Charged Magazine

Tag: science

  • The Prehistoric Origins of Birds

    The Prehistoric Origins of Birds

    You may have heard that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs before. More specifically, modern birds descend from theropods, which is a clade of dinosaurs. A clade is a group of species that share some key traits as well as common ancestry. Theropods all had hollow bones and three toed limbs, traits that remain in modern birds. The most famous of theropods was the T. Rex, but you also may have heard of the Spinosaurus, Archaeopteryx, and Allosaurus.

    How did we come to this conclusion? It turns out hollow bones and three toed limbs are not the only similarities between theropods and modern birds. Various types of theropods have also been found to have feathers in fossilized remains. Older theropod species, that are “farther” back from dinosaurs on the tree of life, only had one kind of feather, which paleontologists think was used for insulation. Younger theropods, more closely related to birds, such as the oviraptors, had multiple different kinds of feathers. While some of these feathers are also for insulation, others are very similar to the flight feathers on modern birds. Modern birds have three “fingers” in the bone structure that supports their wings. Groups of dinosaurs that are theorized to be closely related to modern birds tend to have less and less fingers. The Orinsthican dinosaurs, very distant ancestors to birds, had five fingers. The Allosaurids, closer ancestors, had four fingers. Eventually, dinosaurs like Archaeopteryx had three fingers, which would eventually lead to the development of modern birds’ wings. Over time, the tails of dinosaurs began to get shorter and shorter. Eventually, the tails got so short that they’re barely there, until the only modern evidence of them are the tail feathers on the backs of birds.

    References

    Agnolin, F. L., Motta, M. J., Brissón Egli, F., Lo Coco, G., & Novas, F. E. (2019). Paravian phylogeny and the dinosaur-bird transition: An overview. Frontiers in Earth Science, 6(February), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2018.00252

    The origin of birds – Understanding Evolution. (n.d.). Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-origin-of-birds/

    Theropod | dinosaur suborder | Britannica. (n.d.). Retrieved November 30, 2021, from https://www.britannica.com/animal/theropod

  • Racing Rats’ Impact on Mental Health

    Racing Rats’ Impact on Mental Health

    A cartoon rat examines a rodent operated vehicle.Introduction

    The authors of “Enriched environment exposure accelerates rodent driving skills”, published in Behavioral Brain Research, conducted an experiment intended to study the impact of the environment on the efficacy of stress-releasing mental health treatments in lab rats. This study aimed to see how an enriched environment, both socially and intellectually, promotes stress relief while doing fun activities. The process for teaching the rats to drive the rodent operated vehicles (known as ROVs) also has implications for the importance of enrichment in how service dogs are trained.

    Study Summary

    There were two groups of rats that participated in this study. The control group of rats lived in a standard environment for laboratory rats, in standard laboratory cages, each with one other rat. The experimental group of rats lived in housing with an enriched environment. These rats got multiple rat friends, rat toys to keep them occupied, and multi-level housing.

    The study began with a “training period”, where rats in both groups were taught by operant conditioning how to drive the ROVs. While the authors of the study expected the rats living in standard housing to perform worse than the other rats, they were shocked at how much worse they performed. The authors noted that the control group rats failed to perform even “basic” tasks in driving the ROVs.

    After the training period (in which food rewards were used to encourage the rats to drive), both groups of rats continued to drive the ROVs even in the absence of rewards. However, rats living in enriched housing drove the ROVs without treats for a longer period of time than the rats living in standard housing. Throughout the study, the scientists measured the levels of hormones that were indicative of the rats’ ability to handle stress. Both groups showed an improved ability to handle stress as a result of ROV driving, but the enriched housing rats showed a significantly larger benefit than the standard housed rats.

    Conclusion

    This investigation shows that the environment of an animal has a significant impact on the effect of stress relieving interventions. The authors suspect that the enriched rats were more able to learn new behaviors (driving the ROVs) as a result of experiencing a wider variety of behaviors in their enriched home environments. The results of this study have interesting ramifications on the optimal conditions for other animals who will be undergoing rigorous training. Additionally, this study demonstrates how a good environment that has opportunities for social connection and mental challenges is beneficial in mental health treatment.

    References

    Crawford, L. E., Knouse, L. E., Kent, M., Vavra, D., Harding, O., LeServe, D., Fox, N., Hu, X., Li, P., Glory, C., & Lambert, K. G. (2020). Enriched environment exposure accelerates rodent driving skills. Behavioural Brain Research, 378, 112309. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2019.112309

  • Where do Great Blue Herons catch their snacks?

