Science Tuesday - Ugly Animals, the Moon, Russian Heat Wave, and Crocodiles.

A Masterpiece of Nature? Yuck!
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, August 9, 2010

A friend recently sent around an e-mail with the subject line “lost cat bulletin.” Open the message and — gack! — there was a head-on shot of a star-nosed mole, its “Dawn of the Dead” digging claws in full view and its hallmark nasal boutonniere of 22 highly sensitive feelers looking like fresh bits of sirloin being extruded through a meat grinder.

“I don’t think anyone would come near that cat, much less steal it,” tittered one respondent. Another participant, unfamiliar with the mole, wondered whether this was a “Photoshop project gone bad,” while a third simply wrote, “Ugh.”

We see images of jaguars, impalas and falcons and we praise their regal beauty and name our muscle cars for them. We watch a conga line of permanently tuxedoed penguins, and our hearts melt faster than the ice sheet beneath those adorable waddling feet. Even creatures phylogenetically far removed from ourselves can have an otherworldly appeal: jellyfish, octopus, praying mantis, horseshoe crab.

Yet there are some animals that few would choose as wallpaper for a Web browser — that, to the contrary, will often provoke in a human viewer a reflexive retraction of the nostrils accompanied by a guttural or adenoidal vocalization: ugh, yuck, ew.

Let’s not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals — maybe cute ugly, more often just ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel’s face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don’t threaten us with venom or compete for our food.

( Read more... )

Water on Moon Unlikely, a New Study Indicates
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, August 9, 2010

In the long discussion of water on the Moon, a new study contradicts some recent reports that say the Moon had water at the time of its formation. A group of researchers reports in the journal Science that when the Moon was created, some 4.5 billion years ago, there was not much hydrogen on it, and therefore no water.

( Read more... )

Deaths double amid Moscow smog
By Anna Smolchenko, The Sunday Morning Herald, August 9, 2010

The daily mortality rate in Moscow has nearly doubled amid record temperatures, an official says, breaking a silence over the effects of a heatwave and smog which show little sign of abating.

The acknowledgment on Monday came after media reports earlier accused authorities of covering up the scale of the disaster that affects millions of Muscovites and forced many to flee the Russian capital.

"In usual times 360-380 people are dying each day. Now it is around 700," said the head of the city's health department, Andrei Seltsovsky, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

"Our mortality rate has doubled," he added, saying that out of 1500 spaces in city morgues 1300 places were currently occupied.

( Read more... )

Crocodile Fossil Reveals Teeth of a Mammal
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, August 9, 2010

Modern crocodiles have conical teeth they use to grab at prey. Sometime the crocodiles rip off pieces of flesh from their prey, and sometimes they swallow their victims whole. They do not, however, chew their food, as humans and many other mammals do.

But crocodiles that lived 144 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, had the dental structure to allow for chewing, scientists report in the journal Nature.

The researchers say they discovered a virtually complete skull and skeleton of such a crocodile in southwestern Tanzania.

( Read more... )