Scientists find brain mechanism that keeps us reaching for the glucose

© Unknown

British scientists have found a brain mechanism they think may drive our desire for glucose-rich food and say the discovery could one day lead to better treatments for obesity.

In experiments using rats, researchers at Imperial College London found a mechanism that appears to sense how much glucose is reaching the brain and prompts animals to seek more if it detects a shortfall. In people, the scientists said, it may play a role in driving our preference for sweet and starchy foods.

Glucose, a component of carbohydrates, is the main energy source used by brain cells.

"Our brains rely heavily on glucose for energy,.. but in our evolutionary past it would have been hard to come by. So we have a deep-rooted preference for glucose-rich foods and seek them out," said James Gardiner, who led the study and published its findings in the Journal of Clinical Investigation on Monday.

Gardiner's team started with a hypothesis that an enzyme called glucokinase, involved in sensing glucose in the liver and pancreas, might play a role in driving glucose desire. Glucokinase is found in part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which regulates various functions including food intake.

In their experiments they first found that when rats go 24 hours without eating, glucokinase activity in an appetite-regulating center in the hypothalamus increases sharply.

The rats were given access to a glucose solution as well as their normal food pellets, called chow. When the researchers increased the activity of glucokinase in the hypothalamus using a virus, rats consumed more glucose in preference to chow. When glucokinase activity was reduced, they consumed less glucose.

Gardiner suggested that in people it might be possible to reduce glucose cravings by changing the diet, and said a drug that could act on this system may potentially prevent obesity.

"People are likely to have different levels of this enzyme, so different things will work for different people," he said in a statement about the study.

"For some people, eating more starchy foods at the start of a meal might be a way to feel full more quickly by targeting this system, meaning they eat less overall."

Read More

Ripples in space-time fabric could reveal 'strange stars'

© phys.org

The three valence quarks that make up each proton account for about one percent of its mass; the rest comes from interactions among the quarks and gluons.

By looking for ripples in the fabric of space-time, scientists could soon detect "strange stars" - objects made of stuff radically different from the particles that make up ordinary matter, researchers say.

The protons and neutrons that make up the nuclei of atoms are made of more basic particles known as quarks. There are six types, or "flavors," of quarks: up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange. Each proton or neutron is made of three quarks: Each proton is composed of two up quarks and one down quark, and each neutron is made of two down quarks and one up quark.

© cerntruth.wordpress.com

Strangelet atom reaction.

In theory, matter can be made with other flavors of quarks as well. Since the 1970s, scientists have suggested that particles of "strange matter" known as strangelets - made of equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks - could exist. In principle, strange matter should be heavier and more stable than normal matter, and might even be capable of converting ordinary matter it comes in contact with into strange matter. However, lab experiments have not yet created any strange matter, so its existence remains uncertain.

One place strange matter could naturally be created is inside neutron stars, the remnants of stars that died in catastrophic explosions known as supernovas. Neutron stars are typically small, with diameters of about 12 miles (19 kilometers) or so, but are so dense that they weigh as much as the sun. A chunk of a neutron star the size of a sugar cube can weigh as much as 100 million tons.

Under the extraordinary force of this extreme weight, some of the up and down quarks that make up neutron stars could get converted into strange quarks, leading to strange stars made of strange matter, researchers say.

A strange star that occasionally spurts out strange matter could quickly convert a neutron star orbiting it in a binary system into a strange star as well. Prior research suggests that a neutron star that receives a seed of strange matter from a companion strange star could transition to a strange star in just 1 millisecond to 1 second.

© www.bbc.com

Neutron stars creating gravity waves.

Now, researchers suggest they could detect strange stars by looking for the stars' gravitational waves - invisible ripples in space-time first proposed by Albert Einstein as part of his theory of general relativity.

Gravitational waves are emitted by accelerating masses. Really big gravitational waves are emitted by really big masses, such as pairs of neutron stars merging with one another.

Pairs of strange stars should give off gravitational waves that are different from those emitted by pairs of "normal" neutron stars because strange stars should be more compact, researchers said. For instance, a neutron star with a mass one-fifth that of the sun should be more than 18 miles (30 km) in diameter, whereas a strange star of the same mass should be a maximum of 6 miles (10 km) wide.