    Where do Great Blue Herons catch their snacks?

    A picture of a great blue heron. The heron is standing on the edge of a pond.

    Introduction

    Great blue herons are part of the Ardea genus, which is a genus of birds that includes the herons, egrets, and bitterns. These birds are typically pretty large in size, with lengths usually greater than 80–100 cm. You’re most likely to find members of this genus in wetlands and other partially aquatic habitats.

    Feeding Behavior

    Great blue herons are carnivores, and they eat a variety of aquatic, semi-aquatic, and terrestrial prey. Their diet consists of predominantly fish, but they will eat pretty much anything that they can catch in their beaks. Fish are supplemented by amphibians, reptiles, small ground mammals, and even other birds. Great blue herons catch smaller prey in the jaws at the back of their beak, although they prefer to stab larger prey with their beaks.

    There are 38 total feeding behaviors that have been recorded by members of the Ardea family. Each species in this genus uses multiple feeding methods — they’re creative hunters. Twelve of these strategies have been observed in great blue herons. The most commonly observed feeding behavior for the great blue heron is standing and waiting, where the heron simply stands still and waits for its prey to come to it. Herons also will move slowly, either through the water or through a field, in search of prey. More dramatically, the great blue heron will occasionally plunge-dive, diving down quickly and with force, to catch its prey. A particularly interesting feeding behavior of the great blue heron is to stick its bill in the water, and vibrate it. The underwater vibrations create ripples, attracting fish and other aquatic prey.

    Habitat

    Great blue herons prefer to live in wetlands, especially when nesting. Rather than nesting alone, great blue herons nest in colonies. Colony nesting is particularly common for birds that live in aquatic environments. Colonies can have over 500 nests (so easily over a thousand birds) all relatively close together. For large scale habitats and especially for colony nesting, great blue herons have preferences for certain types of habitats over others. The lacustrine wetlands is a particular favorite of Illinois great blue herons. Lacustrine wetlands are any wetland or deepwater area that has these three characteristics:

    1. Located in a valley/depression in the ground
    2. Lacking trees, shrubs, and other plant life that covers more than 30% of the area
    3. At least 20 acres in surface area

    Biologists believe that herons may prefer this biome for their habitats due to the easy access to their preferred prey of small bodied vertebrates. Additionally, large wetlands tend to be isolated from human activity, which great blue herons tend to avoid if possible.

    References

    Combs, B. P. (2021). Great Blue Heron Forages for Fish by Bill-Vibrating. Western North American Naturalist, 81(2), 280–284. https://doi.org/10.3398/064.081.0213

    Gibbs, J. P., & Kinkel, L. K. (1997). Determinants of the Size and Location of Great Blue Heron Colonies. Colonial Waterbirds, 20(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.2307/1521757

    Knight, E. C., Vennesland, R. G., & Winchester, N. N. (2016). Importance of Proximity to Foraging Areas for the Pacific Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias fannini) Nesting in a Developed Landscape. Waterbirds, 39(2), 165–174. https://doi.org/10.1675/063.039.0207

  • The Undersea Bone Devourer

    The Undersea Bone Devourer

    Osedax, from the Latin os, oris (bone) and edāx, edācis (devourer), is a genus of undersea worms that consumes bone. A genus (which is more Latin, this time for a family group) is a group of species that are similar. More distantly, the genus Osedax belongs to the family Siboglinidae. Siboglinidae is a family (a level above in the biological categorization hierarchy from genus) composed of segmented worms, all of which have chitin bristles. Chitin is a natural substance that is found in all sorts of bugs, and it’s similar to the material that makes up your fingernails. Another prominent species in this family are the undersea tubal worms that live at the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. It turns out there is a surprising amount of diversity of species of undersea bone eating worms. The worms range in size and in behavior. You can find members of the Osedax genus in all seven oceans, and in all sorts of depths (21 – 4000 m). Some of them are generalists, whereas others specialize in large bone deposits often found on the ocean floor. Whalefalls (you can read more about them here: https://2026fat.chargedmag.org/2012/06/whale-fall-2/) are one such source of large bone deposits on the ocean floor.

