When office workers at the 54-story Mori Tower in the Roppongi Hills urban community need some fresh air, they head downstairs to Mohri Garden. The tranquil green space contains a pond that was once part of a 17th-century feudal estate. Now, the pond is home to thousands of Medaka fish with an unusual pedigree: they are the descendants of fish who were born in space.
The Mohri Garden Pond. Photo: machu/Creative Commons
In July 1994, four Medaka — a hardy, inch-long species found in lakes and rice paddies around Japan — traveled to space aboard the NASA shuttle Columbia. During the 15-day voyage, scientists observed the breeding of the Medaka to see if the microgravity environment would affect their behavior. The fish mated and their eggs hatched normally, giving the four adult Medaka the distinction of being the first vertebrates to mate while orbiting Earth.
When the shuttle returned, the offspring of the astronaut fish spent a few months being studied in a Japanese lab before being distributed to “foster parents” at schools, museums, and homes across the country. In 2003, the Roppongi Hills complex opened, boasting four apartment buildings, a corporate high-rise, museums, hotels, and a shopping center. During a welcoming ceremony involving 1,000 school children, Japanese astronaut Mamoru Mohri released 10,000 descendents of the extraterrestrial fish into the garden pond.
With a lifespan of three to five years and a breeding age of seven weeks, the Medaka of Roppongi Hills have thrived. Meanwhile, aboard the International Space Station, microgravity experiments on their species continue.
A Polish group, Deep Ocean Technology, wants to place an underwater hotel ion the Great Barrier Reef.
DOT says its prototype underwater hotel, the Water Discus, is non-invasive and would not harm the Queensland environment.
DOT’s prototype, the Water Discus, provides for 22 underwater cabins linked by a communications shaft to above -water facilities and anchored to the sea bed with five structural legs.
The towable hotel includes 22 cabins and could be built for between $45 and $60 million.
It can be built in a shipyard and towed into place for $45-$60 million.
The cabins are submerged 10 metres to catch the light and the best of the underwater activity, as well as retaining the same atmosphere as on the surface.
DOT’s local representative, Maximillian Zielinski told the Polish-Australian Marine Conference in Sydney on Friday that Queensland offered exciting opportunities to partner on integrated tourism and casino projects.
A spokesman for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said such a proposal would be assessed under the Act and, if it had a significant impact on a matter of national environmental significance would require the approval of the federal Environment Minister.
Mr Zielinski said the design of the Water Discus was non-invasive. “We have been researching very promising techniques of rebuilding the reef, where the Water Discus would be an integral part of the endeavour,” he said.
The average Australian spends more than five hours watching YouTube every month.
With such high viewership, it’s no surprise that interest groups are reaching out with YouTube to try to change people’s behaviour, including well known campaigns such as Beyond Blue’s Man Therapy and Tourism Australia’s Best Jobs in the World. But how successful are they?
There’s even a Hollywood charity dedicated to using television and films for promoting public health messages. However, YouTube videos are much shorter than television shows or movies, meaning that people have less time to become involved and persuaded to change their behaviour.
In our study we looked at whether a single viewing of a YouYube video could influence a person’s behaviour a month later. More specifically, we looked at whether watching a 50-second YouTube clip could encourage pet fish owners to regularly clean out their aquariums.
The experiment
Why pet fish? In many behavioural studies results can be biased by outside influences. If we studied exercise or smoking the participants would have been exposed to similar advertising campaigns elsewhere and might be tempted to lie about their behaviour to feel better about themselves. We were fairly confident that fish owners wouldn’t come across any other videos on cleaning fish tanks.
Fish are also the forgotten family pet. Just like cats and dogs, fish are intelligent, long-lived and can feel pain, but you would never flush your dead cat down a toilet or win puppies at carnivals.
With 1.5 billion pet fish sold globally every year, it’s time we started taking better care of them and regularly cleaning out an aquarium is one of the most effective ways to keep your fish healthy.
Nearly 200 fish owners took part in our online experiment. After answering a few short questions about keeping fish and how often they cleaned their tank, they were randomly assigned to one of three groups.