The researchers suggest that events involving strange stars could explain two short gamma-ray bursts - giant explosions lasting less than 2 seconds - seen in deep space in 2005 and 2007. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) did not detect gravitational waves from either of these events, dubbed GRB 051103 and GRB 070201.

Neutron star mergers are the leading explanations for short gamma-ray bursts, but LIGO should, in principle, have detected gravitational waves from such mergers. However, if strange stars were involved in both of these events, LIGO would not have been able to detect any gravitational waves they emitted, researchers said. (The more compact a star is within a binary system of two stars, the higher the frequency of the gravitational waves it gives off.)

Still, future research could detect strange-star events. Using the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (aLIGO), whose first observing run is scheduled for 2015, the researchers expect to detect about 0.13 mergers per year of neutron stars with strange stars, or about one such merger every eight years. Using the Einstein Telescope currently being designed in the European Union, the scientists eventually expect to detect about 700 such events per year, or about two per day.

There may also be a chance that scientists can re-examine LIGO data from GRB 051103 and GRB 070201 to look for signs of strange-star involvement.

"The possibility of a re-analysis of LIGO signals for GRB 070201 and GRB 051103, taking into account some possible cases involving strange stars, is really exciting," lead study author Pedro Moraes, an astrophysicist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, told Space.com.

Moraes and his colleague Oswaldo Miranda detailed their findings in the Nov. 21 issue of the journal .

Comment: You would think that the Earth should be experiencing gravity waves continuously since they should be coming from any cosmic event that significantly disturbs the fabric of space-time, as they describe it. If you think about other kinds of waves, granted we primarily have knowledge about those that take place on the planet, we have earthquakes, tornadoes, tidal waves and airwaves as models. Every time you walk into a room, you are disturbing the air around you. A land mass creaks and you have radiating ground waves. These are observable because they are motion and we are equipped with motion sensors. So, if a dying star explodes into a supernova, the force expelled should send a literal tsunami of telltale gravitational waves. These should be detectable if they are there. Any particle possesses wave properties.

The first LIGO hunted the waves for nearly a decade and found none - limited range and sensitivity? or inadequate filters? Or, is the space-time aspect a not-fully-understood game-changer? According to Einstein's theory of relativity, when a gravitational wave arrives, space-time is distorted. Are we unable to detect this motion because we are in the same space-time as the occurrence, or because we are within our own gravity wave or because what is relative just is?

Strangelets have been thought to be a concern of sorts. Some scientists believe their composition has the properties that would "puncture" planets and leave tracer exit craters. Others speculate that when a strangelet comes into contact with ordinary matter, it hits a nucleus that is immediately catalyzed and converted into strange matter, and the process keeps going until all matter in the vicinity is converted. If true, you can imagine the problem, especially when scientists have actually produced this peculiar particle in the collider at Brookhaven. The "strange matter" hypothesis remains unproven and no one, so far, has witnessed the little assimilator in action!

Strange stars sure make strange articles!

Read More

NASA's 'Curiosity' discovers more evidence for lakes, and possibly life, on Mars

© Handout/AFP/Getty Images

Artist's depiction shows water in Gale Crater on Mars

Billions of years ago, a lake once filled the 96-mile- (154-km) wide crater being explored by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, bolstering evidence that the planet most like Earth in the solar system was suitable for microbial life, scientists said on Monday.

The new findings combine more than two years of data collected by the rover since its sky-crane landing inside Gale Crater in August 2012.

Scientists discovered stacks of rocks containing water-deposited sediments inclined toward the crater's center, which now sports a three-mile (5 km) mound called Mount Sharp. That would mean that Mount Sharp didn't exist during a period of time roughly 3.5 billion years ago when the crater was filled with water, Curiosity researchers told reporters during a conference call.

"Finding the inclined strata was ... a complete surprise," said lead scientist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"Sedimentary geology ... is the cutting edge for trying to understand the Earth. When oil companies collect seismic surveys across places, they are looking for inclined strata because ... then you get geometry that tells you where the rocks are that you're looking for," he added.

Shortly after landing, Curiosity found that Mars once had the chemical ingredients and the environmental conditions needed to support microbial life, fulfilling the primary goal of its mission.

