Scientists using a new and highly precise dating technique have concluded that the late Cretaceous asteroid strike in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula coincided almost exactly with the extinction of the dinosaurs — give-or-take a few tens of thousands of years. While it's clear that other factors were contributing to the rapidly deteriorating environmental conditions, it's now obvious that the asteroid was the final coup-de-grace for the dinosaurs.

Indeed, all was not well on Earth when the asteroid struck. Volcanoes in India were wreaking havoc to the planet's ecosystems, and earlier asteroid strikes may have contributed to an already fragile environment. Other research shows that Earth experienced six abrupt temperature shifts of two degrees or more in mean temperatures in the one million years before the impact. In one instance, the temperature swung 6-8 degrees.

These factors left doubt in the minds of some researchers, who wondered what it was, exactly, that truly caused the dinosaurs to go extinct. Moreover, previous studies showed considerable inconsistencies with the timing of certain events, leading researchers from Berkeley's Geochronology Center (BGC), the University of California, Berkeley, and universities in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to investigate further — but this time with a new tool.

Their re-analysis utilized a recalibrated argon-argon dating technique that allowed for more accurate measurements of both the impact date and the dinosaurs' extinction.

Researchers Paul Renne, Jan Smit and colleagues determined that the Yucatan impact event happened 66,038,000 years ago — give or take 11,000 years. It's an extraordinarily precise measurement, as it was only a few decades ago that the margins for error were measured in the millions of years.

The scientists also updated the date of dinosaur extinction. It happened about 33,000 years after the asteroid impact, which is a revision from the previous estimate of 300,000 years (which, when considering the cataclysmic effects of the impact, didn't really make a lot of sense). Given the narrow margins of error for the dating technique, it's very likely, therefore, that the asteroid impact coincided almost exactly with the demise of the dinosaurs. Consequently, the researchers are describing the event as the final blow. It was not the only factor, they admit, but it was certainly a major contributor.

The scientists reached this conclusion after analyzing the tektites (glassy spheres) and ash left over from the impact. The team looked at evidence from both the dinosaur extinction date (including ash collected from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, the source of many dinosaur fossils) and the crater formation event (namely tektites from Haiti).

"The impact was clearly the final straw that pushed Earth past the tipping point," said Renne through a statement. "We have shown that these events are synchronous to within a gnat's eyebrow, and therefore the impact clearly played a major role in extinctions, but it probably wasn't just the impact."

You can read the entire study at Science.

Supplementary sources: Reuters, AFP.

Images: Photobank.kiev.ua via Shutterstock andKerem Beyit.

In what is its most targeted search to date, the SETI Institute has scanned 86 potentially habitable solar systems for signs of radio signals. Needless to say, the search came up short (otherwise the headline of this article would have been dramatically different), but the initiative is finally offering some quantitative data about the rate at which we can expect to find radio-emitting intelligent life on Earth-like planets — a rate that's proving to be disturbingly low.

Indeed, by the end of its survey, SETI calculated that less than one-percent of all potentially habitable exoplanets are likely to host intelligent life. That means less than one in a million stars in the Milky Way currently host radio-emitting civilizations that we can detect.

A narrow-band search

The SETI researchers, a team that included Jill Tarter and scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, reached this conclusion after scanning 86 different stars using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. These stars were chosen because earlier Kepler data indicated they host potentially habitable planets — Earth-like planets that sit inside their sun's habitable zone.

As for the radio bands searched, SETI looked for signals in the 1-2 GHz range, a band that's used here on Earth for such things as cell phones and television transmissions. SETI also constrained the search to radio emissions less than 5Hz of the spectrum; nothing in nature is known to produce such narrow band signals.

Each of the 86 stars — the majority of which are more than 1,000 light-years away — were surveyed for five minutes. Because of the extreme distances involved, the only signals that could have been detected were ones that were intentionally aimed in our direction — which would be a deliberate effort by ETIs to signal their presence (what's referred to as Active SETI, or METI (Messages to ETIs)).

"No signals of extraterrestrial origin were found." noted the researchers in the study."[I]n the simplest terms this result indicates that fewer than 1% of transiting exoplanet systems are radio loud in narrow-band emission between 1-2 GHz."

Wanted: Alternative signatures

Despite the nul result, SETI remains hopeful for the future. Scanning potentially habitable solar systems is a fantastic idea, and it's likely the first of many such targeted searches. At the same time, however, SETI will have to expand upon its list of candidate signatures.

It has been proposed, for example, that SETI look for signs of Kardashev scale civilizations, and take a more Dysonian approach to their searches. Others have suggested that SETI look for laser pulses.

Indeed, the current strategy — that of looking for radio-emitting civilizations — is exceedingly limited. Even assuming we could detect signals from a radio-capable civilization within a radius of 1,000 light-years, the odds that it would be contemporaneous with us is mind-bogglingly low (the time it takes for radio signals to reach us notwithstanding).

And as we are discovering by virtue of our own technological development, the window of opportunity to detect a radio-transmitting civilization is quite short. Looking to the future, it's more than reasonable to suggest that alternative signatures — whether they be transmitted deliberately or not — be considered.

