Further Findings » biology

Spring 2009 discoveries revisited

Tim Green — Fri, 29 May 2009 21:22:15 +0000

The spring 2009 semester has ended and that’s a good time to take another look at some of the research that came out of University of Texas at Austin labs in the past few months.

Here’s a roundup of some of the more interesting discoveries in exercise, psychology, business and statistics.

Add crunch to your post workout recovery

In a study of well-trained cyclists, exercise physiologist Lynne Kammer found that a bowl of whole grain cereal is as good as a sports drink for recovery after exercise. The research was supported by the General Mills Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition.

At the tone, say goodbye to that bad memory (someday)

Marie Monfils

Marie Monfils, an assistant professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, has taken advantage of a key time when memories are ripe for change to substantially modify memories of fear into benign memories and to keep them that way. Here experiment manipulated the memory of rodents, but it also could indicate a potential treatment for humans suffering from anxiety-related disorders.

Is that market index half full or half empty?

Nicholas Seybert

Wishful investors who make overly optimistic investments will ultimately harm themselves financially, but they can harm entire markets as well, according to research from business professors Nicholas Seybert, an assistant professor The University of Texas at Austin, and Robert Bloomfield, a professor at Cornell University.

Stocks or Scratch-off game? Same thing for some investors

Alok Kumar

The socioeconomic characteristics of people who play state lotteries are similar to investors who pick stocks with a lottery quality—high risk with a small potential for high return, and just like the lottery, returns on average are lower for those who invest this way in the stock market, research from business professor Alok Kumar shows.

Coffee’s not the only thing mountain grown; Amazon’s frogs are, too

Colorful poison frogs in the Amazon owe their great diversity to ancestors that leapt into the region from the Andes Mountains several times during the last 10 million years, a new study from graduate student Juan Santos suggests.

Been screened at the airport too often? Statistics to the rescue!

William Press

William Press, a computational biologist, has found that secondary security screening at airports is mathematically flawed, and has identified a way to select people for screenings more efficiently and fairly.

Deep sea discovery

Tim Green — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:17:39 +0000

Mikhail Matz

The things Mikhail Matz, an assistant professor of integrative biology, and his colleagues were looking for off the island of Little San Salvador in the Bahamas, were creatures with “big eyes, nicely colored and that glow in the dark.”

The scientists were aboard Operation Deep Scope, a research expedition sponsored by the Ocean Exploration program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They explored the deep sea with a submersible vessel looking for things related to the interaction between light and life in the ocean.

They found some of what they were looking for, but that wasn’t all. There were “all these little

Operation Deep Scope's submersible vessel

mudballs in the background with tracks behind them,” Matz says. “At that moment we did not have the slightest idea what they might be.”

The team posited. Snails? No? Sea urchins? Nope. Deep sea poop? Uh, no.

After taking DNA samples and matching them against a database, Matz and his colleagues identified the creature that made the tracks. It turned out to be a protist, a one-celled organism, called Gromia sphaerica.

The creatures Matz and crew found move along the ocean floor, leaving trails–the first time a single-celled organism has been shown to make such large animal-like traces.

A further finding

Matz took it another step further. He thought that the creatures and their trails could help explain trails laid down hundreds of millions of years ago and preserved in the fossil record.

Scientists have thought that multicellular creatures left those trails. Those found by Matz show they could have been made by one-celled creatures.

“If our giant protists were alive 600 million years ago and the track was fossilized, a paleontologist unearthing it today would without a shade of doubt attribute it to a kind of large, multicellular, bilaterally symmetrical animal,” Matz. “We now have to rethink the fossil record.”

Gromia sphaerica

The creatures are grape shaped and about one-inch in diameter. They get covered with thin layer of sediment as they move along the ocean floor.

Mikhail Matz talks about the discovery. (Link to YouTube.)

They have a thin transparent outer skin, a thin layer of protoplasm underneath it, and the inside is water. They are smooth to the touch and gives when it is squeezed.

“It’s squishy,” Matz says. “And if you squish too hard, it pops.”

He hasn’t calculated the force needed to pop it, but it does take some effort.

Unintended discovery

Matz and his colleagues, including Duke University’s Sönke Johnsen, the co-author of the paper, have followed a time-honored practice of science of making a significant discovery while looking for something else.

“Well,” Matz says, “exploration is unpredictable by definition.”

One of the most famous of looking-for-something-else discoveries was made by Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson of Bell Laboratories. They found the residual background radiation left over from the Big Bang—something they hadn’t been looking for. The discovery won them a Nobel Prize in physics in 1978.

Matz hasn’t booked a trip to Stockholm. He had a hard time finding a journal to review the findings, let alone publish them.

“I asked them, “Please send it to a paleontologist,’” he said.

Finally, Current Biology took the bait, sent the paper out for review and published it online on Nov. 20 and in its print edition Dec. 9. Since it was announced, the discovery has been written up in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and several science blogs.

“Perhaps surprisingly, real professional paleontologists actually seem to like these ideas,” Matz says. “In part, of course, because they enjoy having a nice new controversy. But they do agree that we provide a better-than-before explanation for certain traces and fossils which are otherwise extremely puzzling.”

Even now, after the paper and the umpteenth retelling of the story, Matz’s enthusiasm about the discovery is evident. His eyes light up and his voice quickens.

He wants to find out more about the Gromia sphaerica, but that will have to wait until at least 2010. It’s too late to get funding for a 2009 expedition.

Research pioneers

Tim Green — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:20:20 +0000

New posters were recently installed in the display windows on the first floor of the Main Building on The University of Texas at Austin campus.

They focus on four University of Texas at Austin researchers who made significant discoveries and brought new understanding to long-standing questions in their fields.

They are Hermann J. Muller, Linda Schele, Esmond Snell and Americo Paredes.

The poster with this post is about Schele, who studied the Mayan civilization of Central America.

Take a walk though the Main Building to get the full effect of it and the other posters. Tillie Policastro and David Holston from the university’s Design Center did the layout and design.