The rover then began driving toward Mount Sharp to look for other habitable niches and learn if the life-friendly environments actually existed long enough for life to evolve, a complicated question since scientists don't even know how long it took for life to form and take hold on Earth.

"The size of the lake in Gale Crater and the length of time and series that water was showing up implies that there may have been sufficient time for life to get going and thrive," said NASA's Mars Exploration Program scientist Michael Meyer.

The new studies, which have not yet been published, point to a series of wet and dry times at Gale Crater, challenging a previously held notion that Mars' period of warm climate was early and relatively short-lived, scientists said.

"All that driving we did ... just didn't get us to Mount Sharp. It gave us the context to appreciate Mount Sharp," Grotzinger said of the rover, which has traveled around 5 miles (8 kms) since landing on Mars in 2012.

Read More

Dominant ravens sabotage others' relationships

If we're lucky, this is behavior we haven't seen since high school. The coolest individuals can't stand to see others gaining social status, so they cut down any peers who are starting to elevate themselves. Ravens have to live with this behavior all the time. When the top-dog birds see others building new relationships, they attack these birds or put themselves in the middle. They may as well be spreading rumors or defacing each other's lockers.

Wild ravens living in Austria were the ones to reveal this behavior to scientists. The ravens, a group of about 300 birds in the Austrian Alps, have discovered that a local zoo is a convenient source of food. So the wild birds hang around the captive animals year-round (they especially like the wild boar enclosure) and steal their provisions. Because of this, they're used to seeing humans nearby.

For years, scientists have been capturing these birds, marking them with colored leg bands, and studying their social behavior. Now University of Vienna cognitive biologist Jorg Massen and his coauthors asked whether the most dominant birds might be sabotaging those lower down in the group.

The raven social ladder goes like this: at the top are breeding, male-female pairs - the power couples. Just below them are couples that don't have their own breeding territory yet. Below them are birds that are still trying to solidify a relationship with a mate; these are called "loosely bonded" pairs. Single ravens are at the bottom of the ladder.

For six months, researchers spied on this raven population. They monitored the flirtatious, bond-forming interactions between ravens: sitting shoulder to shoulder, touching each other's beaks, grooming one another's feathers, playing. They saw that 19 percent of these interactions were interrupted by another bird. The intruder would either attack the couple or just plop itself in between them.

This kind of interruption halted the canoodling a little more than half the time. But in another quarter of cases, the couple fought back at the intruder and chased it off. "[We] were wondering why they would do such a thing," Massen says. "What's in it for them?" In other words, why did these third-wheel ravens care enough about what the others were doing to risk their own safety breaking it up?

To find out, the researchers looked at the social status of both the couples being interrupted and the birds interrupting them. They found that loosely bonded individuals - those ravens still trying to build a relationship with a mate - were interrupted most often. And the birds jumping in between them usually belonged to a strongly bonded couple. It seemed that the most dominant birds were trying to keep new couples from forming.

Massen thinks this is powerful ravens' strategy for staying on top. By preventing new pairs from forming, they reduce their competition. They can keep more territory for themselves and more food for their own babies. Single birds apparently aren't worth their attention, and other strongly bonded couples might be too difficult to break up. But by focusing on the pairs that are just starting out, the powerful ravens target their effort where it serves them best.

The researchers haven't yet seen how these machinations benefit the dominant ravens (if they do). Massen says he's now gathering data to find out whether the interruptions truly prevent other birds from forming pairs. The bullies seem to think it's worth it, anyway. For ravens at the bottom of the social ladder, it means finding a partner is going to be even more life-changing than finally getting those braces off.

Read More

SOTT EXCLUSIVE: Match made in Sheol: Israel working with terrorists in Syria (says UN), Mossad training ISIS (says Putin aide)

© PressTV

Alexander Prokhanov: Mossad training ISIS.

On Sunday, December 7, Israel reportedly bombed Syria, yet again, this time striking the area near the Damascus international airport and the town of Dimas, close to the border with Lebanon. While the U.S. continues to bomb Syria under the shaky pretense of "fighting ISIS" (while supporting 'rebels' who ally themselves with ISIS in order to bring down Assad, which is what the U.S. really wants to do), Israel forgoes all that liberal 'bleeding heart' pretense and simply gets down to business: targeting locations under Syrian military control, and which involve supplies and food for the Syrian population that really needs them. But that's not all they're up to (more on that below).