This is something SETI is very aware of, and the researchers said so much in their paper:

Ultimately, experiments such as the one described here seek to firmly determine the number of other intelligent, communicative civilizations outside of Earth. However, in placing limits on the presence of intelligent life in the galaxy, we must very carefully qualify our limits with respect to the limitations of our experiment. In particular, we can offer no argument that an advanced, intelligent civilization necessarily produces narrow-band radio emission, either intentional or otherwise. Thus we are probing only a potential subset of such civilizations, where the size of the subset is difficult to estimate. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is still in its infancy, and there is much parameter space left to explore.

The paper is set to appear in the Astrophysical Journal and can be found here.

Top image via x264-bb. Interior image: cv.nrao.edu.

Behold Lion Man, an ancient figurine sculpted from a mammoth's tusk. Discovered back in 1939, this remarkable ice age piece was initially dated at 32,000 years-old, but a new carbon dating analysis has pushed it further back in time to 40,000 years ago — making it the oldest figurative sculpture ever discovered. So yes, this thing was actually sculpted by a paleolithic human who was romping around Europe at the mid-point of the last ice age.

When Lion Man was first discovered at the back of the Stadel Cave in the Swabian Alps in Germany, it was broken into 200 tiny pieces. Experts re-assembled it in 1970, where it assumed the characteristics of a standing bear or big cat — but with human characteristics. It stood 12 inches tall (30 cm), and was missing about 30-percent of its total mass.

Martin Bailey of The Art Newspaper reports on the latest developments:

Further fragments were later found among the previously excavated material and these were added to the figure in 1989. At this point, the sculpture was recognised as representing a lion. Most specialists have regarded it as male, although paleontologist Elisabeth Schmid controversially argued that it was female, suggesting that early society might have been matriarchal.

The latest news is that almost 1,000 further fragments of the statue have been found, following recent excavations in the Stadel Cave by Claus-Joachim Kind. Most of these are minute, but a few are several centimetres long. Some of the larger pieces are now being reintegrated into the figure.

Conservators have removed the 20th-century glue and filler from the 1989 reconstruction, and are now painstakingly reassembling the Lion Man, using computer-imaging techniques. "It is an enormous 3D puzzle", says the British Museum curator Jill Cook.

The revised date pushes Lion Man back to the oldest sculpture ever found, which includes two smaller and less sophisticated carvings found in the Swabian Alps dating back 35,000 and 40,000 years respectively. Etching have been found that are even older, but nothing quite like this.

A replica of Lion Man is now on display at the British Museum.

More here.

Image: British Museum.

International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield is certainly making the most of his time up there space. This past Friday he teamed up with Ed Robertson of Barenaked Ladies fame to perform their original track, "I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)." For the live performance, they were joined by the Wexford Gleeks from the Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts, who were all at the CBC studios in Toronto.

The Canadian duo began co-writing the song several months ago when Hadfield was still in Russia training for the mission.

From the CBC:

"We've been pals for a long time and it just seemed like a fun thing to do," says Robertson of the song that is part of a planned album Hadfield wants to record while in space. "Chris and his brother write songs and they're really great, so he's going to record a bunch of stuff up there. The song we wrote together, I guess someone heard it and loved it, so before it was even finished we were asked to do this premiere and be a part of Music Monday."

As for the collaboration, Robertson says he was contacted by Hadfield in order to "bring the writing to the next level," and originally thought he would be doing the brunt of the work with limited feedback from Hadfield. As it turns out, it ended up being a full-on collaboration.

"I wrote the first verse and chorus, sent it to him, and asked for some technical jargon for the second verse because the first verse was emotional," says Robertson. "I asked him to be on the lookout for speeds and weights and a number of revolutions, serial numbers; anything we can use to put some technical data into this song. After about a day and a half he sent me the second verse, and it was poetic and good. I was just like, 'Dude you are a high-functioning individual.' You are in Russia training to command the I.S.S. and in your free time you wrote the second verse of this song."

As for what message they wanted to get across with the song, Robertson says he "wanted to impart some of the wonder that Chris has imparted to me. I wanted it to be a celebration not about the remoteness of space, but about the connectedness of a human being on the I.S.S. who looks down and sees the whole planet in a way that, from our perspective, we don't have the opportunity to."

More here and here (including notation and lyrics).

Scientists have known for quite some time that squid have the capacity for short burst flight, but they've only known this through anecdotal accounts. Until recently, they've never actually been able to properly document the phenomenon, or get a sense as to how the mollusc pulls it off. Now, thanks to Jun Yamamoto of Hokkaido University, not only have the rumors been proven true — scientists have also figured out the mechanics behind squid flight.

Back in July 2011, Yamamoto and his team were tracking a large group of squid (Todarodes pacificus, also known as neon flying squid) about 370 miles (600 km) off the coast of Tokyo. As the boat got nearer, the 8-inch (20 cm) squid propelled themselves from the water where they remained airborne for a distance of 98 feet (30 meters) — and at the breakneck speed of 37 feet per second (11.2 m/s).

