodes then were little rubber cups suckered onto your skin using a conductive gel. I remarked to the cardiologist that the gel was probably ridiculously expensive. He said it was, and a group had researched cheaper alternatives. They found one with the right combination of surface tension, viscosity and conductivity. Unfortunately, it was low on patient acceptability – ketchup, of course.”
Documentation of that physician’s declare (which can have been only a jest) appears scarce. Suggestions has to this point discovered solely a pooh-poohing, in a 1981 research by Andrew P. B. Lee, “Biotechnological rules of monitoring“, revealed in Worldwide Anesthesiology Clinics.
Lee wrote: “Most electrode jellies sold are no more effective than K-Y jelly or tomato ketchup at lowering 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 Unbelievable Analysis. Earlier, he labored on uncommon methods to make use of computer systems. His web site is unbelievable.com
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