Goldfish survey video: the sad version.
Two of the groups were shown different videos designed to improve their tank cleaning habits, either a sad video about pets dying or a funny video of fish pooing. The remaining control group were shown no video at all.
Goldfish survey video: the funny version.
One month later, they were asked again how often they cleaned their tanks and what they remembered about the video.
What they remembered
Initially, it looked as if watching the YouTube video made no difference to their behaviour. About a third of people cleaned their tank more often after the experiment, a third less often and a third stayed the same.
However, a closer examination revealed that the results were slightly more complex. People who watched a video but did not improve were already doing the right thing and cleaning out their aquariums regularly.
So, rather then being unaffected by the video, they simply didn’t have room for improvement. But for the one-quarter of respondents who agreed they needed to improve, the videos made a big difference.
The group of owners who said they needed to improve but did not see either YouTube video actually got worse over the following month. Half cleaned their tank the same number of times and the other half cleaned their tank less often. None of the participants in this group improved their habits.
By comparison, 60% of fish owners who intended to improve and watched a YouTube video started cleaning out their tanks more often. Only 6% cleaned their tank less after watching the video.
Make ‘em laugh to remember
When it comes to remembering the message, comedy appears to beat tragedy, with 88% of people who saw the funny video recalling it after one month compared to 60% who recalled the sad video.
Our results suggest that YouTube videos can affect a person’s behaviour, if only by reinforcing what you already intended to do. For example, a YouTube video encouraging people to quit smoking won’t help people who don’t smoke, and won’t stop determined smokers. But it could help people who were thinking about quitting to start taking action.
So for people thinking of making a YouTube video there is some evidence to suggest that a funny video will be remembered better, which is possibly why Melbourne’s Metro Trains Dumb Ways to Die was a YouTube hit despite dealing with a serious topic.
Dumb Ways to Die
Our results, while promising, represent a small sample and may not apply to all topics or all groups of people. YouTube is an important feature of modern life and more research needs to be done to determine its full potential to influence our behaviour.
This is an edited version of Miriam Sullivan’s presentation “Can we change behaviour using YouTube?”, delivered today at the Australian Science Communicators national conference in Brisbane.
With thanks to co-researchers Professor Nancy Longnecker and Associate Professor Dominique Blache. No animals were harmed in the making of the films; they were all willing volunteers in return for treats.
Big waves are energetically costly for fish, and there are more big waves than ever. The good news is that fish might be able to adapt.
Shiner surfperch, Cymatogaster aggregate, the study species. Photo: Ross Robertson
“There has been a lot of recent work in oceanography documenting the fact that waves are becoming more frequent and more intense due to climate change,” says Mr Dominique Roche, PhD candidate from the Research School of Biology. “The habitats that fish live in are changing.”
“This is not a localised problem, but something that is documented globally,” adds Ms Sandra Binning, also a PhD candidate in the Research School of Biology.
Mr Roche and Ms Binning are co-authors on a study documenting the energy it takes for fish to swim through large, intense waves. Specifically, they focused on fish that swim with their arm, or pectoral fins, which are very common on both rocky and coral reefs.
“By controlling water flow in an experimental chamber with the help of a computer, we were able to replicate oscillations in the water flow like in a wave pool,” explains Mr Roche.
“We looked at how much energy the fish consumed while swimming without waves, in conditions with small waves, and in conditions with large waves. The idea was to compare the amount of energy that fish consume while swimming in these three conditions when their average swimming speed was exactly the same.”
Mr Roche and Ms Binning found that it’s a lot more energetically demanding for fish to deal with large fluctuations in water speed and wave height.
“It’s harder to constantly switch speeds than it is to remain at a constant speed, like a runner changing between running and walking during interval training versus a steady jog. Well, it’s the same for swimming fish,” says Mr Roche.
“Things could get tough for fish in windy, exposed habitats if waves get stronger with changing climate. But there may be a silver lining,” says Ms Binning.