According to the researchers, the squid is able to accomplish this by shooting a powerful jet of water out from their funnel-like stems. Once they're out of the water, they glide by spreading out their fins and arms. This configuration creates aerodynamic lift, enabling the squid to keep a stable arc on its flight. Consequently, the researchers say the squid is truly flying, and not just jumping. And indeed, the technique allows the squid to remain airborne for as much as three seconds at a time.

The biologists theorize that it's a defence mechanism to help the squid escape predators (or nosy marine biologists). Interestingly, the squid can only do this when in the reverse position; it's looking behind itself while it does all of this.

The study will be published later this week in Marine Biology.

Supplementary sources: Phys.org/AFP and Wired.

Images: Kouta Muramatsu, Hokkaido University, AFP.

A scientist from the University of Utah has confirmed that two continent-sized "thermochemical piles" are slowly converging at the bottom of Earth's mantle about 1,800 miles (2,900 km) beneath the Pacific Ocean. This process, says geologist Michael Thorne, could eventually lead to a cataclysmic eruption that could "cause very massive destruction on Earth." But don't panic quite yet. His research suggests that this super-volcano-in-the-making may not erupt for another 100 to 200 million years.

The new study, which is set for publication in this month's issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters, suggests that the collision of the two piles is creating a massive reservoir of partly molten rock that could eventually lead to one of two different kinds of super-eruptions in the far future.

Pick your poison

The first scenario is a "hotspot plume," the kind of large scale geological event that happened about 2 million years ago at Wyoming's Yellowstone caldera — an eruption that covered North America in blanket of volcanic ash.

The second possibility is a flood basalt eruption — a more protracted event similar to what happened in India's Deccan Traps about 65 million years ago. In this scenario, a large and volatile volcanic region spews lava to the surface over an extended period of time — continuous eruptions that can last thousands of years, resulting in large igneous provinces. A similar thing happened in the Pacific Northwest's Columbia River region about 17 million years ago.

Needless to say, these eruptions are extremely disruptive to ecosystems, and may be tied to some extinction events; ash and volcanic gases make life difficult for organisms (including massive die-offs in the oceans caused by oxygen loss).

Spongy molten blobs of doom

And now, Thorne says a similar thing could happen again, but this time in the South Pacific near the Samoan region.

He reached this conclusion after investigating two massive piles that were discovered in the 1990s. Initially, geologists assumed that these continent-sized regions were static. But Thorne's high-resolution seismic images showed they are in fact colliding — and that they're gradually creating a "spongy blob" of partly molten rock that's growing to the size of Florida.

The two piles, which rest on the boundary between the core and the mantle, are located underneath the Pacific Ocean and under Africa (we're talking really deep under Africa). Each of them are approximately 3,000 miles (4,830 km) across.

"We call it a blob of partially molten material," said Thorne when speaking to NPR. "I mean it's big...this one that we found is an order of magnitude, maybe 10 times larger, than any of the ones we've observed before."

The effect is like two rock piles that are being squished together, "squeezing this huge molten blob at the middle of it like some kind of balloon, and it is going on right underneath us."

And indeed, Thorne's subsequent computer simulations helped him determine the shape and size of the two piles, while also demonstrating the theoretical potential for the region to trigger a massive plume eruption. It's by no means guaranteed, but if it were to happen, it would take place no earlier than 100 million years from now.

As for Thorne's confirmation of plate activity, he used data extracted from over 50 earthquakes which occurred deep below the Earth's surface, and by analyzing changes in wave patterns in the rock where the core meets the mantle.

The study was conducted along with Allen McNamara and Edward Garnero of Arizona State University, and Gunnar Jahnke and Heiner Igel of the University of Munich. The National Science Foundation funded the research.

The study is set to appear in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Supplementary sources: University of Utah and NPR.

Top image via. Interior images: National Science Foundation, University of Utah.

As if putting feathers on dinosaurs wasn't insult enough, a radical new theory from Paul Else of the University of Wollongong is proposing that dinosaurs produced a kind of milk for their offspring, that they essentially lactated — a physiological process that's associated almost exclusively with mammals. But as Else's new paper suggests, some modern birds feed their newly hatched young with secretions similar to the milk of mammals. So why not dinosaurs, too?

Top image: Artist's interpretation of 190-millon-year-old Massospondylusnests, eggs, hatchlings and adults by Julius Csotonyi.

Indeed, pigeons, emperor penguins, and flamingos all produce a milk-like substance for their young. But rather than delivering food to their babies with breasts, these birds regurgitate the substance and transmit it mouth-to-mouth. Else hypothesizes that the dinosaurs did a similar thing.

"Since birds and dinosaurs share much in common I proposed that some dinosaurs likely used this feeding strategy," he said in a statement.

It's important to note that this isn't just the regurgitation of previously consumed food (i.e. partially fermented plant matter). Some birds produce these secretions from various parts of their upper digestive tract, including the crop organ, esophageal lining, and proventriculus. The resulting "milk" is similar to what mammals produce; it contains similar levels of fat and protein, along with carotenoids, antibodies and, in the case of pigeons and doves, epidermal growth factor.

