Gorillas Seen Using "Baby Talk" Gestures

An adult lowland gorilla pets a younger gorilla at Alberta's Calgary Zoo

Gorillas use a nonvocal form of "baby talk" to communicate with infants, a new study says. A first among primates, the discovery may give insight into how similar human communication evolved.

Lowland gorillas converse with each other primarily through nonvocal gestures.

While researching how captive gorillas communicate during play, study leader Eva Maria Luef noticed that animals older than three years had a special way of interacting with younger gorillas.

With infants, the older gorillas used touch and repeated gestures—such as grabbing or stroking the infant's jaw—more frequently than they did when communicating with their peers.

"We were surprised that ... [gorilla] infants are addressed differently," said Luef, of the Department of Education and Psychology at Berlin's Freie University.

The behavior is evidence of a "gestural motherese," according to the study, published in June in the Journal of American Primatology.

Human motherese, or baby talk, is a universal mode of connection between adults and infants. Regardless of their language, people baby-talk in the same way, with a raised pitch and a swooping, sing-song style.

So far, the rhesus macaque is the only nonhuman primate known to use vocal baby talk.

Gorilla "Baby Talk" Observed

In 2011, Luef and co-author Katja Liebal recorded video of lowland gorillas in two zoos: Zoo Leipzig in Germany and Howletts Wild Animal Park in the United Kingdom.

The team observed 24 gorillas, which they separated into four age groups: infants, juveniles, subadults, and adults.

The scientists focused on the animals' behavior during play bouts, which are started and ended via nonvocal communication-an exchange of signals involving the head, limbs, and body posture used to manipulate another gorilla's behavior.

Analyzing the video footage, the scientists then noted each gorilla's nonvocal signals.

The team saw that gorillas in the three older groups touched infants more, which may be because the youngsters themselves communicate with their mothers via touch, Luef said.

"The adults, when addressing them, may have that in mind, knowing the infants prefer tactile gestures," she said.

Luef is less certain about why the older gorillas repeated their gestures with infants, but it's possible that the older gorillas know that their messages are easier to comprehend when repeated, she said.

Gorilla Study Insight Into Human Evolution?

The research "provides some welcome [observation-based] evidence for what many primatologists probably already have observed and suspected," Steve Ross, director of the E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes, said by email.

Overall, "like many studies with primates, I think there is the potential to use this information to form some ideas about how human behavioral and cognitive processes have evolved," said Ross, who was not involved in the study.

For instance, primate infants learn mostly through passive observation, unlike human babies, who are actively taught many behaviors and concepts.

The repetitive motions and touches of the gorillas represents "an interesting middle ground that may help us understand when, in evolutionary time, other more-involved teaching abilities arose in our common ancestors," Ross said.

Study author Luef added that, in general, nonvocal language is too often neglected in primate-communication research. By contrast, human studies often incorporate both verbal and nonverbal language.

"That's the holistic approach to how we communicate—and we should do the same thing with apes."

Source: nationalgeographic

NASA Launches New "Black Hole Hunter"

The supernova remnant known as the Crab Nebula, as seen in x-rays (blue), infrared, and visual light.

At noon eastern time today, a rocket carrying NASA's newest space telescope dropped from a carrier plane, ignited its engines, and lofted the spacecraft into a picture-perfect equatorial orbit. The solar-powered craft—dubbed the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR—will peer into the mysterious high-energy x-ray universe with unprecedented detail.

Used on Earth for medical imaging and in airport security machines, high-energy x-rays are naturally produced by some of the most exotic objects in the universe. (Also see related pictures: "X-Ray History—Hidden Kitten, Quackery, and More.")

NuSTAR will seek out these rays to capture images of black holes, neutron stars, and other cosmic bodies with a hundred times more sensitivity and ten times better resolution than previous spacecraft.

Current x-ray telescopes—such as NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and theEuropean Space Agency's XMM-Newton—can get clear looks at objects that emit lower energy x-rays, but due to technical challenges, these craft have trouble bringing higher energy wavelengths into focus.

