A little bit of scratching can do some good, but too much can hurt

Scratching an itch can feel great, so scientists decided to dig into why that is the case since we know too much scratching isn’t good for us. Dr. Dan Kaplan, a professor of dermatology and immunology at the University of Pittsburgh, said they found that scratching drives inflammation to the skin, which, in light moderation, helps to fight bacterial skin infections. But he warns that continual or excessive scratching can prolong an itch and potentially damage the skin. Their study is in the journal Science.

Bear hazing goes high-tech with drones

A wildlife manager in the US has found that drones can be a safe and effective way to discourage problem bears from troubling human habitation and livestock. Wesley Sarmento started working in the prairies of Montana to prevent bear-human conflicts, but found the usual tricks of the trade were not as effective as he wanted them to be. Previously he tried to use noisemakers, dogs, trucks, and firearms, but buzzing bears with flying robots turned out to work much better. Now a PhD student at the University of Montana, he published an article about his hazing research in Frontiers in Conservation Science.

Ants can remember and hold grudges against those who trouble them

When ants fight with those from another nearby colony, it makes an impression. A new study has found the insects can remember the chemical signature of the aggressors, and will respond more vigorously and violently the next time they cross paths. Dr. Volker Nehring, a researcher at the University of Freiburg, Germany, describes the phenomenon as “the nasty neighbour" where ants are most aggressive to ant colonies closest to them, and says this is due to resource protection. Dr Nehring and his team’s research was published in the journal Current Biology.

Scientists on the front line of permafrost thaw describe changes in the Arctic

The acceleration of change in the Arctic due to global warming is transforming the landscape on a year-to-year basis, often in surprising ways. That’s according to scientists who’ve been studying the effects of climate change in the North.

One study found that lakes in Western Greenland shifted from pristine blue to dirty brown from one year to the next due to increased permafrost melting and runoff. Jasmine Saros, a lake ecologist from the University of Maine, said they were astonished by the magnitude of change they saw in all 10 lakes they studied and how quickly it happened. That study was published in the journal PNAS.

We also speak with William Quinton, a permafrost hydrologist from Wilfred Laurier University and the director of the Scotty Creek Research Station in southern Northwest Territories, an area he describes as “the frontline of permafrost thaw.” Quinton was part of a research team, led by Anna Virkkala from the Woodwell Climate Research Centre, that found that 34 per cent of the Arctic Boreal Zone — a region where carbon was safely locked up in the permafrost for thousands of years — has now become a carbon source. That study is in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Bits of Bennu have building blocks of life

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission took six years to travel to the asteroid Bennu and return samples to Earth. Now, the first results from the analysis of these rocks are being released. Researchers found evidence of salty water, as well as the elements necessary for life, such as amino acids and the building blocks for RNA and DNA. We spoke with Kim Tait, senior curator of mineralogy at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and co-author of one of the recent studies, published in the journal Nature.

Unlocking the secret of Polar bear de-icing

Polar bears spend so much time going in and out of the water that they are considered marine mammals. So when they do this in the frozen Arctic, why are they not covered in ice? A new study reveals the secret turns out to lie in the unique oils they produce that covers their white fur. Julian Carolan, a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin, worked with scientists in Norway, Denmark and the U.K. on this paper published in the journal Science Advances.

Truffle-hunting dog finds fabulous new fungus

A chance discovery has turned out to reveal a new species of North American truffle. These fungi can be desirable and valuable delicacies. An American truffle hunter, Lois Martin, and her trained dog Monza found a distinctive truffle in a city park that turned out to be a fungus new to science. Although native to North America, it was more similar to European truffles than any found in the Americas. Dr. Greg Bonito at Michigan State University named this new truffle Tuber canirevelatum, meaning the ‘dog-found’ truffle in honour of Monza and other dogs who look for truffles. The work was published in the journal Mycologia.