Else, a molecular biologist with an interest in membrane lipids, came up with the idea when considering how difficult it must have been for dinosaur parents weighing several tonnes to feed their relatively tiny offspring. Moreover, paleontologists know that dinosaur babies grew quickly, which, when considering Else's concern, presents a kind of conundrum. The only way it was possible, argues Else, was a form of lactation.

Else proposes that dinosaurs used secretory feeding to increase the rate of growth of their young (the "milk" may have contained growth hormone). And like mammalian breast milk, the secretions could have provided immune responses, among other benefits.

His new paper was just accepted for publication in The Journal of Experimental Biology. Moving forward, Else's hope is that a "real" dinosaur biologist will prove or disprove his theory — what could be easier said than done given the dearth of paleontological evidence in support of such an (apparent) wild claim.

But that said, he claims it might be possible to prove by studying dinosaurs like the herbivorous duck billed hadrosaur — dinosaurs that may have sustained their young — not with fermented plant matter — but with this specialized secretion.

Read the entire study.

Image of hadrosaur.

Human labor is long and difficult, so it's only natural that someone be there to lend a helping hand — that's where the midwife comes in. It's not the kind of thing that's typically observed among other animals, however. Imagine the surprise of these zoologists working in southwest China when they witnessed the birth of a black snub-nose monkey whose delivery was assisted by a monkey midwife.

Normally, these high-altitude monkeys give birth at night, and the whole thing only takes about 10 to 15 minutes. Consequently, biologists have never actually seen it happen with their own eyes. But recently, Wen Xiao of Dali University in Yunnan and colleagues got lucky when they witnessed a rare day time birth. Writing in New Scientist, Michael Marshall reports:

A female monkey gave birth to her first infant within fifteen minutes late one morning. While sitting in a rhododendron tree, she began twisting her body and calling faintly. After 10 minutes she started screaming, and then another female climbed up the tree. She was an experienced mother, and sat beside the labouring female while the crown of the infant's head appeared. Once the head was fully exposed, the "midwife" pulled the baby out with both hands and ripped open the birth membranes.

Within a minute, the mother had reclaimed the infant from the midwife, severed the umbilical cord, and begun eating the placenta. A few minutes later, the midwife went back down to the forest floor to forage.

"This is a fairly rare observation," says Sarah Turner of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who was not involved in the Yunnan study. She says female monkeys often pull their babies out themselves, and the midwife may have adapted this behaviour. "It's hard to know what's going on in her head," says Turner, but it seems she was genuinely helping.

That could be because female black snub-nosed monkeys tend to stay in the group they were born in. As a result, the females in a group are likely to be closely related and to have strong social bonds. Animals often help their relatives because doing so preserves their own genes, a phenomenon called kin selection.

The juvenile females in the group watched the birth closely, and may have picked up a few tips. Turner says many primates remain with their groups while giving birth, giving juveniles a chance to learn.

Black snub-nose monkeys are highly social primates who live in large societies called bands. These bands, which can exceed 400 members, are sub-divided into groups of 10, mostly consisting of one male and several females. During this particular birth, two other females watched it happen — undoubtedly taking mental notes.

More at New Scientist. The entire study can be found here.

Images: Xi Xhinong.

With the death of floppy drives (you remember those, don't you?), USB memory sticks have become as commonplace and indispensable as mobile phones. But for the most part, they're achingly boring and over-the-top utilitarian. Thankfully, there are still some manufacturers out there willing to put out products that defy the norm. Here are some highly creative and real portable flash drives that are available for purchase.

This list comes to us via InspirationFeed.com, where you can find prices and links for purchase.

There are many more here.

A genetic investigation by French archaeologist Marc Gabolde is threatening to rewrite the history books on two of ancient Egypt's most iconic figures. For years, antiquities experts have assumed that Akhenaten and his unnamed sister were the parents of the world's most famous pharaoh, Tutankhamun. And in fact, recent DNA analyses suggested as much. But as Gabolde's new interpretation of the genetic data shows, King Tut's mom may have been none other than his father's first cousin, Nefertiti.

That Nefertiti may have been Tutankhamun's mother is not a complete shocker. She was married to Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten, after all — his Great Royal Wife and chief consort. Moreover, Egyptologists know that the couple had children together (they parented six daughters). Yet, the DNA evidence suggested a different maternal parentage for Tutankhamun.

Indeed, back in 2005, an investigation by archaeologists, radiologists, and geneticists using CT scans and genetic analysis indicated that King Tut's dad was in fact Akhenaten, and that his mother was not one of his known wives. Instead, Tutankhamun's mother was his aunt — one of Akhenaten's five sisters (though the archaeologists weren't sure which one). Moreover, given King Tut's many congenital malformations, including a deformed foot, a slightly cleft palate, and mild scoliosis (a curved spine), archaeologists offered these as clues in support of the idea that he had an incestuous lineage (which is not uncommon in royal families).