NuSTAR will use a row of 133 fingernail-thin mirrors stacked like Russian dolls to focus light onto state-of-the-art detectors, producing crisp pictures in high-energy wavelengths.

"We're going to look at the remnants of stars that exploded long ago and also be poised to respond quickly—within a day—to any new explosions like supernovae or gamma-ray bursts," said NuSTAR's principal investigator Fiona Harrison, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

By extending our view of the x-ray universe, the NuSTAR team is "almost guaranteed to make new and exciting discoveries," said MIT's Jeffrey Hoffman, an astronomer and former NASA astronaut who's not affiliated with the mission.

"The experience of astronomy says that every time you open a new wavelength region with much greater clarity—in the infrared, or gamma rays, or now high-energy x-rays—you'll have exciting discoveries," he said.

"Which ones will turn out to be the real superstars, we don't know yet."

Air-Drop Rocket

Folded up for flight, the refrigerator-size NuSTAR launched from the U.S. Army's Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll, about midway between Hawaii and Australia.

Cruising over the Pacific, the carrier plane dropped a Pegasus rocket carrying the spacecraft at about 40,000 feet (12,000 meters). After a few seconds of free fall, the rocket ignited in midair and soared into space.

Once in orbit, NuSTAR deployed its solar arrays. It will soon extend its 33-foot-long (10-meter-long) mast to begin collecting data for its two-year primary mission phase.

Among its science goals, NuSTAR is designed to seek out and study black holes in our Milky Way galaxy and beyond.

Researchers hope the craft's data will help improve our understanding of how black holes form during the violent collapses of dying stars and how the objects grow as they consume nearby matter, from dust and gas to whole planets and stars.

Black holes are often defined as objects so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape their grasp. But matter falling into a black hole gets so hot that it emits huge amounts of radiation, helping scientists pinpoint the otherwise invisible objects.

With NuSTAR's increased sensitivity, "you'll be able to see further in toward the surface of a black hole, because as you get closer, the energy of the radiation that's coming out gets higher and higher," MIT's Hoffman said.

"Being able to focus on these higher energies is all new, and it will really help us to probe the structure of black holes."

NuSTAR will also explore the strange behavior of extreme black holes, such as the supermassive monsters at the centers of most large galaxies.

Actively feeding galactic black holes, also called blazars, act like cosmic particle accelerators, cranking out jets of high-energy radiation at nearly the speed of light.

Studying x-rays from these jets can give scientists a better picture of their structure and composition, helping them to figure out why some supermassive black holes are feeding while others remain dormant.

Expecting the Unexpected

NuSTAR's extreme x-ray vision will also help scientists decipher how star explosions seed the universe with ingredients for galaxies, stars, planets—and even life.

When a supermassive star runs out of hydrogen in its core, it starts fusing atoms into progressively heavier elements. Eventually the dying star collapses and explodes as a supernova, which litters the cosmos with atoms of oxygen, carbon, iron, and more.

NuSTAR will be able to see the high-energy x-rays from radioactive nuclei initially produced in the explosions.

"Elements like iron and the calcium in our bones are forged in stars and expelled out into the galaxies [by supernovae]. We are 'star stuff,'" mission leader Harrison said.

"The material in our bodies was forged in the stars, and by being able to study the explosions and the material that gets expelled, we can learn a lot about how these explosions happen and how these elements are created."

NuSTAR will also collect information on the ruins of dead stars, such as the variety of ultradense neutron stars left over by some supernovae, including highly magnetic magnetars and rapidly rotating pulsars.

This stellar graveyard can serve as a laboratory for observing the unique physics of matter at gravitational extremes.

In addition to these well-defined science objectives, Harrison said, the mission team is ready to explore the unknown.

"I'm expecting that some of our greatest scientific highlights won't be the things we've predicted," she said.

Source: nationalgeographic

Saturn Moon Has Tropical "Great Salt Lake"

Saturn's hazy moon Titan has a huge tropical lake and marshes of liquid methane near its equator, suggest surprising new images from a NASA spacecraft.