Voiding your bowels can improve cognitive performance

To maximize your cognitive function, it might be a good idea to make sure you have a poo first. That’s according to a recent study in the journal Sports Medicine and Health Science. In it, scientists found that 9 out of 13 individuals improved how well they did in a mentally taxing cognitive test if they defecated first, whereas all 13 of them improved in their performance when they took a mild laxative the night before. Chia-Hua Kuo, a professor of sports medicine and nutrition at the University of Taipei, said they also saw an increase in oxygen consumption in the test subjects’ subnavel regions as they were doing the test, suggesting a previously unsuspected link between the rectum and the brain.

Saving species on Earth, preserving them on the moon

The world is in a biodiversity crisis. We’re losing species at an unprecedented rate, thanks to climate change, habitat loss, overexploitation and more. We look at some of the more out-of-the-box solutions that are currently in the works – from creating an internet of animals to monitor biodiversity, to saving samples of Earth’s biological resources on the moon.

We spoke with:

Martin Wikelski, the director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, honorary professor of ornithology at the University of Konstanz, and the scientific head of the ICARUS project.

Mary Hagedorn, a senior research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and senior author of a recent paper published in the journal Bioscience proposing a passive biorepository on the moon.

Reintroducing Hawaii’s sacred crow to the wild

The world’s most endangered crow, the Hawaiian crow or or ʻalalā, is making tentative steps towards a comeback. After going extinct in the wild, only 120 birds remain in captivity, in two facilities operated by the San Diego Zoo. Over the years, researchers have attempted reintroductions in the bird's native habitat on the Big Island of Hawaii, but those efforts have all been unsuccessful. Recently, the team tried something different - reintroducing the birds to a different island than their native home. The initial release happened in October and so far, the team, including Bryce Masuda, has high hopes and positive signs from their latest attempt.

Lasers tell us about the pterosaur’s unique tail

The great flying reptiles of the dawn of the age of dinosaurs, the pterosaurs, took flight with delicate but flexible internal tail structure that allowed it to work like a kite. Scientists used recently developed technology to enable them to see a lattice-like structure in the soft tissue in the early pterosaur soft tissue that was otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Natalia Jagielska, a paleontologist at the Lyme Regis Museum in Dorset, England, said their kite-like tail vane would have stood upright and could have functioned as a display and to help them in flight. The study was published in the eLife journal, Evolutionary Biology.

How gophers help re-seed volcanic landscape with life

After Mt. St. Helens exploded in 1980 it left a shattered, ash-covered, barren landscape behind. But the one-time reintroduction of gophers to one area led to a remarkably fast recovery of plants and other fauna. Forty-years later, changes to the environment are still being documented by Dr. Mia Maltz, assistant professor of Microbial Ecology and Soil Earth at the University of Connecticut, and her team. They published their research in the journal Frontiers in Microbiomes.

Desert ants’ magnetic navigation

Desert ants that navigate the endless sands of the Sahara use the Earth’s magnetic field to find their way, which is not unusual. But unlike other animals like birds and turtles they don’t appear to have an internal compass that aligns north and south. Instead they are unique in that they use a more subtle cue – the polarity of the magnetic field. A study looking at this led by Dr. Pauline Fleischmann, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oldenburg in Germany was published in the journal Current Biology.

Celestial body mysteries: dark comets and meteorites from young asteroid families

The thousands of small celestial bodies in our solar system are now a bit less mysterious, thanks to several recent discoveries.

One group of astronomers have traced back the origins of 84 per cent of all known meteorites that have pummeled Earth to just a few young asteroid families in the asteroid belt. Michaël Marsset, from the European Southern Observatory in Chile, said collisions in the asteroid belt create a collisional cascade that produces fragments, some of which end up raining down on Earth as meteorites. Two of their papers were published in the journal Nature and a third in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Another group of astronomers have identified two populations of stealthy dark comets that are something in between a comet and an asteroid. They’ve found fourteen of these objects whose orbital motion is comet-like, but which lack a visible tail like regular comets. Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, said they’ve found two types of these unusual solar system bodies: larger ones in an elliptical orbit out to Jupiter and smaller ones in orbit around Earth. Their study was published in the journal PNAS.