A subsequent analysis by Zahi Hawass in 2010 reaffirmed the suggestion that Akhenaten was King Tut's dad — a claim that was rejected by some experts who argued that Tutankhamun's marriage to Ankhsenamun, the daughter of Akhenaten, was done to legitimize his claim to the crown.

But Marc Gabolde — the director of the archaeological expedition of Université Paul Valery-Montpellier III in the Royal Necropolis at el-Amarna — has a different idea. Speaking recently at Harvard's Science Center, Gabolde told his audience that this DNA evidence was incorrectly interpreted. The apparent genetic closeness, he argued, was on account of three successive generations of marriage between first cousins.

"The consequence of that is that the DNA of the third generation between cousins looks like the DNA between a brother and sister," he said. "I believe that Tutankhamun is the son of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, but that Akhenaten and Nefertiti were cousins."

Together, the power couple sparked a religious revolution in Egypt where they enforced the monotheistic worship of Aten, the Disc of the Sun. And now, assuming Gabolde's theory is true, they were also the parents of Tutankhamun, the Child King who assumed the throne at the age of 8 — and who is today renowned for his golden death mask.

Likewise, Nefertiti has been made famous on account of her bust, a masterpiece created by the sculptor Thutmose.

During his talk, which was titled "Unknown Aspects of Tutankhamun's Reign, Parentage, and Tomb Treasure," Gabolde offered other details of Tutankhamun's life, including his interest in Nubia (a region in southern Egypt), and inscriptions showing him hunting ostriches.

Source: Harvard News. Supplemental sources: National Geographic, Heritage Daily.

Images: National Geographic, Philip Pikart, Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer.

Astronomers recently discovered two previously unknown moons orbiting Pluto, bringing its total up to five. How this supposed non-planet can have so many moons is beyond me, but whatever. Anyway, the new moons have been dubbed P4 and P5 — an oversight that needs correcting, especially when considering the elegant names of Pluto's other moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra. Thankfully, a group of astronomers has shortlisted a set of names it's hoping to submit to the the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for consideration. And best of all, you can vote for your favorites.

The group responsible for this is none other than the SETI Institute. And, in keeping with the Greek and Roman theme, they've proposed 12 names:

• Acheron
• Alecto
• Cerberus
• Erebus
• Eurydice
• Hercules
• Hypnos
• Lethe
• Obol
• Orpheus
• Persephone
• Styx

• You can vote here. Alternatively, if you have a great idea for a name that they have overlooked, you can let them know by filling out the write-in form. There's also a blog.

  During the course of the first day, SETI received over 75,000 votes. Voting ends at noon EST on Monday, February 25th, 2013.

  H/t LiveScience.

  Image: NASA.

For many years now, scientists have used satellites to chronicle "ship tracks" — bright and easily visible atmosphere-bound emissions similar to the vapor trails produced by airplanes. But ships also emit a less obvious signature, one that's not so easy to see. As data from the Dutch and Finnish-built Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite now shows, ships are leaving long tracks of elevated nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) along certain shipping routes. And alarmingly, a bi-product of NO₂ — what's called NO_x — often leads to cardiovascular and respiratory problems in humans.

OMI has been tracking these highly-reactive oxides of nitrogen since 2005, allowing researchers to put together this high-resolution bird's eye view of the Earth's hot zones. The researchers believe that shipping accounts for 15 to 30 percent of global NO_x emissions — but they're not entirely sure. The team is hoping that their data — and their new map — will reduce the uncertainty associated with this potentially escalating problem.

NASA explains the map:

The map above is based on OMI measurements acquired between 2005 and 2012. The NO2 signal is most prominent in an Indian Ocean shipping lane between Sri Lanka and Singapore, appearing as a distinct orange line against (lighter) background levels of NO2. Other shipping lanes that run through the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea also show elevated NO2 levels, as do routes from Singapore to points in China. These aren't the only busy shipping lanes in the world, but they are the most apparent because ship traffic is concentrated along narrow, well-established lanes.

The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans also have heavy ship traffic, but OMI doesn't pick up NO2 pollution tracks because the shipping routes are less consistent. The shapes of landmasses force ships into narrow paths in the Indian Ocean, while ships in the Atlantic and Pacific tend to spread out over a broad areas as they navigate around storms.

In addition, the air over the northeastern Indian Ocean is relatively pristine. Heavy NO2 pollution (dark red in the map) from cities and off-shore drilling activity along the coasts of China, Europe, and the United States obscures the ship tracks that might otherwise be visible to OMI. In the map, the Arctic is gray because the lack of light during the winter and frequent cloudiness during the summer prevented OMI from collecting usable data in the area.

Source and image: NASA.

Notice anything weird about this lung scan? If you look carefully you'll notice there's A FREAKIN' GORILLA SHAKING HIS FIST in the top right-hand corner! The scan is a play on the famous invisible gorilla experiment, where the most blatantly obvious of things — including those in plain sight — are simply ignored when our attention is directed elsewhere. And as this new study suggests, even radiologists — when screening for life-threatening cancerous nodules on lung scans— aren't immune to this phenomenon.

