• Dolphins persuade Navy trainers to dredge up 130-year-old torpedo

    Alan Antczak / DVIDS

    A trained Atlantic bottlenose dolphin leaps out of the water during a photo session with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific Marine Mammal Team in San Diego.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    The U.S. Navy doesn't yet exactly know how a 130-year-old brass torpedo got to the bottom of the Pacific off the coast of San Diego, but they have a couple of dolphins to thank for rediscovering the rare weapon.

    The find was so unexpected that the humans didn't believe the dolphins at first.

    The marine mammals have been trained by the Navy's Space and Navy Warfare Systems Center Pacific, or SSC Pacific, to hunt for underwater mines and mark their locations. Divers place mine-shaped objects on the sea bottom, and then they teach the dolphins to find them. "It's all part of training to show the dolphins what they're going to be exposed to when they're on real-world missions," SSC Pacific spokesman Jim Fallin told NBC News on Monday.

    During an exercise in March, conducted not far from California's historic Hotel del Coronado, the trainers sent a dolphin down to look for the pre-positioned target objects. The dolphin dove down, came back up — and gave the trainers a signal they didn't expect. "It had found something where we knew something shouldn't be," Fallin said.

    The training team dismissed that first signal as a false positive. But when the same team went back to the same place with a different dolphin, the location was flagged again, Fallin said. That's when the trainers started taking the animals seriously.

    A piece of naval history
    SSC Pacific worked with recovery divers and bomb disposal experts to check out what the dolphins had found. At first, they thought the object was merely an old tail section from an aerial drop mine. They quickly changed their minds.

    "It was apparent in the first 15 minutes that this was something that was significant and really old," Christian Harris, operations supervisor for the SSC Pacific Biosciences Division, said in a news release. It turned out to be the tail section from one of the first self-propelled torpedoes developed and used by the U.S. Navy, known as the Howell torpedo.

    U.S Navy / SSC Pacific

    The fins of a Howell torpedo can be seen preserved in water after the object was recovered with the aid of dolphins.

    U.S. Navy

    The only other Howell torpedo known to exist today is at the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, Wash.

    More sections were brought up and submerged in water for preservation. Eventually the torpedo will be flown to the Naval History and Heritage Command at the Washington Navy Yard for more thorough study. "What's missing at this point is the nose, and we're not sure where that is," Fallin said.

    The 11-foot-long (3.4-meter-long) torpedo was developed by Lt. Cmdr. John A. Howell between 1870 and 1889. The Navy says it was driven by a 132-pound (60-kilogram) flywheel that was spun up to 10,000 rpm prior to launch. It had a range of 400 yards, a speed of 25 knots, and a warhead filled with 100 pounds of gun cotton.

    "It was the first torpedo that could be released into the ocean and follow a track," Harris said. "Considering that it was made before electricity was provided to U.S. households, it was pretty sophisticated for its time."

    Howell torpedoes were used on Navy battleships and torpedo boats until 1898, when they were replaced by Whitehead torpedoes. Only 50 of the Howells were ever were built. The only other Howell that exists today is sitting inert in the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, Wash.

    How did the torpedo get there? Fallin said he "can't add any information other than that it was there," he said.

    Day of the dolphins
    This isn't the first unexpected object located by the Navy's mine-hunting dolphins: Previously, the mammals have detected sunken items including a submerged car and a lobster trap in a place "where a lobster trap wasn't supposed to be," Fallin said. But the Howell torpedo could well rank as the most significant archaeological find for a finny troop that's trained for war.

    The dolphins' finest hour came during the Persian Gulf conflicts, when they spotted underwater hazards and served as sentries for the U.S-led coalition's vessels.

    "Dolphins remain the pre-eminent capability for the Navy in counter-mine identification," Fallin said. "There's no technology that the Navy has today that replicates the dolphins' natural ability to identify mines ... although our lab is working on those futuristic technologies. We're designing those technologies around the sonar capabilities that are inherent in dolphins. Unmanned autonomous robots have been proven to be pretty capable at this point in shallow water. The technology holds promise."

    It's all in a day's work for the dolphins — and for SSC Pacific, an arm of the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command that focuses on command and control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — a group of technologies known as C4ISR. "We represent the nation's only full-spectrum C4ISR laboratory," Fallin said.