Israel must really be having a laugh at the U.S. -- when Bibi and his merry bunch of war trolls want to bomb Syrian civilian and military infrastructure, they just do it, world opinion be damned. For the pansies in the U.S., it's always a 'mistake' -- they really meant to target the 'terrorists'. Grow a spine, guys, and drop the Columbo routine! No one takes a bumbling superpower seriously these days. If you really want to strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, honesty is the best policy. Just tell them: do what we say or we will unleash our trained terrorists on you. Or we'll blackmail you. Or we'll stage a coup in your country, and have you killed in the streets. Or we'll just bomb your country until you submit. That's the way Israel rolls. So take notes, America! Don't be afraid to show the world your true self.

Speaking of truth telling, Russia has been doing a lot of that lately, and Assad himself too. He recently gave an interview to the French magazine (you can read it in full here), in which he called the U.S. airstrikes in his country an illegal intervention that violates Syria's sovereignty (d'uh!). He also shared his thoughts on the origins of ISIS, and the efficacy of the U.S. 'war on ISIS':

"Let's be honest: had Qatar not paid money to those terrorists at that time, and had Turkey not supported them logistically, and had not the West supported them politically, things would have been different. [...]" Assad said.

He explained that currently Syria is fighting against "not only gangs", but also states that support them with "billions of dollars."

...

"The truth is that ISIS was created in Iraq in 2006. It was the United States which occupied Iraq, not Syria. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi [IS leader] was in American prisons, not in Syrian prisons. So, who created ISIS, Syria or the United States?"

Terrorism is an ideology which twenty years ago was exported to the West from Sunni Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, Assad stated. He believes that the process has reversed with terrorists coming to the Middle East from Europe and "especially France".

...

Syria's president criticized the air strikes conducted by the US-led coalition targeting the militants in Syria saying that there strikes are "merely cosmetic" and "terrorism cannot be destroyed from the air."

"That's why, and after two months of the alliance's airstrikes, there are no tangible results on the ground in that direction," he said. "And that's why saying that the alliance's airstrikes are helping us is not true."

Assad's advisor Bouthaina Shaaban later told RT:

IS militants - formerly ISIS, also known by the Arabic acronym Daʿish - have "covert international support that enables to transfer weapons and give financial aid to terrorists," Shaaban admitted.

High-level experts work for these terrorists she stated, questioning from where they came.

"Therefore, in dealing with IS militants we will rely on our own capabilities, a new coalition that is being created between Russia, Syria, and countries" that stick to their statements and promises.

"At the same time, the West, in my personal opinion, pursues other objectives, participating in the [US-led] coalition. The West, above all, is trying to save the US military industry, attracting finances of the Gulf Arab countries in order to save relevant US companies," she said.

One of those objectives is to topple Assad. But besides the obvious hand of Washington and Brussels behind ISIS, where is ISIS getting its 'covert international support'? Two recent reports may provide the answer.

First, recently reported that UN observers in the disputed Syrian Golan Heights recently submitted reports of "regular contact" between the IDF there and armed Syrian terrorists at the border:

According to the UN report, a person wounded on 15 September "was taken by armed members of the opposition across the ceasefire line, where he was transferred to a civilian ambulance escorted by an IDF vehicle."

Moreover, from 9-19 November, the "UNDOF observed at least 10 wounded persons being transferred by armed members of the opposition from the Bravo side across the ceasefire line to IDF."

...

Israel initially had maintained that it was treating only civilians. However, reports claimed that earlier last month members of Israel's Druze minority protested the hospitalisation of wounded Syrian fighters from the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front in Israel.

A statement issued by a group of Druze activists accused the Israeli government of supporting radical Sunni factions such as the Islamic State (ISIS).

Replying to a question by i24News on whether Israel has given medical assistance to members of al-Nusra and Daesh (the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State (ISIS), a Israeli military spokesman's office said: "In the past two years the Israel Defence Forces have been engaged in humanitarian, life-saving aid to wounded Syrians, irrespective of their identity."