For those unfamiliar with the Invisible Gorilla Test, it goes like this: Participants are asked to watch a game in which members of two teams pass the ball to one another. The point, so they're told, is to count how many times the ball changes hands. But while the test is happening, a man wearing a gorilla suit walks in front of the camera, beats his chest, and then walks off.

What's astounding about this experiment is that 50% of participants fail to see the gorilla (I have to admit, I was one of them). It's crazy because when you watch the video knowing that the gorilla is going to show up, it's impossible to miss. The experiment reveals the power of our attention and how it overrides superflous detail — what's called "innattentional blindness."

But as the new study by Trafton Drew has revealed, sometimes these "superflous" details can be critical. Alix Spiegel from NPR explains:

Drew wondered if somehow being so well-trained in searching would make them immune to missing large, hairy gorillas. "You might expect that because they're experts, they would notice if something unusual was there," he says.

He took a picture of a man in a gorilla suit shaking his fist, and he superimposed that image on a series of slides that radiologists typically look at when they're searching for cancer. He then asked a bunch of radiologists to review the slides of lungs for cancerous nodules. He wanted to see if they would notice a gorilla the size of a matchbook glaring angrily at them from inside the slide.

But they didn't: 83 percent of the radiologists missed it, Drew says.

This wasn't because the eyes of the radiologists didn't happen to fall on the large, angry gorilla. Instead, the problem was in the way their brains had framed what they were doing. They were looking for cancer nodules, not gorillas, so "they look right at it, but because they're not looking for a gorilla, they don't see that it's a gorilla."

In other words, what we're thinking about — what we're focused on — filters the world around us so aggressively that it literally shapes what we see. So, Drew says, we need to think carefully about the instructions we give to professional searchers like radiologists or people looking for terrorist activity, because what we tell them to look for will in part determine what they see and don't see.

Moving forward, Drew hopes to develop techniques that will help radiologists see — both visually and cognitively — the things that hide in plain sight.

More at NPR.

Image: Trafton Drew and Jeremy Wolfe.

Elyn Saks first started noticing that something was wrong when she was 16. One day, and without reason, she suddenly left her classroom and started walking home. It turned into an agonizing journey in which she believed all the houses in her neighborhood were transmitting hostile and insulting messages directly into her brain. Five years later, while attending law school at Oxford, she experienced her first complete schizophrenic break. Saks struggled over the course of the next decade, but she came through thanks to medication, therapy, and the support of friends and family.

I recently spoke to professor Saks to find out more about schizophrenia and what it's like to live with the condition. There are many misconceptions about the disorder, especially when it comes to what can be done to improve the quality of life for those who suffer from it.

Photo via The Daily Trojan.

Elyn Saks is an outspoken advocate for schizophrenia and mental health awareness. She is Associate Dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould Law School, and the author of her 2007 autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness. Recently, she gave a TED talk advocating compassion toward people with schizophrenia — a talk that's been viewed over 600,000 times.

Saks has done yeoman's work getting the word out, arguing that there's no such thing as "schizophrenics," but rather, people who suffer from schizophrenia. The central goal of her work is to instill the idea that people with severe mental illness can attain tremendous benefits when given the right resources, allowing for increased autonomy and dignity.

We started our conversation by discussing the nature of the condition itself.

A waking nightmare

"Schizophrenia is classified as a psychotic disorder, and that means it involves being out of touch with reality," Saks told me. "To me, the best analogy of what it's like is that it's a waking nightmare, where you have all the bizarre images, the terrible things happening, and the utter terror — only with a nightmare you open your eyes and it goes away. No such luck with a psychotic episode."

Indeed, schizophrenia is characterized by an inability to discern what is real and not real, to think clearly, have normal emotional responses, and act normally in social situations.

Neuroscientists and psychologists aren't entirely sure what causes it, though links have been made to genetics, social factors (including early environment), and neurobiology. A recent study suggested it may develop during a short period of time during infancy. Scientists also know that its effects are sometimes caused or worsened by certain recreational and prescription drugs.

Once it manifests — typically in in the teen years or young adulthood — schizophrenia elicits both positive and negative symptoms.

"A positive symptom," says Saks, "are things that you have that you don't want, and negative symptoms are those things that you want but don't have."

Positive symptoms include delusions, which become fixed in the mind, or false beliefs that don't respond to evidence.

"Sometimes I have the delusion that I've killed hundreds of thousands of people with my thoughts, or that someone has set off a nuclear explosion in my brain," she told me. Hallucinations are another common positive symptom, though mostly auditory. Saks says she experiences the occasional visual hallucination, but not very often.

Negative symptoms, on the other hand, include things like apathy, an inability to hold on to relationships, an inability to work, and so on.

"Apart from the first two years of my illness I've been spared those malignant negative symptoms," she told me, "which in some ways are big part of the burden of what it means to have schizophrenia, which is just shutting down." Indeed, during the early phases or her schizophrenia, Saks spent hundreds of days in an institution for fear that she was unable to take care of herself.