    More about dolphins intelligence:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Half the mice on 'space ark' survive a month in orbit – all the lizards do

    Russia24 on Vesti.ru

    Vladimir Sychov, deputy director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems and the lead researcher for the Bion-M project, talks to reporters Sunday while others examine the "space ark" capsule in the background. Visit Vesti.ru to watch a Russian-language video, or click on the embedded video below.

    MOSCOW — A Russian capsule carrying mice, lizards and other small animals returned to Earth on Sunday after spending a month in space for what scientists said was the longest experiment of its kind.

    Fewer than half of the 53 mice and other rodents who blasted off on April 19 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome survived the flight, Russian news agencies reported, quoting Vladimir Sychov, deputy director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems and the lead researcher.

    Sychov said this was to be expected. The surviving mice were sufficient to complete the study, which was designed to show the effects of weightlessness and other factors of spaceflight on cell structure, he said. All 15 of the lizards reportedly survived. The capsule also carried small crayfish and fish.

    The capsule's orbit reached 575 kilometers (345 miles) above Earth, according to the news agencies. That's higher than the orbit of the International Space Station, which is currently at a maximum altitude of about 421 kilometers (262 miles).

    Russian state television showed the round Bion-M capsule and some of the surviving mice after it landed slightly off course but safely in a planted field near Orenburg, about 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) southeast of Moscow.

    "This is the first time that animals have flown in space for so long on their own," Sychov said in the television broadcast from the landing site. The last research craft to carry animals into space spent 12 days in orbit in 2007.

    The mice and other animals were to be flown back to Moscow to undergo a series of tests at Sychov's institute, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

    The Associated Press

    Watch Vesti Russia24's Russian-language coverage of the "space ark" that returned to Earth.

    More about animals in space:

  • The animal world likes to self-medicate, too

    Jaap de Roode

    A female monarch butterfly lays her eggs on tropical milkweed.

    By Douglas Main
    LiveScience

    The use of medicine can no longer be considered a solely human trait, if it ever was. An ever-growing list of animals use various chemicals to self-medicate and to treat peers and offspring, usually to fight off and prevent infection.

    And this list runs the gamut, with the usual suspects — primates chewing on medicinal herbs — as well as some more surprising drug-takers, such as fruit flies, ants and butterflies, a new study finds.

    Previously, scientists thought such behavior was unique to primates and more intelligent animals, where self-medication could be learned and passed on from parents to offspring. But according to the study scientists, who examined recent research in the field, animals from insects to chimpanzees may self-medicate as an innate response to parasites and perhaps for other reasons as well.

    "Self-medication in animals is really common, more common than previously thought," said study author Jaap de Roode, a researcher at Emory University in Atlanta.

    Drunk fruit flies
    Medication can be taken either in response to an active infection or to prevent future parasitic attacks of an animal or its offspring, according to the paper, published online Thursday in the journal Science.

    Fruit flies, for example, will lay their eggs in more alcoholic fruit (produced by natural fermentation) when parasitic wasps are hanging around, said Todd Schlenke, an Emory researcher who wasn't involved in the review paper. "In the flies, increased blood-alcohol content causes the wasp maggot parasites living in their blood to die in a particularly gruesome way, by having their internal organs evert outside their bodies through their anuses," Schlenke told LiveScience. [The 10 Most Diabolical and Disgusting Parasites]

    Whereas the alcohol can have negative effects on the developing flies, it also makes infection less likely. When parasitic wasps are scarce, the flies prefer to lay their eggs in less fermented fruit. Infected larvae can also preferentially seek out areas of a fruit with more alcohol, Schlenke said.

    "We think there is a cost-benefit analysis going on here — if you don't need it, don't use it," de Roode said. "If it's very likely you'll be infected, you may use it regardless. If your risk is much lower, it's easier to see how you'd use it only when infected."

    Ants have also been found to "medicate" their colonies against infection, bringing back chemicals with antifungal properties. And monarch butterflies fight parasites by laying their eggs in toxic milkweed plants.

    Helping humans
    Animal medicine can be useful to humans in a variety of ways. For instance, bees collect plant resins with antifungal and antimicrobial properties and bring it back to their hives to help them fight infection. Beekeepers have selected against this trait since resin is sticky and hard to work with; this has likely made bees more prone to infection, de Roode said.

    These medicines could also possibly be used to fight infection in humans or other animals. One chemical in bee resin has been shown to have inhibitory effects against HIV-1, de Roode said. Another plant eaten as a medicine by primates is now being used as an antiemetic (to treat nausea and vomiting) in African livestock, said Juan Villalba, a researcher at Utah State University who wasn't involved in the study.