    Osedax worms were first discovered in 1994. Biologists were initially baffled at what exactly they were. The worms evaded classification until molecular DNA analysis showed that they were related to the tube worms that live in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. This breakthrough allowed biologists to finally place the Osedax genus into the Siboglinidae family. Later, fossils were discovered of Osedax worms inhabiting a large, dead reptile, dated to the early-Late Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago. This led to several revelations about the history of Osedax worms. Firstly, there was now a historical precedent for being generalists, rather than whale specialists. Osedax worms were initially discovered and identified on whale falls, and there was some debate in the scientific community about whether or not they occupied other niches. Well, giant dead reptiles certainly weren’t whales, so this find cleared that up nicely. The fossil finding also illustrates something about the history of Osedax worms and the Siboglinidae family. This finding confirmed an earlier theory that the Siboglinidae family originated somewhere in the mid-Cretaceous period. It also means that the weird bone eating worms under the sea outlasted the dinosaurs, which is neat.

    A labeled illustration of an Osedax worm.
    A labeled illustration of an Osedax worm.

    Physically, Osedax worms are strange looking creatures. Red, string-looking bits float out from one side of the main worm body. On the other side, there are green, root-like structures sticking out back. These roots secrete acids to dissolve the bones where they lodge. Their middle is a white, segmented tube. It doesn’t get any more regular on the inside, either. Osedax worms don’t have a digestive system – they just host a wealth of bacteria inside of them to digest the bones they consume. Another strange thing about the inside of an Osedax worm is that the male worms live inside the females. As in, every picture of an Osedax worm you see will be of a female, as the males are teeny tiny and live inside of the females. Dwarf males, as this phenomenon is called, occurs when the males of a species are much smaller (and usually simpler anatomically) than the females. In species where dwarf males exist, the males typically reside somewhere inside or attached to the female members of the species. Osedax worms are at least as odd as you were expecting worms that ate bones to be, at very least.

     

    References

    • Smith, Craig R, Glover, Adrian G, Treude, Tina, Higgs, Nicholas D, & Amon, Diva J. (2015). Whale-Fall Ecosystems: Recent Insights into Ecology, Paleoecology, and Evolution. Annual Review of Marine Science, 7(1), 571-596.
    • Rouse, G. W. (2004). Osedax: Bone-Eating Marine Worms with Dwarf Males. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 305(5684), 668-671.
    • Danise, S, & Higgs, N. D. (2015). Bone-eating Osedax worms lived on Mesozoic marine reptile deadfalls. Biology Letters (2005), 11(4), 20150072.
  • The von Neumann Architecture

    The von Neumann Architecture

    The von Neumann Architecture

    Introduction

    Have you ever wondered how your computer works? Who decided that we should use keyboards to tell our devices what to do? And who else later decided that touch screens were cooler much of the time. Much of how we think about computing we currently owe to John von Neumann, who developed the current way of thinking about computers.

    The Von Neumann architecture is a model that was developed in the 1940s by John von Neumann, a physicist and mathematician, who was an early computer researcher. During World War 2, cracking secret codes and the development of nuclear weapons led to an increase in public funding for computer research, as machines could do lots of arithmetic quickly and accurately. Von Neumann would go on to outline a model for building any sort of computer in his The First Draft Report on the EDVAC (the EDVAC being a computer he was working on at the time) that has been the standard for all computing devices since.

    In his model, von Neumann illustrates that a computer should have several main components:

    • Arithmetic Unit
    • Control Unit
    • Memory
    • Input
    • Output

    Flexibility of the Model

    This model is relatively flexible – in his paper, von Neumann mentions that different machines could very well have different capabilities while still being built with all of these components in mind. Computers that use the von Neumann architecture range from very simple (such as the one in your microwave) to the massive supercomputers that have dedicated buildings. The wide scope of computers that fall under the von Neumann model are proof that von Neumann achieved his goal when it came to creating a model that was versatile.

    Components and What They Do

    The control unit, as described by von Neumann, is the part of the computer that keeps track of what is supposed to run when. When you turned on your computer, your PC’s control device (most probably inside of a CPU) queued up the correct start up operations. The purpose of the control unit is to allow a computer to run many different kinds of programs, and switch between them when necessary. While this seems trivial now, the first computers were manually operated. If you wanted a computer to do something different than what it was previously doing, you had to go in and change all of the wires yourself. The conception of a control unit allowed the computer to modify its own hardware and software, allowing a great deal of abstraction for users. Computers being able to modify themselves (and other computers) essentially enables modern computing as we know it, the good (high level programming languages, not swapping about the wires in your desktop) and the bad (it would be impossible to hack a pre-von Neumann computer without performing an elaborate heist operation to change around the wiring yourself).

    The arithmetic unit of a computer does the logical processing. Computers were originally designed for doing lots and lots of math, so von Neumann designated an entire component of his model to do that. Despite being called the arithmetic unit, this unit is also responsible for doing logical operations as well. Arithmetic units allow computers to distinguish if two sequences of binary are completely the same (an AND operation), if some of the numbers are the same, or allowing sign flippage.