Schizophrenia is also characterized by disorganized thinking, along with the onset of loose and bizarre associations. Saks says it causes some people with schizophrenia to form "word salad," where words come out completely jumbled.

"As an example," says Saks, "when I broke down during my first semester at law school I was saying to my classmates, ‘Are you having the same experience I am with the words jumping around the pages in our cases? I think we have to case the joint, but I don't believe in joints, but I do believe they hold your bodies together.'" Basically, says Saks, they're words that are connected, but they don't make any sense when put together.

Experiencing psychosis

I asked Saks if she remembers her first episode.

"Ahhh, I do, yeah," she replied with a sigh. "I actually had a psychotic episode when I was a teenager that resolved, but I didn't officially breakdown until I was 21 after I started having significant problems continuously."

Her first episode happened when she was 16, five years before the full onset of schizophrenia.

"I got up during the middle of class one day, and without telling anyone, I started to walk home — which was about five miles away — and I felt that the houses were starting to communicate with me and that they were sending me messages. I didn't hear any voices, and I thought they were putting thoughts inside my head, things like, ‘Walk, repent, you are special, you are especially bad.' Accompanying this were feelings of intense loathing and fear. That was the first experience of psychosis that I had."

But it was not to be the last. Later, during her first year at Oxford, she started exhibiting symptoms indicative of depression and mild paranoia. Eventually, it developed into something more like a thought disorder than a mood disorder; the kinds of things characteristic with schizophrenia started to become characteristic with what Saks was experiencing.

"I started to have intense and frequent delusions," she said, "I did not hallucinate much, but I was very confused, and exhibited chaotic and disorganized thinking."

Later, when attending Yale Law School, she experienced an episode that found her singing on the roof of the library at midnight. Saks was then taken to the emergency room and tied down to a hospital bed. She would spend the next five months in a psychiatric ward.

Over the course of the next several years, Saks was in a state of debilitating psychosis. She entered into analytic treatment, but was not on any medication. "And I probably should have been," she says. For ten years she refused to believe that she was suffering from a mental illness — a conviction that prevented her from taking her meds seriously.

"I thought I could prove I wasn't really ill if I could get off the medication," she said to me. "Eventually my analyst in L.A. said, ‘You know, why don't you just stay on the meds and get on with your life. There are so many things that your life has to offer and you're spending most of your time in and out of the land of psychosis.' I resisted at first, but then I tried it — especially with the newer medications my life just started going much better."

Prior to staying on her medication, Saks clung to the fantasy that everyone had the same "scary and weird thoughts," and that the only difference was that other people were better at hiding or managing it. "I wasn't mentally ill," she thought, "I was just socially maladroit."

But once on the meds, her mind cleared: "And I thought, ‘Oh god, the other people have clear minds' and it made me realize I probably did have an illness. And the more I accepted that I had the illness the less it defined me — because when you're struggling with it all the time it's always front and center. But when you say to yourself, ‘Take the meds, go to therapy, and focus on love and work and all the other things that make up your day-to-day, that makes your life better."

Given the severity of her symptoms, I asked Saks if it wasn't obvious to her when a psychotic episode was happening — especially after the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Why can't a person exhibiting symptoms just consciously sweep the irrational thoughts aside and recognize them as such — that they're nothing more than delusions?

"Because you think what you're believing is true," she replied. "I used to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that — what other people would think was crazy — I thought was absolutely true, that I was privy to a special truth."

But that said, Saks told me that experience with the disorder can help, especially when there are people around who can serve as "auxiliary egos" — people like therapists, partners, and friends. Essentially, anyone who can recognize when an episode is coming on.

"My husband likes to say that psychosis is not like an on and off switch — it's more like a dimmer," she said. "At the far end of the switch — and I still experience this from time to time — I'll have a transient thought that I've killed people with my thoughts. When that happens I'll basically stand back and say, ‘Oh, Elyn, that's just your illness acting up, pay it no mind.'"

Further along the spectrum, Saks says she often struggles in social settings — which makes it difficult for her to be around people for extended periods of time.

"At the far end of the dimmer — the dark part — I'm stuck in the corner shaking for a week, but that hasn't happened in a decade," she said.

Often misunderstood

Frustratingly, schizophrenia as a health condition is as neglected as it's misunderstood. People tend to get squeamish when it comes to mental illness, convincing themselves that it's not a wide scale problem, or that people who suffer from it are lost causes. At the same time, many people cling to outdated notions about the disorder.

Indeed, schizophrenia is not as rare as some people think. It has been estimated that anywhere from 0.3 to 0.7 percent of the population is afflicted with it. For a country like the United States, that's anywhere from 940,000 to 2,200,000 people. And the costs are enormous, estimated at $62.7 billion per year in the U.S. alone. Yet, schizophrenia receives only a small fraction of the amount of medical research dollars that go into other serious diseases and disorders.