    Villalba's work has shown that animals can benefit when artificial medicines are made available to them, to eat when necessary. A polymer called polyethylene glycol helps sheep handle a diet high in tannins, and lambs can learn to eat this medicine from observing their parents doing it, Villalba said.

    This paper "will bring more attention to the idea that medication is an important and common kind of immune response that organisms use in nature," Schlenke said.

    Email Douglas Main or follow him @Douglas_Main. Follow us@livescience, Facebook or Google+. Article originally on LiveScience.com.

    Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Why rats sniff each other

    Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine

    Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine

    By Megan Gannon, LiveScience

    Without being able to talk to each other, rats use sniffing as one way to answer key questions about strangers. Is that a female? Can I mate with her? Is this one sick? What did he eat? — All of this information can be learned through odor cues. 

    But new research shows that the act of sniffing itself might serve its own social function, allowing rats to reaffirm their hierarchical status and maintain order. 

    Daniel Wesson, a neuroscientist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, studied how pairs of rats sniffed each other when they were placed in the same enclosure. In initial observations, Wesson saw that when one rat started sniffing another's body or behind, both rats ramped up their level of sniffing. But when one rat started sniffing the other's face, the other rat typically backed off and turned down its level of sniffing. 

    Further investigations showed that dominant rats (larger, more aggressive ones) didn't tamp down their sniffing, and sometimes increased it, when a subordinate rat sniffed them in the face. But when dominant rats started smelling their subordinates head on, and the subordinates failed to cut back on their sniffing, the top rats were quick to engage in aggressive behavior (kicking, biting or jumping on the other rat). The results suggest that sniffing can help high-ranking rats assert dominance and allow subordinate rats to appease their superiors and prevent aggression. 

    Wesson saw the same results when he inhibited the rats' sense of smell, which bolsters his claim that there's more to sniffing than odor-detection. And when he gave some of the rats oxytocin, a brain chemical that's been shown to enhance bonding and ease the pressure of hierarchies, these sniffing displays and aggression vanished. [That's Odd! The 10 Weirdest Animal Discoveries] 

    It's still not clear why only face-sniffing seems to serve a social function for rats, while body-sniffing and butt-sniffing don't. Wesson said one possibility could have to do with the fact that face-to-face interactions are very dangerous for a rat, as an injury to the throat or neck could be deadly. 

    "When animals come face-to-face with each other, they more or less have to be on their best behavior, otherwise they risk getting hurt," Wesson told LiveScience. "Another possibility is that there are cues given off during sniffing that can only be communicated when animals are in proximity with each other." 

    Wesson said he hopes to explore the circuits in the brain that are activated when animals are engaged in this behavior, and to learn more about why animals decide to become aggressive, as well as which brain problems might cause animals to inappropriately deal with social cues. 

    The research was detailed in the journal Current Biology. 

    Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience, Facebook  or Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

  • Love and lust: Lessons from the animal kingdom

    Zanna Clay

    Juvenile female producing a copulation call while engaging with a high-ranking adult female. During sexual interactions, females embrace one another, touch genitals and swing their hips laterally. Often they remain in eye contact, as shown here.

    By Wynne Parry
    LiveScience

    NEW YORK — Sex. Many (but not all) animals do it. Partners come together to combine their genetic material in hopes of creating a healthy next generation for passing down their genes.

    For humans, romance, love and sometimes Valentine's Day can be involved, although the formula varies greatly depending on culture. Meanwhile, other animals go about it in a dizzying variety of ways. Creatures may form pair bonds or mate promiscuously, like bonobos. Corals and fish spew their eggs and sperm out into the environment to unite there.

