Thomas Fortenberry

Spider-Man’s Stradivarius is close at hand. Behold! And yet, I hear the tittering laughter of Hulce-cum-Amadeus.

Scientist Fiddles With Spider Silk

A new kind of violin string creates sounds as soft as silk. And no wonder, since it’s made of spider silk.

The strong-yet-stretchy protein fibers, which already have shown promise in everything from sutures to bulletproof vests, vibrate well when bowed, Shigeyoshi Osaki of Japan’s Nara Medical University reports in the April 13 Physical Review Letters.

Dragline silk can be stronger than steel, pound for pound. Orb-weaving spiders dangle from a single thread of this kind of silk and edge their webs with it. Filaments woven together into a slender rope can hold up a man.

To craft violin strings, Osaki packed thousands of dragline strands into bundles. Then he twisted together the bundles and treated them with a gelatin solution. Individual fibers’ curved surfaces became flat-sided, allowing the fibers to stack together tightly.

“The most interesting aspect to this paper is the change in shape from round to polygonal when they wound the fibers,” says Randy Lewis, a molecular biologist who studies spider silk at Utah State University in Logan. No one has made polygonal spider silk before, he says.

A Stradivarius violin strung with the shapely silk sang with stronger overtones than it did with other strings made of traditional materials. Professional violinists compared the sound favorably to that produced by catgut or steel strings, Osaki reports.

As if we need more proof that our closest relatives are highly intelligent, another study proving monkeys and apes can use language. Not only do we mean the long-proved abilities to obey commands and use sign language. Here we go a step further and see that some can read as well.

Baboons can learn to recognize words

Even though they speak no language, baboons can achieve one of the first steps in reading — the ability to distinguish real words from nonsense on the basis of the arrangement of their letters.

The monkeys’ ability suggests that reading is based on simple object-identification skills, rather than on more advanced linguistic skills, according to Jonathan Grainger and his colleagues at Aix-Marseille University in France.

“When we read, we’re capitalizing on object identification, an expertise we already have and one that’s quite ancient,” Grainger says. “We identify a table by its components: its tabletop and four legs. The same goes for identifying words using their component letters.”

Grainger’s study was performed on six adolescent baboons (Papio papio) housed together. The animals had free access to computer screens displaying four-letter strings of words that formed either real English words or meaningless ‘nonwords’ that resembled real words, such as ‘DRAN’ or ‘TELK’.

Interested baboons touched the screen to identify the letter string as a word or a nonword. A correct answer earned a food reward. Each baboon had a microchip in its arm that allowed the researchers to identify the individual taking the test. The team’s results are published in Science today.

Over 44 days, the animals completed around 50,000 tests. They identified words with an average of 75% accuracy, and learned between 81 and 308 words from the 500 words and more than 7,000 randomly generated nonwords that they were shown.

Begin the Uplift!

While not as fun as an artifact of super-advanced planetary engineering, it makes sense. It also is a great example of the geological uniqueness to be found throughout the galaxy. Can you imagine the diversity everywhere when we already have this much on just eight planets?

Mystery of Saturn’s Walnut Moon Cracked

by Charles Choi

The giant ridge around the middle of Saturn moon’s Iapetus that makes it resemble an oversize walnut may have essentially formed as a “hug” from a dead moon, researchers say.

Iapetus, the third-largest of Saturn’s moons, possesses a mountain range like no other in the solar system. This enormous ridge wraps along its equator, reaching up to 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) high and 124 miles (200 km) wide, and encircles more than 75 percent of the moon. Altogether, the ridge may constitute about one-thousandth the mass of Iapetus.

“I would love to stand at the base of this wall of ice 20 kilometers tall that heads off straight in either direction until it dips below the horizon,” study lead author Andrew Dombard, a planetary scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told SPACE.com.

Scientists had been at a loss to explain how this mountain range might have formed. Of all the planets and moons in our solar system, apparently only Iapetus has this kind of ridge — any process that researchers previously suggested to explain its formation should also have led to similar features on other bodies.

Now investigators suggest this ridge could be the remains of a dead moon. Their model proposes that a giant impact blasted chunks of debris off Iapetus at the tail end of the planetary growth period more than 4.5 billion years ago. This rubble could have coalesced around Iapetus, making it a “sub-satellite,” a moon of a moon.

Under this scenario, the gravitational pull Iapetus exerted on this sub-satellite eventually tore it back into pieces, forming an orbiting ring of debris around the moon. Matter from this debris ring then rained down, building the ridge Iapetus now sports along its equator fairly quickly, “probably on a scale of centuries,” Dombard said.

The researchers suggest that, of all the planets and moons in our solar system, only Iapetus has this kind of ridge because of its unique orbit so far away from Saturn. This made it easier to have a moon of its own — if Iapetus was closer in, Saturn might have tugged Iapetus’ moon away, Dombard said.