“In the swim chamber, when the water flow increased, fish had to beat their fins faster to keep up. But when the water flow slowed down, some fish took advantage and rode the wave. Essentially, rather than beating their fins frantically, these fish used the momentum that they had gained while speeding up to glide and save energy.
“This means that some individuals are better at dealing with waves than others, and that there is hope for populations to adapt their swimming behavior to potentially changing conditions in the future,” concludes Mr Roche.
Engineers intrigued by the toughness of mollusc shells, which are composed of brittle minerals, have found inspiration in their structure to make glass 200 times stronger than a standard pane.
Despite the fragility of their constituents, mollusk shells are known to be extremely strong and tough. Here a new type of glass, inspired from the structure and mechanics of mother-of-pearl (nacre), displays superior toughness and deformability compared to regular glass. Image: F. Barthelat
Counter-intuitively, the glass is strengthened by introducing a network of microscopic cracks, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications this week.
A team at McGill University in Montreal began their research with a close-up study of natural materials like mollusc shells, bone and nails which are astonishingly resilient despite being made of brittle minerals.
The secret lies in the fact that the minerals are bound together into a larger, tougher unit.
The binding means the shell contains abundant tiny fault lines called interfaces. Outwardly, this might seem a weakness, but in practice it is a masterful deflector of external pressure.
To take one example, the shiny, inner shell layer of some molluscs, known as nacre or mother of pearl, is some 3000 times tougher than the minerals it is made of.
“Making a material tougher by introducing weak interfaces may seem counter-intuitive, but it appears to be a universal and powerful strategy in natural materials,” the paper said.
Taking what they learnt, the team used a 3D laser to engrave microscopic fissures into glass slides, filled them with a polymer, and found it made them 200 times tougher.
The glass could absorb impacts better — yielding and bending slightly instead of shattering.
“A container made of standard glass will break and shatter if it is dropped on the floor.
“In contrast, a container made of our bio-inspired glass has the possibility to deform a little, without completely fracturing,” study co-author Francois Barthelat said in an interview.
“That container could therefore be used again after one or several drops.”
The engraved glass can “stretch” by almost five per cent before snapping — compared to a strain capacity of only 0.1 per cent for standard glass.
The stronger glass may find application in bullet-proof windows, glasses, or even smartphone screens.
Glass is functional because of its transparency, hardness, resistance to chemicals and durability — but the main drawback is its brittleness.
The new method to address this weakness was “very economical”, said Barthelat.
“All that is needed is a pulsed laser beam which can be accurately focused at pre-determined points.
“Our 3D laser engraving technique can easily be scaled up and applied to larger and thicker components of different shapes.”
Previous attempts to copy the sturdy structure of mollusc shells had focused on creating new materials by assembling miniscule “building blocks” — like building a microscopic wall.
“Our idea was to attack the problem from a new angle: start with a large block of material with no initial microstructure and carve weaker interfaces within it,” said Barthelat.
SCIENTISTS in the US say they are on the way to creating a “cloak of invisibility” after uncovering the secret behind the cuttlefish’s extraordinary ability to blend in with its surroundings.
The cuttlefish can make itself scarce by changing colour. Photo: Andrew Hosking
The findings, reported in the Interface Journal of The Royal Society, could trigger improvements in paints, cosmetics, consumer electronics and military outfits.
“Throughout history, people have dreamt of an ‘invisible suit’,” said co-author Kevin Kit Parker, professor of bio-engineering at Harvard University. “Nature solved that problem. Now it’s up to us to replicate this genius so, like the cuttlefish, we can avoid our predators.”
Cuttlefish, known as “chameleons of the sea”, change their colour and skin patterns instantaneously to conceal themselves from hunters such as dolphins, sharks, seals and seabirds. This is made possible by millions of tiny organs known as chromatophores, each of which contains a pouch of black, brown, red, orange or yellow pigment.
Muscles around these ink-filled sacs selectively stretch them to six times their original surface area, allowing different colours to dominate at every point of the cuttlefish’s skin and staging a colour and movement show at a resolution of several megapixels.