    A panel discussion at the New York Academy of Sciences on Tuesday explored how lust, and sometimes love, are manifested throughout the animal kingdom, past and present. Here are some of the top lessons science has taught about love and lust:

    First, figure out who's who. "Sexing," the scientific term for figuring out whether an individual is male or female, has been a challenge for paleontologists studying dinosaurs. Looking for skeletal differences just didn't work, said panelist Brian Switek, who writes about dinosaurs and is the author of a forthcoming book, "My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs" (Scientific American/FSG). In recent years, however, the task has become more feasible. For instance, paleontologists have begun looking in fossils for what is called medullary bones. Among birds, which experts consider to be living dinosaurs, females store calcium for egg-laying in this temporary bone tissue. [Top 10 Swingers of the Animal Kingdom]

    Fatherhood can be complicated. "Thanks to molecular testing, we can now genetically trace, like Maury Povich, who's the daddy," said Danielle Lee, who studies animal behavior and behavioral ecology at Oklahoma State University. The results of testing: The female's social partner may not be the father of any of her young. Moderator Joshua Ginsberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society pointed out that the same phenomenon applies to humans. The man on the birth certificate is not always the biological father, although the rates at which this happens vary widely depending on the population. Marina Cords, a professor at Columbia University who has studied blue monkeys for 30 years, said that the female monkeys who live in harems "seem to get pretty tired of the one guy." She added, "They sneak around, too."

    There's more than one way to get the girl. Not all males within a species are created equal. Among some animals, such as salmon and squid, some males invest more energy in acquiring the traits attractive to females. "Others are smaller: the wimpies, if you will," Lee said. These are the "sneaker males," which use their innocuous presence to their advantage to mate furtively with the females.

    Don't believe in animal love at first sight. For humans, it's easy to interpret animal interactions as evidence of love. Cords, who studies monkeys, noted that she attempts not to attribute human characteristics to her study subjects, but "the question is, how do you know?"

    Work in psychology that looks at the behavior of mothers and babies to assess their attachments has some applicability to non-human primates, she said. "I think that is a way of measuring what I would perhaps call akin to human love," Cords said. "I think it has to do with attachment and a certain feeling you have when you are with someone and you miss someone when you are not with them." In addition to behavior, primatologists can look at hormone levels, she said.

    Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt

    A mating pair of the extinct turtle found at Messel Pit. Researchers suspect the turtles died as they were having sex and sinking to deeper layers of the lake where toxic gases were likley present.

    Simulated sex can't trump a good specimen. Work with paleontologist Heinrich Mallison's digital model of Kentrosaurus, which resembled Stegosaurus with more spikes, has shown that the male dinosaur could not have been realistically expected to mount the female from behind, "doggy-style." Instead, the results suggest the female lay on her side, Switek said. He and Mallison are now working on a related paper. The science of dinosaur sex needs good fossil specimens, he said, citing the discovery of 50-million-year-old turtles preserved while mating. "It would be fantastic if someone found this in dinosaurs," he said.

    Scientists' experiences and biases shape their questions. Lee, who works with rodents, has begun conducting experiments on the degree to which pairing a female with a male she prefers affects her success having offspring. This is the sort of question that would occur to a female ecologist like herself, but not necessarily to a man. Responding to a question about homosexuality in animals, she said it had not occurred to her to investigate whether adult females nesting together constituted any homosexual behavior. “That is why we need more diverse scholars within those fields to ask those questions,” she said. [The Animal Sex Quiz]

    Love is a turn-on for the human brain. When Stephanie Cacioppo, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, and colleagues showed people pictures of their beloved partners and recorded their brain activity, they saw increases in the release of dopamine, a chemical signal associated with rewarding experiences, and the release of oxytocin, a signal that is associated with pair bonding and empathy. For people who reported feeling madly in love, a part of the brain known as the angular gyrus became activated. This region is also associated with self-representation and language, she said.

    Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

    Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Dognition uses brain-teasers to unlock mysteries of your dog's mind

    Dognition

    Duke neuroscientist Brian Hare tests a dog's cognition using a simple set of toys.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Is your dog an Einstein or a Charmer? For $60 (woof!!), a new business venture called Dognition will help you put your pooch through a series of fun playtime activities to find out how your dog thinks. The metrics generated by those experiments … I mean, fun playtime activities … are being fed into a research project that could for the first time determine how the cognitive traits of various breeds differ.

    "Dognition.com is ultimately about people's dogs, and finding out about your dog," Duke University neuroscientist Brian Hare, one of the venture's co-founders, told NBC News. "That's what you're paying for. I buy fancy dog food for my dog, and just like I want to take care of his stomach, I want to take care of his mind, too. Skip the next couple of chew toys, and your dog and you will really enjoy doing something a little different."

    The business venture builds on Hare's work as the director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center and an associate professor in evolutionary anthropology at Duke's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. It also meshes with a newly published book by Hare and his wife, Vanessa Woods, titled "The Genius of Dogs."

