Coolest Science Stories of the Week
By Live Science, 24 March 2013.
Snakes with shrunken heads, diseases from iced tea and the Kill Bill wasp are just a few of our top picks from Science this week.
10. Shrunken heads of sea snakes explained
Some sea snakes have heads that look comically small compared with the rest of their body. New research shows these shrunken heads evolved quite rapidly, allowing the snakes to hunt eels hiding in tight spaces.
If you only looked at the genes of the blue-banded sea snake and the slender-necked sea snake, the two species would seem nearly identical. But the close cousins, which are found in waters around Southeast Asia and Australia, have quite different physical looks, researchers say.
9. Medieval monks cultivated wetlands
A medieval monastery in Belgium went to major effort to drain wetlands on its land, building structures on artificially raised soil, a new study finds.
Archaeologists excavated the Boudelo Abbey, once part of the medieval county of Flanders, in the 1970s. Until now, however, they had no idea that an extensive drained wetland surrounded the site.
8. Too much tea linked to bone disease
A 47-year-old Michigan woman developed a bone disease rarely seen in the U.S. after she drank a pitcher of tea made from at least 100 tea bags daily, for 17 years, researchers report.
The Detroit woman visited the doctor after experiencing pain in her lower back, arms, legs and hips for five years.
7. Mysterious layer beneath Earth revealed
A mysterious layer lies beneath Earth's massive tectonic plates.
Sandwiched between two rock layers - the rigid lithosphere and the more pliable asthenosphere - this thin boundary is like the jelly in a peanut butter sandwich. Scientists think it could be very wet rock, or even partially melted rock, but no one knows for sure.
6. Ancient Egyptian sundial found
A sundial discovered outside a tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings may be the world's oldest ancient Egyptian sundials, say scientists.
Dating to the 19th dynasty, or the 13th century B.C., the sundial was found on the floor of a workman's hut, in the Valley of the Kings, the burial place of rulers from Egypt's New Kingdom period (around 1550 B.C. to 1070 B.C.).
5. Graves of twin moon probes spotted
An eagle-eyed NASA spacecraft has spotted the tiny craters two moon probes created when they crashed intentionally into the lunar surface last year.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) snapped a series of photographs of the two 16.5-foot-wide (5 meters) craters, which mark where the space agency's twin Grail probes ended their gravity-mapping mission, and their operational lives, on Dec. 17.
4. Giant squid all one species
Though they roam the deep sea around the globe, enigmatic giant squid are all part of the same species, new research finds.
The new study reveals that the genetic diversity of giant squid (Architeuthis) is remarkably low - far lower than that of other marine species examined, said study researcher Tom Gilbert of the University of Copenhagen. The findings suggest that the squid intermingle and mate across the globe.
3. Wasp named for 'Kill Bill' assassin
A new species of parasitic wasp with a lethal lifestyle is taking its name from assassin Beatrix Kiddo, the heroine played by Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" films.
While the winged creature isn't exactly a master of the "Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique" - a technique that involves striking five pressure points, resulting in (you guessed it) an exploding heart - it does shares the yellow-and-black colour of Kiddo's jumpsuit. Even more, the wasp has its own deadly repertoire of assassin-like moves.
2. Penis-snatching panics resurface
In a recent issue of "Pacific Standard" magazine, Louisa Lombard, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, described visiting a small town in the Central African Republic where she encountered two men who claimed that their penises had been stolen.
It seems that the day before, a traveller visiting the town had shaken hands with a tea vendor who immediately claimed he felt a shock and sensed that his penis had shrunk. He cried out in alarm, gathering a crowd, and a second man then said it also happened to him.
1. Lost tectonic plate found
A tectonic plate that disappeared under North America millions of years ago still peeks out in central California and Mexico, new research finds.
The Farallon oceanic plate was once nestled between the Pacific and North American plates, which were converging around 200 million years ago at what would become the San Andreas fault along the Pacific coast. This slow geological movement forced the Farallon plate under North America, a process called subduction.