The UN report also laid out instances where in Israeli army was seen interacting with armed rebels. In one incident, the report claimed that the IDF gave some boxes to the Syrian armed rebels.

[embedded content]

There's really no difference between al-Nusra and Da'esh/ISIS.

Then there's this: Mossad training ISIL terrorists: Putin aide

Alexander Prokhanov told Press TV that Mossad is also likely to have transferred some of its spying experiences to the ISIL leadership, adding that Israel's military advisors could be assisting the Takfiri terrorists.

...

"ISIL is a tool at the hands of the United States. They tell the Europeans that if we (the Americans) do not intervene, ISIL will cause you harm," he said, adding that Iran and Russia are the prime targets of the ISIL.

"They launched their first terror attack against us just a few days back in Chechnya," he said, stressing that the ISIL ideology has got nothing to do with the Islam practiced in Iran and some other Muslim countries in the Middle East region.

Prokhanov said the United States and Israel are one and the same when it comes to supporting a terror organization like the ISIL.

[embedded content]

Now, despite giving vocal and even humanitarian support to the Palestinians, Russia has maintained a fairly neutral relationship with that hysterical banshee of the Middle East: Israel. So Prokhanov's statement here is significant. (Prokhanov is an author and activist, editor-in-chief of the right-wing newspaper, and member of numerous public councils in the Russian Federation. While it's hard to know what influence, if any, he really has with Putin, he's part of a group of thinkers that apparently has Putin's ear, which includes Sergei Glazyev.) Not only that, Russia has recently demanded an explanation for Israel's latest bombing of Syria:

"Moscow is deeply worried by this dangerous development, the circumstances of which demand an explanation," Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said.

In a letter to the United Nations, Russia complained about Israel's "aggressive action" and demanded that such attacks should not happen again, the spokesman said.

Syria also complained to the UN about the strikes, demanding that the Security Council "severely condemn the Israeli attack and impose punitive sanctions on Israel due to its support of Syrian terrorist organizations."

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied the reported strikes. "We have a firm policy of preventing all possible transfers of sophisticated weapons to terrorist organizations," Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz told Israel Radio on Monday.

Except when they're the ones doing it. What a lying bunch of psychopaths. And note the use of the word 'possible' here. Can we say "Minority Report"? Philip K. Dick, not to mention George Orwell, would certainly not approve.

The Damascus airport warehouses reportedly targeted by the Israeli air strikes on Sunday held Iranian missile systems destined for the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, DPA reported, quoting a Lebanese security source.

Al-Arabiya reported that two Hezbollah militants, one of whom was high-ranking, were killed in the strike.

A Syrian military source confirmed that the hangars at Damascus International Airport contained missiles but gave no details about their origin or destination.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, described the target as an import-export warehouse in the military area of the airport.

The Lebanese official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said a Hezbollah convoy heading to Lebanon had been hit in another set of strikes at Dimas, approximately half-way between Damascus and the Lebanese border.

...

In Teheran on Monday, the Syrian and Iranian foreign ministers condemned the reported Israeli air strikes, calling them an act of aggression that proves Israel was "in the same trench" with extremist groups fighting the Syrian government.

...

Speaking on Monday at a joint news conference in Tehran with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem said Israel was trying to compensate for losses incurred by Islamic extremist groups in Syria at the hands of the Syrian army. He did not elaborate.

Every day, it becomes more obvious that the U.S. and Israel (not to mention the EU and NATO) are the ideological blood brothers of terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Nusra. They share the same brutal, cynical, anti-human mentality. They rape, torture, and murder in their struggle for global domination and their psychopathic urge for the ultimate degradation of all human values. And sooner or later, it will become so obvious that only the most die-hard authoritarian follower will buy into the transparent mask of sanity these psychopaths project to the world. Unfortunately, sick bastards like the ones ruling Israel don't give up easily. They're willing to take the world down with them.

Read More

Animal Magnetism: How the magnetic field influences animal navigation

© Revwarheart.

The migration of the monarch butterfly seems like it’s magic, but it’s actually guided by the magnetic field.

Sometimes, ecology is quite visible. When an owl catches a mouse, we see that connection very clearly. When a river floods, we see how water shapes a landscape.