     

    How smart are dogs?
    Don't expect Dognition's cognitive assessment to measure your pet's IQ: Hare says a dog's intelligence can't be described with a single number. (Come to think of it, the same caveat should apply to humans.)

    "Because we use standardized testing in all walks of life, it leads you to believe that there's just one measure of intelligence, and there's a number, and that's it," Hare said. "But when you start studying cognitive science, and look at other species, that all starts to crumble."

    It's also fruitless to try calculating whether dogs are smarter than cats, or chimps, or bonobos. "That's like trying to answer the question, 'Is a hammer better than a screwdriver?'" Hare said. Instead, he and his colleagues look at how dogs and other species address problem-solving challenges and communicate with humans. It turns out that dogs are geniuses when it comes to figuring out what humans are trying to tell them — which suggests that our world is truly going to the dogs.

    "Dogs are bizarrely successful," Hare said. "They have more jobs than ever in this age of the Internet and the International Space Station."

    Researchers have even argued that humans and dogs are locked in a co-evolutionary embrace that began tens of thousands of years ago. Last month, for example, one research team determined that canine digestive systems have adapted to the relatively starchy diet served up by modern humans.

    How it works
    Hare's research into dog cognition began back in 1995, with studies of how dogs looked for hidden treats when humans tried giving them hints. Those experiments, which are done using simple household items such as plastic cups (plus tons of treats), are laid out in Dognition's Canine Assessment Toolkit.

    After you plunk your money down, Dognition's website takes you through a personality questionnaire about your dog: For example, how excited does your dog get around other dogs, grown-ups, children? Do fireworks scare your pup? Then, Dognition guides you through a battery of tests that are as fun as playing fetch, or hide-and-seek. The results are uploaded to Dognition HQ, and you get back a detailed profile of your dog's mental habits, based on where Fido's performance ends up on a chart of independent vs. social problem-solving skills.

    Different areas of the chart are associated with nine different canine archetypes: Ace, Stargazer, Maverick, Charmer, Socialite, Protodog, Einstein, Expert or Renaissance Dog. That can give you something to brag about on Dognition's Facebook page, but it also can shed new light on why dogs do the things they do, or how you can get through to them better. "We've got a bunch of really fantastic trainers who have signed up to help," Hare said.

    Researchers get a reward as well: The data from hundreds of Canine Assessment Tests can be correlated with breed, age and other factors. "To collect the amount of data we've taken in during our month-long beta program would have taken us a couple of years," Hare said.

    Eventually, Hare and his colleagues hope to map out the substantive cognitive differences between dog breeds — differences that have not yet been studied scientifically. "The reason we don't know anything about breed differences is that we currently don't have the tools available to look at the number of dogs that would allow us to answer the interesting questions," Hare said.

    Dognition could fix that. And it also could open up new possibilities for some of humanity's best friends.

    "One of the things we're hoping to do is, suppose there's that dog that may not be the most attractive dog physically, but the dog is wonderfully behaved," Hare said. "What Dognition.com can do is help people understand more about what's inside that dog, and not just its physical appearance — and see that, wow, this dog is amazing."

    More about dog intelligence:

    Dognition offers a $59.95 Canine Assessment Toolkit as well as a $129.95 annual membership bundle that includes enhanced games and other goodies.

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • What does it sound like? World's largest animal audio library has answer

    Chukot-TINRO

    This file photo shows tens of thousands of walruses in Russia. A new digital audio archive allows you to learn what walruses sound like.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Ever wonder what a blue monkey sounds like, or a bearded seal? What about a scaly-breasted wren? To find out, surf over to the world’s largest archive of animal vocalizations ever put online and have a listen.

    Archivists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library spent a dozen years digitizing the nearly 150,000 analog audio recordings in its collection to put them on the Web. It’s lauded as an unequaled research and conservation resource. 

    "In terms of speed and the breadth of material now accessible to anyone in the world, this is really revolutionary," audio curator Greg Budney said in a news release announcing the archive.

    The recordings date back to 1929. There’s an emphasis on birds, but sounds of everything from apes to zebras are also available.

    The resource should prove a gold mine for researchers of many stripes, birders keen to fine-tune their identification skills, and many a parent answering inquisitive kids’ questions.

    Going forward, the archivists aim to grow the collection with recordings from professional and amateurs alike. 

    "It’s just plain fun to listen to these sounds," Budney said. "Have you heard the sound of a walrus underwater? It’s an amazing sound."

    John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, check out his website.