Titan is the only moon in the solar system to host a significant atmosphere—a roiling haze of organic molecules, which some scientists think might include the ingredients for life as we know it.

It's also the only object in the solar system, other than Earth, to have bodies of liquid on its surface—previous data from NASA's Cassini orbiter revealed hundreds of lakes near the frigid moon's poles.

With surface temperatures hovering around -297 degrees Fahrenheit (-183 degrees Celsius), Titan is far too cold to have liquid water. Instead, the lakes are filled with liquid hydrocarbons, such as methane and ethane.

Now, for the first time, Cassini images show dark regions that appear to be pools of hydrocarbons around the moon's equator.

"We detect evidence for the presence of a tropical lake with an area of 2,400 square kilometers [927 square miles]—as large as the Great Salt Lake in Utah—with a depth of at least a meter [three feet]," said study leader Caitlin Griffith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"Our work also suggests the existence of a handful of smaller and shallower ponds, similar to marshes on Earth, with knee- to ankle-level depths."

Oases of Liquid Methane

Based on the polar lakes and other evidence, scientists think methane—the main component of natural gas—might play a similar role as water on Earth, cycling between the atmosphere and the surface.

But until now, Titan's lower latitudes were thought to be dry, filled mostly with rippling sand dunes.

Scientists had previously seen only hints of moistness in Titan's tropical areas. For instance, in 2004 the European Huygens lander set down near the moon's equator and captured views of what appeared to be rain runoff.

In addition, later Cassini images turned up evidence of storms in this supposedly parched region.

Still, Griffith and colleagues think the newfound lakes can't be explained by rainfall, since a number of circulation models say that significant bodies of liquid shouldn't be stable at the moon's tropics based on precipitation alone.

"Any liquid deposited in the tropical surface evaporates quickly and eventually is transported by Titan's circulation to the poles, where the large polar lakes appear," Griffith said.

"Lakes at the poles are easy to explain, but lakes in the tropics are not."

One possibility, Griffith said, is that "our detection of tropical lakes suggests that a subterranean source of methane may flood the surface and dampen the ground, in essence creating oases on Titan."

Tropical Lakes Feed Methane Cycle?

While it's unclear how long the tropical lakes might stay on Titan's surface, planetary scientist Oded Aharonson agrees that their most likely source would be subterranean.

"The possibility of persistent liquid bodies in the low latitudes ... would point to an active subsurface hydrology on Titan," said Aharonson, of the CaliforniaInstitute of Technology, who was not part of the study team.

In fact, Aharonson thinks the tropical lakes could be the long-sought global source of liquid hydrocarbons on Titan—the region where the compounds first bubble up to the surface to feed the moon's methane cycle.

"If the equatorial regions have subsurface methane emerging to the surface," he said, "that would be a viable source."

Source: nationalgeographic

Space Pictures

Following a Moon Shadow

Seen from one of Japan's MTSAT meteorological satellites, the shadow of the moon darkens part of the North Pacific during the annular solar eclipse last Sunday and Monday. Despite the diminutive shadow shown, the moon is actually a little bigger than a quarter the size of Earth.

An annular eclipse happens when the moon lines up between Earth and thesun, and when the dark moon's apparent diameter is smaller than the visible disk of the sun, leaving a ring—or annulus—of fiery light around the edges.

Milky Way Visitor

Echoing the arc of the Milky Way (center), a meteor—or possibly a satellite reflecting the sun's rays—streaks earthward near Cagnes-sur-mer in southeastern France in a picture submitted May 17 by National Geographic Your Shot user Jerome Cassou.

Meteors are mostly sand grain-size particles that enter Earth's atmosphere at high speed, burning up and superheating the air around them, which creates the characteristic short-lived streaks of light.

Fiery Crescent

Captured from about 400 miles (630 kilometers) above Earth by Japan's Hinode satellite, the moon moves into position for the May 20-21 annular solar eclipse.

Before the eclipse, astronomer Anthony Cook, of the Griffith Observatory in California, had predicted that scientists would make use of the event to study the sun's activity. Hinode's handlers also used the eclipse to gather data to improve the craft's ability to image subtle features in the sun's corona, or upper atmosphere, according to NASA.

