Today's selection of science news. Links are normally to press releases on EurekAlert (at the bottom end I may also add a couple of newspaper stories). I include quotes from the summary in italics in cases where the title alone doesn't reveal what the story is about. My own thoughts appear without italics if I have any.
astrobiology
A planet that should not exist
Astronomers detected a giant planet orbiting a small star. The planet has much more mass than theoretical models predict. While this surprising discovery was made by a Spanish-German team at an observatory in southern Spain, researchers at the University of Bern studied how the mysterious exoplanet might have formed.
Jupiter-like planet with a blueish colour orbiting a cool red dwarf.
Credit: © CARMENES/RenderArea/J. Bollaín/C. Gallego
Earliest signs of life: Scientists find microbial remains in ancient rocks
birds
How neuronal recognition of songbird calls unfolds over time
nanoworld
How to tie microscopic knots
Chemists clarify a chiral conundrum?
Rice University researchers set out to untangle the mysterious interactions in mixtures of proteins and gold nanorods. Their experiments revealed multilevel chirality in the way proteins prompt nanoparticles to align and in how the particles' plasmons respond to light in the proteins' presence.
I'm not claiming I understand this, but it does sound intriguing. I also love the quizzical use of the question mark in the title.
biomedical
How fungus-farming ants could help solve our antibiotic resistance problem
For the last 60 million years, fungus-growing ants have farmed fungi for food. In their cultivation of those fungi, they've successfully relied on bacteria-produced antimicrobial ingredients to protect their crops from other species of parasitic fungi. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution say they are looking to these ants to find new ways to stop or slow the evolution of antibiotic resistance that now presents a threat to modern medicine.
See also my latest feature on the antibiotics crisis (magic link included in the blog entry should still work until early November).
Tasmanian devil research could help tackle immunotherapy resistance
humans
Sport has its benefits but do not overdo it
Music is essential for the transmission of ethnobiological knowledge
Songs are a storehouse for ethnobiological knowledge and a means to construct, maintain and mobilize peoples' relations with their local environments.
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from the news media:
Germany needs a major reforestation effort after severe recent losses, the Guardian reported earlier in the week. See also my recent feature on the global opportunities for reforestation to fight climate change.
And speaking of trees:
More than half of native European trees face extinction, warns study
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