    The memory component of this model is probably simplest to understand. If we want computers to do work in a useful capacity, they need to be able to remember what we’ve done. Most modern computers have two types of memory. They’ve got long term, slower memory, which is usually kept in the hard drive. Computers also have faster, short term memory. This is typically stored in RAM. Traditionally, RAM memory has been volatile. This means that it is erased when you turn the power off. This is also why you used to lose everything you did on older video games without saving – if you didn’t tell the computer to move your data out of RAM and onto the hard drive, it was just lost.

    The last components of a computer are its input and output components. Input is just how the user puts instructions into a computer. These days, inputs are most often keyboards and/or touch screens, although speakers are becoming more common. Output is how a computer communicates what it’s doing to the user. Most computers have a visual (a screen) and an audio (speakers and/or headphones) component to the output.

    Conclusion

    The von Neumann model for computing has lasted for nearly a century. Pretty much any device that you use will have been built and designed with the von Neumann architecture in mind. That being said, scientists are looking beyond this model for the future. Quantum computing and other innovations may mean we say good bye to the von Neumann architecture.

    References

    Brandl, M. F. (2017). A Quantum von Neumann Architecture for Large-Scale Quantum Computing. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02583)

    Freiberger, P., & Swaine, M. (2016, November 14). Von Neumann machine. Retrieved September 15, 2020, from https://www.britannica.com/technology/von-Neumann-machine

    von Neumann, J. (1945). First draft of a report on the EDVAC. doi:10.5479/sil.538961.39088011475779

     

  • Nicotine is Dope: a poem on vaping and addiction

    Nicotine is Dope: a poem on vaping and addiction

    What nice etiquette

    Not to be burning a cigarette.

    With flavors like Diet Coke

    Instead of plain old smoke.

    Youth claim to thrive

    On something that resembles a flash drive.

    But wait,

    Maybe we should take five.

     

    It seems vaping has strayed from its original intent.

    It is no longer used to prevent.

    And is now an addictive supplement.

     

    Without trying to overreact,

    Let me present some facts:

    With every juice pod that is drained,

    There are effects on the brain.

    Research shows detriments to the prefrontal cortex –

    An area so important for cognitive development…

    Especially during adolescence!

     

    This is what lower activity in this region can mean:

    Difficulty choosing between

    Or even troubles controlling the obscene…

    Things that, quite frankly, are already hard enough for teens.

     

    So make sure you look for the current research and stats.

    So next time one says it’s healthier than cigarettes,

    You can say, “Well maybe we should chat.”

     

     

     

    References:

    England L, Bunnell RF, Pechacek, et al. Nicotine and the developing human: A neglected element in the electronic cigarette debate. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 2015;49(2): 286–293.

    Musso F, Bettermann F, Vucurevic G, et al. (2007). Smoking impacts on prefrontal attentional network function in young adult brains. Psychopharmacology. 2007;191(1): 159-169.

    Primack BA, Shensa A, Sidani JE, et al. Initiation of traditional cigarette smoking after electronic cigarette use among tobacco-naïve US young adults. The American Journal of Medicine. 2018;131(4): 443.e441-443.e449.

    Yuan M, Cross SJ, Loughlin SE, Leslie FM. Nicotine and the adolescent brain. Journal of Physiology. 2015;593(16):3397-412.

     

  • Makin’ Biscuits

    Makin’ Biscuits

    Some cats are oftentimes seen engaging in a rhythmic motion of pushing their paws back and forth on a soft surface, which is referred to as “kneading.” This behavior is not universal across all cats and can be distinctive among cats (“Why Do Cats Knead?, n.d.). The exact reason behind this behavior is a mystery, but there are a few explanations to rationalize this behavior (Castro, 2013).

      1. Kittens knead their mother while nursing to stimulate milk flow. This behavior may be carried on into adulthood when cats are feeling happy, associating kneading with the comfort of its mother (Castro, 2013).
      2. Cats may be marking their territories with their scent (“Why Do Cats Knead?, n.d.).
      3. Female cats knead as a mating signal to males (“Why Do Cats Knead?, n.d.).
      4. Kneading is a form of stretching (“Why Do Cats Knead?, n.d.).

    Regardless of the reason why cats knead, we can all agree that they are super cute when they do so!

     

    References
    _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Castro, J. (2013, October 18). Why Do Cats Knead? Retrieved from https://www.livescience.com/40548-why-do-cats-knead.html

    Why Do Cats Knead? (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/evr_ct_why_do_cats_knead