Scientists have assumed that chromatophores are little more than selective colour filters, containing nothing but granules of pigment. But the Harvard-led team found they are “luminescent protein nanostructures” that emit their own light.
The team, which also included scientists from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, was able to show that the pigment granules actively absorbed and emitted light. “(Cuttlefish are) not simply modulating light through passive reflection,” said co-author Evelyn Hu.
The discovery explains how cuttlefish can maintain the intensity of their colours when their chromatophores expand, unlike balloons, which fade as they are inflated.
Professor Parker, an army reservist who has served in Afghanistan, said the findings could lead to a biologically inspired design for new types of military camouflage. Like the cuttlefish, the suits could be so adept at taking on background colours and patterns that their wearers would be difficult to see.
“Nature solved the riddle of adaptive camouflage a long time ago,” Professor Parker said. “Now the challenge is to reverse-engineer this system in a cost-efficient, synthetic system that is amenable to mass manufacturing.”
Professor Hu said it would be “extremely challenging” to replicate the cuttlefish’s mechanisms.
Four decades on, take a look back at photos of the devastating floods that swamped Brisbane on the Australia Day weekend in 1974.
Fourteen people died, at least 6,700 homes were inundated and there was $980 million ($8.1 billion in 2014 terms) of damage after the swollen Brisbane river surged through the city on Sunday January 27.
The flooding came after near-record rainfall over the wet summer, which was topped off by torrential falls from January 23, caused by Tropical Cyclone Wanda.
Between January 24 and 29, central Brisbane alone received an enormous 650 millimetres of rain.
The army and the fire brigade were called into action, even helping to repair the Pauls milk factory in South Brisbane, where waters reached six feet.
University of Queensland researchers have revealed new insights into colour vision in a study on a tropical reef shrimp.
Colour blindness test surprisingly reveals that mantis shrimp have poor colour sense.
The study from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute, crushes the illusion that complex eyes with more colour channels mean better colour vision.
Researcher Hanne Thoen found that the mantis shrimp (Haptosquilla trispinosa),which has 12 colour channels, has worse colour vision than humans, which have three colour channels.
“Theoretically, mantis shrimp should be far better at distinguishing colours than we are,” Ms Thoen said.
“Human brains – and all other animals including birds, monkeys, frogs and fish – determine the colours of objects by comparing the relative excitation of inputs.
“For instance, in humans this is red, green and blue.
“The critical finding is that mantis shrimp do not do this, and this means their way of encoding colour is different to all other animals known.”
A number of tests were conducted, including training the shrimps to respond to certain colours and using a two-way choice test with food as a reward.
Ms Thoen said by receiving food when choosing one particular colour and not any other, the shrimp quickly learned which choice to make and also revealed how they encode colour.
“We tested their ability to discriminate between colours that differ a lot – such as red and blue – and then changed to colours that got closer and closer together along the spectrum – red-green, red-yellow, red-orange – and noted when they started to make mistakes,” Ms Thoen said.
“Results were also compared to a number of other animals, including humans, bees, fish and butterflies, and although theoretically they should be better than all of them, they are far worse.”
Ms Thoen’s PhD supervisor, Professor Justin Marshall, runs the Sensory Neurobiology Group at the Queensland Brain Institute.
He said finding an animal that processed colour vision in a new way was remarkable and totally unexpected.
“It solves a long-standing problem of why mantis shrimp have 12 colour receptors – because they process colours and the contrast they provide in a totally different way to anything we have previously seen in an animal,” Professor Marshall said.
“This is the first time since the original descriptions of colour vision in the 1800s that we are able to say that there is another way of colour processing out there.”
“The findings demonstrate how evolution pushed the design of nervous systems towards a simple arrangement, rather than trying to fully interpret all the information from a very complex colour vision at the retinal level.
“This has the potential to teach us more about humans’ more simplistic perceptions of colour and about bio-inspired machine-vision solutions that might borrow ideas from the evolutionary process.”
Ms Thoen said the discovery would stimulate and inspire the advancement of new and innovative technologies in the applied sciences.
