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Sperms defy Newton's law of motion
and animals in nature get drunk all the time.
Coffee Table Science
November 03, 2024
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In this newsletter
Comb jellies can reverse their age
Joan J. Soto-Angel is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen and, while observing animals in the laboratory, found that an adult comb jelly had disappeared from its tank, but a larva was now living in its place.
Since jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii, are known to deviate from the linear progression of life and turn back from adults to polyp stages, Soto-Angel was keen to know if the comb jellies, Mnemiopsis leidyi, also had this ability.
He then designed controlled experiments to see what conditions caused the comb jelly to reverse its age and found that stress from starvation and physical brought about this change.
Interestingly, during this reversal process, the comb jelly not only changed its morphological features to turn young but also changed its eating habits to those of a larvae.
Old habits die hard, they say. Ask them to look up a comb jelly next time.
The research findings were published in the journal PNAS.
Animals get drunk in nature all the time
The internet is filled with videos of animals getting allegedly drunk after eating highly fermented fruits and zoologists were of the view that these were just anecdotal stories to share and nothing more.
But further investigation into these incidents has revealed that animals could be getting drunk in nature all the time, and it is not just humans who have a liking for alcohol.
Flowering plants make sweet sugary fruits to disperse their seeds. But yeast can quickly ferment the sugar into ethanol and once alcoholic, the fruit is less prone to bacterial damage.
Researchers believe that plants would prefer the growth of yeast over bacteria to enable seed dispersal, but any animal eating these fruits is also consuming alcohol.
It is likely that the alcohol content is not more than 1-2 percent by volume but could cross 10 percent in some cases as well, less than a standard wine, though. Evolutionarily, this does not appear to be something animals can’t handle.
If high ethanol percentages were a concern, animals bodies would have high expression of genes that process ethanol in the body. This, in turn, would give them high alcohol tolerance as well, but that does not appear to be the case.
Alcohol intake through fruits could help fight infections and is also a rich source of calories for the animals. The release of endorphin and dopamine following alcohol intake could help animals relax as well, enabling social relations. But these are theories that need to be explored further, say researchers at the University of Exeter.
The research findings were published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
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The chemistry textbook was wrong about double bonds
If you had a hunch that your chemistry teacher didn’t fully understand organic chemistry and was just winging it, then you are likely right. Neil Garg and his colleagues at UCLA have just proven that Bredt’s rule, first reported in 1924, is just not true, and it has been holding back new inventions in chemistry for 100 years now.
Organic chemistry, which involves carbon atoms, is full of bonds between carbon molecules, sometimes single, some double, and in some cases, even triple bonds. Molecules that have double bonds are known as olefins or alkenes, and the carbon atoms within them lie in the same 3D plane most of the time.
Bredt’s rule states that molecules cannot have a carbon-carbon double bond at the ring junction of a bridged bicyclic molecule, also known as bridgehead position. The presence of such a bond distorts the geometry of the alkenes, and this thinking has prevented the exploration of new molecules in drug discovery, where olefins are used heavily.
By defying Bredt’s rule, Garg’s team synthesized multiple kinds of molecules that are stable and could have practical applications. They call them anti-Bredt olefins, or ABOs.
The research findings were published in the journal Science.
Sperms defy Newton’s law of motion
Everybody knows Newton’s third law of motion, even if you do not remember the first two. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
This is what propels spacecraft and submarines in the sea, but tiny wiggly sperm in the human body seem to defy this law completely.
Not just sperm but even green algae do not follow the third law, but there is a commonality between the two—flagella. Both these living forms use a whip-like structure that moves to generate motion and drive the cells forward.
But sperm and green algae operate in highly viscous fluids, and if an equal and opposite reaction were acting on them, their flagella would produce no movement at all, and you and I would not be here.
Mathematical scientist Kenta Ishimoto and his team at Kyoto University investigated this to find out how these cells were defying the laws of physics. Turns out that the flagella have an ‘odd-elasticity’ that lets them operate without losing much energy to their surroundings.
However, since this does not completely explain their movement, the researchers had to come up with a new term, elastic modulus, to describe the flagella's working mechanism. This could help scientists design small swimming robots that can self-assemble and mimic living materials.
The research findings were published in the journal PRX Life
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Thanks for reading.
Until next time,
Ameya
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