Science News

Headlines

. Teens discover new species of mites
. How we confuse poor birds
. A strong, waterproof building material from plant leaves
. Welcome the new element, ununseptium!
. A striped shirt is a good idea against flies

Read more about them below

. Teens discover new species of mites

Imagine the excitment of finding three new animal species. This is what two Russian teens have achieved, as they searched through vegetation, looking for mites.
Mites are tiny. Most can be seen only with the aid of a microscope. As arachnids, they belong to the group of animals that includes spiders, scorpions and ticks. Like ticks, their closest relatives, many mites are parasites. That means that they get their nutrition by taking advantage of their plant or animal hosts.
This is especially true for a group of mites called eriophyoid mites. Because mites in this group live inside plants — and outside of view — they have not been well studied. So says Timofei Petrushenko, 16. He is a Class 10 student at the Academic Gymnasium of Saint-Petersburg State University in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Though poorly known, eriophyoid mites could be very important. They spread from plant to plant by riding the winds. They can cause abnormal growths on the plants they infect. These mites also can ferry viruses from one plant to another. That could cause big problems for crop species hosting the mites.
He and classmate Valentina Ruazantceva, also 16, collected samples of grass-like plants called rushes. These were growing near their homes in northwestern Russia. They also asked a Russian scientist for samples of similar plants from other parts of the world. Then, Timofei and Valentina looked at the samples closely.
In particular, the teens pored over parts of the plants that were discoloured. With tiny needles, they probed the plants in those areas, removing samples from inside them. They also searched discoloured stems for tiny holes. Holes could signal where mites had bored through to get inside the plants.
During their research, Timofei and Valentina found three new species of mites. One came from the plants the teens collected near their homes. The other two came from plant samples collected in the United States and Serbia.
Like previously known species of eriophyoid mites, each of the three new ones has only two pairs of legs. (Many mites, especially those that live on the outside of animals or plants, have eight legs.) Distinctive patterns of ridges and grooves on the new mites’ bodies are unlike those found on other species. That is a how they realised they had found species new to science.
The teens plan to submit a scientific paper describing their findings to a journal where scientists describe details of newfound animal species. If the paper is accepted by the journal — and the mites confirmed to be novel species — these teens may get to choose the scientific names for each one. That is what they are most excited about, apparently.

. How we confuse poor birds
Research has shown that robins get disoriented when surrounded by the electromagnetic noise given off by some ordinary electronic devices.
Birds know where to go when it is time to migrate. They get some of that superb sense of direction from their ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field. That magnetic sense acts a bit like a compass used by human hikers. But the energy coming from some electronic devices can perturb a birds’ internal compass. And that might confuse a bird's sense of direction, according to a new study.
Most electronic devices send out waves of energy called electromagnetic radiation. The levels are too low to harm people. Any given device only sends out a small amount. But some types of this radiation could pose a problem to birds.
Even when held captive in a lab, birds know when it is time to migrate. They fidget in their cages. They try to face in the direction they would fly away, if outdoors. But the birds cannot always line up correctly, as some German scientists have reported in the journal Nature.
They observed that caged robins did not face toward their migratory directions. For several years they could not figure out why. Then a researcher suggested that they set up a shield. Called a Faraday cage, it consisted of grounded aluminum screens that blocked incoming electromagnetic radiation. When protected by the screening, birds in the lab at last faced in the direction they should migrate. 
Over the next few years, they kept testing the idea that electromagnetic noise upsets a robin’s sense of direction. They tried various ways to challenge it. Yet their data always showed the same thing. The birds only faced the correct direction when the shield blocked out the electromagnetic radiation.
Not all types of everyday radiation confused the birds' sense of direction. Cell phones and power lines are often blamed for confusing birds. But the researchers reported that they had no effect in their tests.

