It's a Mixed Up, Muddled Up, Shook Up World Except for Flora
Flora the Komodo dragon is expecting. She's pregnant with seven little dragons and due in January. And the proud father of the newest additions to the family is...Flora the Komodo dragon. Yes, in a paper published in the journal Nature researchers reveal that both Flora and London-based dragon Sungai have become pregnant via parthenogenesis, an asexual reproductive process that does not require two parents. Flora, innocent lass that she is, lives with her younger sister Nessie and has never even met a boy. But apparently dragons don't suffer for want of a mate: Flora fertilized her eggs herself and seven of them look like they'll be carried to term. Sungai also self-fertilized early this year and gave birth to four dragon hatchlings in April. Afterwards, Sungai mated with a male and gave birth to one hatchling the old-fashioned way. The researchers say these cases may indicate that zookeepers should set up co-ed housing for their Komodo dragons. Currently, males are only shipped in for mating, but it looks as though dragons who've gone long enough without a mate will do the job themselves. To keep maximal genetic diversity in the Komodo gene pool, males should be available for the matin' at all times, so the ladies don't have to fall back on plan B.
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Just Follow Your Nose
You may not have the fine odor detection abilities of the NYPD's K9 unit, but if you can pick up a scent, you're just as good as the hounds are at tracing it to its source. According to a new study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, humans track smells the same way that dogs do and, with a little practice, can get pretty darn good at navigating by nose. Researchers created a 10-meter long trail of chocolate essential oil in an open field. They then took 32 Berkeley undergrads, and in a hazing exercise to inspire even the most creative of fraternities, the researchers blindfolded them, plugged their ears, and set them loose in the field to see whether they could find their way to the "chocolate." Each subject got three ten-minute chances to track the chocolate scent; two-thirds of the students completed the task, and when four students practiced over three days, their performances improved significantly. Rats and dogs have many more genes for smell receptors than we do, but the researchers hypothesize that our large, analytical brains may compensate for this deficiency. Sadly, we still can't smell as wide a range of substances as dogs, so we won't have human sniffers on our bomb squads any time soon.
Give Me The Willies
The guy's been dead for nearly 400 years, but we still can't stop salivating over just how good William Shakespeare was at his craft. And now a study shows that Slick Willy has pulled another fast one on us: By employing a technique called "functional shift"—using a noun as a verb, or "verbing the noun," for example—Shakespearean language excites positive brain activity, which the researchers say may heighten the drama felt during his plays. The authors monitored the brains of 20 participants as they listened to Shakespeare. When they heard a functionally shifted word, the subjects experienced a positive spike in brain activity that indicates they were reevaluating the word. When you hear a functionally shifted word, the researchers report, you understand the word's meaning before you understand its function in a sentence, so the brain has to work backward to figure out what the sentence means.