“Modern cameras struggle with the amount of data they take in due to increased pixel numbers.
“Maybe there is a more efficient way and the bio-inspiration provided by the shrimp could be the answer.”
The project was supported by grants from the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Australian Research Council and Doctoral Fellowship (2013) from Lizard Island Research Station – a facility of the Australian Museum.
Media: Mikaeli Costello, Director Advancement and Communications, Queensland Brain Institute, +61 401 580 685 or mikaeli.costello@uq.edu.au; Professor Justin Marshall, Queensland Brain Institute, +61 7 3345 1397, +61 423 024 162, or justin.marshall@uq.edu.au
The emergence of life from water on to land is a pivotal moment in evolutionary history, and scientists say a new discovery may shed light on how it was able to happen.
Scientists found the polypterus receives 93 per cent of its oxygen through spiracles on the top of its head. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Palaeontologists have verified a 200-year-old hunch about an African fish and, in the process, showed how the first land animals developed the ability to breathe.
The scientists found the polypterus, a bony fish species, receives most of its oxygen not through gills but primitive nostrils on the top of its head.
Scientists had previously noticed similar holes, known as spiracles, in fossils of much more ancient species which are today regarded as the ancestors of modern land animals.
Gogonasus fossil showing the large spiracles on top of the head and single pair of nostrils on the nose. Photo: Professor John Long
Those species include the gogonasus, which inhabited the oceans 380 million years ago and was first identified by Flinders University palaeontologist Professor John Long.
His new research, in conjunction with a team based at the Scripps Research Institute in the US, has now been published in the journal Nature Communications.
He says the spiracles in ancient species were a key step in evolution, allowing marine life to survive on land for the first time.
It’s a sort of evolutionary half-way if you like between true fishes breathing with gills and land animals that breathe entirely through their lungs.
Professor John Long, palaeontologist
“For many years, us palaeontologists have found fossils of ancient fish that have these peculiarly large holes on the top of their heads,” he said.
“We never knew what they were for so the evidence from our study shows these ancient fossil fishes were using these holes to breathe air.”
The scientists examined polypterus specimens for 360 hours, measuring the amount of oxygen inhaled by the fish.
“We can actually see what it does with the spiracles. It rises up to the surface of the water so the head’s still under water, but just the top of the head hits the surface,” Professor Long said.
“These little valves in the top of the head open and it sucks in.
“These sort of fish take in a lot of their oxygen through their gills but they top it up with lungs so they use both, so it’s a sort of evolutionary half-way if you like between true fishes breathing with gills and land animals that breathe entirely through their lungs.”
History of human hearing linked to origin of breathing
Professor Long says the spiracles were eventually replaced in most species as they switched to breathing through their noses and mouths.
But their legacy remains in our bodies and without them, we may not have adapted such an acute sense of hearing.
“Our new research has really nailed the origin of breathing in our deep, distant ancestors and as a by-product it’s also give us the story about how human hearing has its deep ancestry way back in the evolution breathing,” Professor Long said.
“When [the fish] left the water and invaded land and began to breathe air through the regular way, you know, through your nose and nostrils and mouth, this hole had another purpose.
“It then switched to becoming a hearing tube and eventually evolved into the tube leading to the inner ear.”
Professor Long says the research has an interesting lineage in its own right.
The groundwork was laid by French naturalists who noticed the strange spiracles on the polypterus when they were in Egypt as part of the Napoleonic invasion
“Napoleon lost his battles and so they had to rush back to France,” Professor Long said.
“They thought these fish were breathing in through the holes in the top of their head but nobody believed them and then a detailed a study done in 1968 by scientists in a laboratory said that these fish definitely do not breathe through their heads.”
But scientists became suspicious when they examined the set-up of those experiments.
“They were in a laboratory that was not reflecting [the fish’s] natural conditions,” Professor Long said.
“The new group thought that work was wrong because the fish were stressed.”
Proof perhaps of Isaac Asimov’s quip that “the most exciting phrase to hear in science … is not ‘Eureka’ but ‘that’s funny’.”