Ecology can also be less visible. The soil is a good example of this: There is so much life in that brown material beneath our feet, but since we live on top of it, soil life can be difficult for us to visualize.

Sometimes, ecology is invisible.

What forces guide monarch butterflies as they migrate to a place they've never seen? When animals interact with the Earth's magnetic field, these invisible influences play a big role in animals' behavior.

Many animals can sense the Earth's magnetic field

How do you navigate through your everyday life? You likely use landmarks such as street signs or buildings. If you're not relying on a device to keep time, you could use the sun's position in the sky to tell you the time of day, and unless you live near the Arctic Circle, the presence of light or dark tells you whether it's day or night.

Humans use many environmental cues to tell them when and where to move, and for a long time, scientists thought that animals relied on similar environmental cues to find their way around.

However, in 1957, a Frankfurt scientist named Hans Fromme noticed that the robins he'd placed in a cage were getting restless. It was fall, and they kept on moving to the southwest part of the cage. Why were they doing this? Yes, the robins in Germany migrate to Spain to the winter, but their behavior puzzled him: these robins were in a closed room, without the sun or the stars to guide them.

They could not tell that it was fall, and they could not use the position of the sun and the stars to tell where Spain was. He decided that they must be using the Earth's magnetic field to guide them in their attempted migration.

How animals navigate

Just as we might use street signs, a GPS, and a map to navigate our way around a city, animals use multiple means of navigation. They use environmental clues such as temperature, light levels, and the availability of food sources to trigger migration. They use the sun, moon, and stars to help them make their way to breeding grounds.

Some animals use landmarks to show where they should go, while others such as salmon use the smell of a particular river to guide them home. While they usually use it together with other navigational methods, animals also use the earth's magnetic field as their compass.

© Gracey.

What’s behind the amazing navigational abilities of birds? While they use the sun and the stars to navigate, birds also use the Earth’s magnetic field.

How does the magnetic field influence animal behavior?

Since Fromme's time, many experiments on animal behavior have determined that organisms as diverse as bacteria and hamsters can detect the intensity of the Earth's magnetic field and the angle at which it intersects with the Earth.

The most visible interaction between animals and the magnetic field comes every year as animals migrate from cold to warm climates and back again. To navigation-challenged humans, animal migration can seem almost magical.

How do animals like salmon, leatherback turtles, butterflies, and hummingbirds manage to migrate thousands of miles? It turns out that it's not magic at all: it's an invisible ecological interaction.

An inner compass is very important to migrating animals, particularly on days when it's overcast and hard to navigate using the sun or the stars.

In a 2014 study of monarch butterflies, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School discovered that migrating monarchs orient themselves to the south - even in the absence of cues from the sun. This means that even when it's overcast, butterflies can continue moving southward to their winter home.

An alignment with the magnetic field can also help organisms move within their immediate environment. According to Kirschvink and Diaz-Ricci's work published in the , magnetotactic bacteria align with the Earth's magnetic field to seek out the area between mud and water in their aquatic environments. This is the best place for the bacteria to live.

Animal magnetoception: Where is this built-In compass?

When humans use a compass, it's visible in our hands. If animals have a compass, where is it? For a long time, studies of animal behavior showed animals aligning themselves with the earth's magnetic field, but no one knew exactly how they managed to figure it out. However, research has discovered that many species contain small quantities of magnetite, the same material used in the ancient lodestones that humans used to guide their journeys.

In 2012, research published in the discovered that rainbow trout have a good nose for figuring out directions. In their olfactory system, the trout have some cells that contain tiny quantities of magnetite. Researchers isolated these cells by looking for cells that aligned with the magnetic field and discovered that the cells contained magnetic components.

While people have not studied the magnetoreceptor anatomy of all animals that migrate, many organisms - including humans - contain particles of magnetite within their bodies. In the case of the magnetic bacteria, the bacteria contain magnetosomes, particles of magnetite or iron sulfide tucked into their cells.

It seems that animals that use the magnetic field to navigate may come with a built-in compass, but there may be more than one type of compass. The bodies of animals such as birds and the fruit fly contain proteins called cryptochromes. When these proteins are exposed to blue light, they form molecules with electrons that spin in specific ways depending on the earth's magnetic field. Researchers think that these cryptochromes could help some animals navigate.