. A strong, waterproof building material
A new material made from plant leaves could replace plywood for many uses. The material is strong, waterproof, cheap and easy to make. Two girls in their teens have invented it using a blend of pineapple waste and recycled plastics.
Those raw ingredients are abundant in Malaysia, where the two girls live. The largest part of the new material is a type of plastic called high-density polyethylene. It is used to make many things, including milk jugs and shampoo bottles. Known as HDPE, this plastic is often recycled or thrown away. Nurul Roslan and Hanis Zaini, both 17, Class 11 students at Mara Junior Science College Terendak in Melaka, Malaysia, have found a good use for it. When treated like trash, the plastic does not degrade quickly, it can take about 450 years to break down.
The other ingredient in the new material is fibre from pineapple leaves. These leaves are tough because they contain a strong material called lignin. It does not decompose quickly. Farmers often burn the leaves to dispose of them. That causes air pollution. If farmers don’t burn the leaves, they send them to a landfill. There they join the discarded plastic.
Nurul and Hanis wanted to find a use for these normally discarded items. That is when they came up with the idea to create a new building material. They tried many recipes. First, they melted the HDPE at 180° Celsius and stirred it for 6 minutes. Then they added pineapple leaf fibers and stirred the mix for another 4 minutes. After that lumpy mush hardened and cooled, they ground it into a powder. Finally, they melted that powder and moulded the material into its final shape.
Nurul and Hanis tested their material by moulding it into large square tiles 1 millimeter thick. According to their tests, the best mix is made from 90 percent HDPE and 10 percent pineapple leaf fibre. The tiles they created are waterproof and termite-resistant. Those are big gians in tropical countries like India and Malaysia. The material is twice as flexible as plywood but twice as strong, they say. Their new material is also durable, has a shiny surface and can be dyed any colour. They expect that it could be used to make anything from shelving to plastic furniture.
Best of all, they claim, their material is ecofriendly. Using waste plastic and pineapple leaves could help reduce air pollution (by keeping those items out of incinerators) and extend the lives of landfills. What is more, replacing wood-based building materials with the new material could also help reduce the need to cut down local forests.

. Welcome the new element, ununseptium!
Scientists have confirmed element 117. This superheavy element was produced for the second time — and by a different team of researchers than four years ago — thus proving that ununseptium is real. Both times, scientists reported making only a small amount. Just a few atoms. And they lasted for less than a second before breaking apart. But that was enough.
The new announcement means that chemists will likely soon be adding number 117 to their periodic table of the elements. The new entrant’s name? Unofficially, scientists are calling it ununseptium. Not terribly clever, it is based on the Latin for one-one-seven. But that name is only temporary. Those who first created 117 will get a chance to rename it before long.
Uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring element on Earth (at least in substantial quantities). It is number 92 on the periodic table. But for decades, scientists have been bombarding big elements with smaller ones. Their goal has been to briefly fuse them. That creates a superheavy element: in different classifications, that is an element bigger than uranium or one more massive than rutherfordium (number 104).
For now, number 117 is the most massive element confirmed to exist. In 2006, researchers reported creating one slightly bigger: ununoctium, or number 118. But such superheavy elements must be created more than once, by different teams. Until that happens, the scientific community will not formally accept that their existence is real. Ununoctium is still awaiting such a confirmation through a second set of tests.
The creation of element 117 began with another element, berkelium (number 97). For more than a year, researchers worked to make some 13 milligrams of almost pure berkelium. They shipped the radioactive element to another team, where it was bombarded with a high-energy beam of calcium ions. A small number of the smash-ups resulted in fusion reactions. A few atoms of element 117 emerged from those reactions.
The researchers did not actually "see" the new element. They deduced its creation by studying its radioactive decay. That is when an atom sheds subatomic particles (here alpha particles). All radioactive elements, including number 117, decay. It means they break into smaller atoms or spit out subatomic particles. In the new tests, scientists quantified each successive decay of the original element and its breakdown products — known as daughters. That let them confirm that the short-lived parent must have been element 117.
In all, 72 scientists and engineers from 16 different research groups took part in this project. They reported their achievement in the journal Physics Review Letters.

. A striped shirt is a good idea
Zebras, the large african animals with black and white stripes, are some of the most fascinating creatures on Earth. Scientists have long wondered what benefit zebras might get from their fancy black and white coats. Those lovely stripes may be most useful as protection from biting flies, a study now reported in Nature Communications concludes.
Biologists studied zebras and other closely related African animals. They tested five popular ideas about how the stripes might function. No evidence emerged to support most of these notions. Some scientists had proposed those stripes help zebras hide from predators, such as lions, or confuse them. Still others suggested that those stripes might offer some cooling or help the animals in forming social groups. None of those ideas hold up. Instead, the stripes appear to help the animals avoid the bite of bloodthirsty flies. This finding supports some studies had found signs that flies prefer solids to stripes when hunting for a landing place.
To test all of the theories, scientists used geographic information. They looked at where in Africa the 20 different types of animals belonging to the genus Equus lived. Some of these equines have stripes, including zebras and asses with striped legs. Others are stripe-free. These include other asses and wild horses.
The team found no connection between stripes and whether the animals lived in woodsy areas. This suggests that stripes do not camouflage zebras in those places.
In other studies, researchers found that lions ate plenty of zebras. The new observations suggest that stripes do not confuse the predators. The experts also looked for — and found no evidence that stripes cool the zebras or help them recognize each another when forming social groups.
Striped animals often live in places where the environment is just right most of the year for biting flies to flourish. In those areas, horseflies, tsetse flies and other biting flies spread fatal diseases to zebras and horses. That connection now suggests stripes may help zebras reduce the number of bites, and the infections they can spread. 
There are still many questions to be answered in this regard, but this seems a good explanation.

Sources: Society for Science and the Public, Nature, Science,
Nature Communications