Losing Power

Carrying Russian and U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station, a Russian Soyuz spaceship jettisons rocket boosters after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on May 15.

Currently the Russian spaceships are NASA's only means of ferrying astronauts to the space station. This week's successful launch of the first private craft toward the space station, though, hints that the U.S. space agency may have another option for manned spaceflight as early as 2015.

Source: nationalgeographic

Secrets of Natural Cocaine Production Revealed

A closeup of the coca plant relative, Erythroxylum australe

A mysterious but crucial step that coca plants use to build cocaine has been discovered, according to a group of biochemists.

Despite the drug's infamy, cocaine is chemically similar to a host of anesthetics and stimulants used legally every day. Understanding how cocaine is made in the coca plant might therefore lead to new anesthetic drugs without the addictive qualities, the study authors say.

"Plants can't run away, so they have to be the planet's best chemists to survive," said study co-author John D'Auria, a biochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany.

"They make chemicals other organisms simply cannot make, including cocaine."

But to maximize a chemical's benefits to humans, he said, "we need to have some idea how the plants are making it. If you understand the biochemistry, you might take away the bad properties and keep the anesthetic ones."

Ancient Medicine

South Americans have cultivated coca for about 8,000 years.

"Coca is important in terms of a cash crop for South America and the source of an infamous street drug, but it also has a strong medicinal history," D'Auria said.

Indigenous tribes that cultivated coca chewed its leaves for religious rituals as well as for hunger and thirst suppression.

Yet today little is known about how the plant actually creates cocaine, in part because of its highly illicit nature—few, if any, U.S. labs are permitted to grow coca or study cocaine, which is part of a group of compounds called tropane alkaloids.

To probe the mysteries of cocaine, D'Auria and his team began by studying a highly similar yet legally grown family of flowering plants called Solanaceae,also known as the potato or nightshade family.

Although cocaine is part of a different family, many Solanaceae plants also produce tropane alkaloids, some of which have been made into medicines that dilate pupils, wrangle motion sickness, and treat peptic ulcers.

But D'Auria's team eventually realized that coca plants weren't using the same enzymes as Solanaceae plants to build their tropane alkaloid molecules.

That's surprising, he said, because the alkaloids are complex molecules that take many stages to create, and evolution typically conserves the best solutions rather than reinventing them.

"Another thing is that the roots of Solanaceae make tropane alkaloids. Coca does it in the leaves, which is a huge difference," D'Auria said. "That means nature has found two very different ways to make very similar compounds, which I think is extremely impressive."

To pinpoint one of cocaine's production steps, D'Auria and his colleagues ground up the coca leaves and searched for enzyme activity they thought might help prepare molecules of cocaine, which looks like two carbon-based rings bridged by bonds with oxygen.

The team eventually found an enzyme—and the gene that codes for it—that prepares cocaine's main ring to merge with benzoic acid, the plant's second-to-last step in building the drug.

Next Steps

The researchers are now gearing up to publish a study on the final step in the cocaine-building process, and they hope to retrace the earlier steps until the whole pathway is mapped.

Biochemist Toni Kutchan, who studies medicinal compounds at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, said the work wasn't a revalation but noted its importance in unraveling cocaine synthesis.

"This is one of many steps, so I'll be interested to see what they reveal in the next study," she said.

Kutchan also said she'd like to know why the coca plant began making such a complex molecule in the first place.

Study co-author D'Auria hinted that cocaine's natural purpose may be to kill bugs.

Previous work found that a high amount of cocaine in cultivated coca plants—as much as 10 percent of young leaves' dry weight—acts as an insecticide. More studies of the crop's wild ancestors, he said, could help solve the riddle.

"We are absolutely interested in this and are working on the question," D'Auria said, adding that his team is now studying six relatives of coca in the lab, and "we are working on obtaining the insect herbivores which are known to feed on them."

The new study about how plants make cocaine was published online last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Source: nationalgeographic