© Muvuca.

Although it’s controversial, some scientists think that electromagnetic interference from humans could interfere with animal migration.

Human impacts on the Earth's magnetic field

Humans have an impact on so many aspects of the earth's ecology. While wrangling with the magnetic field might seem like an activity that is out of our reach, human-induced electromagnetic noise could be a concern for migrating animals.

In a 2014 study published in the journal , laboratory studies on robins showed birds that were exposed to background electromagnetic noise had trouble discerning which way was south.

While other studies have not seen the same impact from everyday background noise, it's prudent to be aware that human-induced electromagnetic disturbances could have an impact on some animals' highly-tuned sensory systems.

Animal navigation: Migration and the Earth's magnetic field

Animal navigation has long fascinated humans. We enjoy watching the geese migrate overhead as fall approaches, but for a long time, no one knew how they managed to find their way.

While it's not completely clear how all animals navigate using the Earth's magnetic field, recent investigations of animal anatomy have drawn us closer to the answer to this perplexing question.

Read More

Wrong time, wrong place: Rare bird found in Barrie, Canada

© Darlene Deemert

An ash-throated flycatcher is shown in a Barrie backyard Nov. 18.

If you were a bird, you may want to consider flying south in October and not returning to our area until next May. Many human snowbirds do just that. Many birds migrate south to warmer climates for winter, then return in the spring, but some seed-eating birds tough out the winter with us.

There is a family of birds called flycatchers that survives by hawking flying insects out of the air in mid-flight. There are not many insects flying around in winter, so a flycatcher that tried to overwinter instead of migrate would have little chance of survival.

Flycatchers mainly eat insects and other invertebrates, but also fruit.

One of the largest and most common species of flycatcher that nests in our area in summer is the great-crested flycatcher. It is a member of the Myiarchus genus and the second-largest flycatcher in our area, slightly smaller than the eastern kingbird. Great-crested flycatchers leave our area in late summer and early fall to fly south to southern Central America or northern South America. There are few records of this species staying around in late fall or winter in our area.

Great-crested flycatchers mainly eat insects but will also eat a good amount of fruit, which they swallow whole, then regurgitate the pits. The one member of the flycatcher family that leaves later than most and arrives back in our area in late March is the eastern phoebe. It winters in the southern United States and Mexico. It eats mainly insects, but survives long periods on small fruits and seeds when they are unable to find insects.

Imagine the surprise when Barrie resident Darlene Deemert saw a flycatcher drop from the sky into her small residential backyard near the Barrie Country Club at about 2 p.m. Nov. 18, in the middle of a snowfall.

The bird looked like a great-crested flycatcher, but smaller, and didn't have the grey throat and breast along with the deep yellow belly of a great-crested flycatcher. The throat and breast was white and the belly was a washed-out, light yellow colour. She checked her bird guide and the bird looked like an ash-throated flycatcher known only to nest as far north as northern California and winter in Mexico and Central America.

This is not a bird one would expect to see in Ontario, especially in the middle of a snow storm in mid-November. She then wondered if it could be a young great-crested flycatcher that did not migrate with the rest of the species a few months ago. She captured a few distance photos of the bird with her camera and posted her observation on my Simcoe Nature Board website.

Although still considered rare, they predictably appear on the East Coast from Florida north to the Atlantic provinces from early November to mid-December. In fact, during this season, one is more likely to encounter an ash-throated flycatcher on the East Coast than a great-crested flycatcher that departs from our area in early October.

This bird stayed in Deemert's backyard flying around a low burning-bush shrub loaded with berries in company with a small flock of juncos that were visiting a feeding station and millet and sunflower seeds. She saw it flying up from the bush and catching snowflakes in midair like they were flies for about 30 minutes. Then, it flew away with a flock of juncos.

It was not seen again, but the following morning, a number of us checked the area unsuccessfully for signs of the bird since it would be a new species for our Simcoe County and even Ontario personal lists. There were no further reports received in the following days.

The ash-throated flycatcher is a rare but regular vagrant to the East Coast and individuals have been recorded nearly every year in all the coastal states and provinces, with inland sightings being less in the east and midwest.

Read More