It's also commonly mistaken for multiple personality disorder, what's now referred to as dissociative identity disorder (DID). These two conditions are distinct, though some crossover exists; DID patients sometimes exhibit psychotic symptoms. Also, both DID and schizophrenia can be triggered by traumatic experiences. But that's where the similarities end.

Another common misconception about schizophrenia is that people who suffer from it are extremely violent.

"And that's just not true," says Saks. "Most people with schizophrenia are less violent, but are more likely to be victimized." The big, violent folks, added Saks, tend to be teenage males and substance abusers.

There's also a misconception that all people with schizophrenia can't hold down a job, and that they lose the ability to work in any kind of meaningful way. Or that they can't live independently, that they need some kind of supervised living arrangement.

Like many other psychological disorders, schizophrenia follows along a spectrum in terms of its severity. While many people can become incapacitated by their symptoms, Saks argues that most of them could benefit from drugs and therapy.

And indeed, Saks is convinced that there are more "high functioning" people with schizophrenia than is typically assumed. To that end, she, along with her colleagues at UCLA and USC, designed a study to recruit high functioning people with schizophrenia in the LA area. Specifically, they were looking to study professionals, a group that included MDs, PhD candidates, teachers, CEOs, and full-time students.

"I mean, we got 20 subjects fairly quickly," she told me, "I started to suspect that I wasn't unique, that there were many other people like me. It would interesting to know what the stats are on how many people with schizophrenia are so-called "high functioning" professionals."

More than meds

Moreover, Saks is convinced that, with proper resources, nearly everyone can live up to their potential — regardless of their situation or status.

"There are going to be some people who you do everything for and they still won't be able to thrive," she says, "But I think many more people can do better than we give them credit for — but instead, we prematurely tell people to lower their expectations."

Indeed, antipsychotic medications have revolutionized the treatment of schizophrenia — and they work startling well.

"A lot of people get on medication and they completely recover and never require therapy," says Saks. But there are some people who don't respond to medication — and that, she argues, is where therapy and social support could potentially help.

"The best evidence with major mental illness shows that the most effective strategy is to use a combination of meds and a therapy for choice," says Saks. "For me, I know I need the therapy and the medication. I need both of them. If one of them were to go away I would probably be really compensated."

Saks is currently in psychoanalytic treatment, where she attends sessions five days a week. And by doing so, she's going against the grain; conventional wisdom says psychoanalytic treatment shouldn't work for people with psychosis. But she's convinced it's helping.

Saks told me about several aspects of psychoanalytic treatment that have been tremendously beneficial for her — and they're not typical things that psychoanalysts do.

For example, because stress is particularly bad for psychiatric illnesses, Saks has been taught to identify her stressors and avoid them. Or cope with them at the very least. She has also learned to bolster her "observing ego" — that part of her brain which allows her to step back and observe her mind, feelings, and thoughts in order to understand them and not get swept up.

"It's also a place where you can bring your thoughts," she says. "A lot of therapists have a rule where their patients cannot articulate their delusions or hallucinations — but to me you need to have a place where you can do that, where it's safe. It's sort of like a steam valve. I don't have to do it in my outside world, I have a place where I can do it in therapy."

Another important thing, says Saks is insight.

"People have different theories about psychotic symptoms," she says. "Some people think they're just the random firing of neurons that don't have any meaning. But I think they have meaning and that they tell you some truth about your psychological reality. So, when I say I've killed hundreds of thousands of people, it's really an archaic way of saying I feel like a very bad person. But even though it's meaningful in this sense, it doesn't help patients in the moment of the psychotic symptoms that they interpret."

Saks believes that extreme and exaggerated ideations are a defense mechanism — which in some circumstances can make a person feel better or safe.

Saks closed our conversation by noting that, outside of medications and drugs, it's people who can make the greatest impact.

"It's so important to have a benign, smart, caring, non-judgmental person that accepts you — not only for the good — but for also the bad and the ugly," she said, "That is incredibly empowering."

All images/charts via Schizophrenia.com.

Sea slugs are weird. But their sexual habits are even weirder. Take Chromodoris reticulata for example. It's a "simultaneous hermaphrodite," meaning it has both male and female sexual organs which it uses at the same time when mating (making it the envy of the animal kingdom). Even stranger, however, is how its penis detaches after copulation. But not to worry — a new penis grows back within 24 hours, a parlor trick Chromodoris can perform up to three times.

The study, which appears in Biology Letters, is appropriately titled, "Disposable penis and its replenishment in a simultaneous hermaphrodite" and was authored by Ayami Sekizawa, Yasuhiro Nakashima and colleagues. Writing in the paper, the Japanese researchers described the behavior as "extremely peculiar," adding that "No other animal is known to repeatedly copulate using such ‘disposable penes'."

During sex, two sea slugs join together and connect their junk in all the right places. They proceed to both give and receive sperm. But after the mating takes place, the sea slug ejects its thread-like organ. The researchers theorize that, because the sea slug penis has backward pointing spines, it's difficult to withdraw it after copulation. So instead, it just gets rid of it. The shape of the penis may have something to do with its ability to remove the sperm from rival sea slugs.

As for Chromodoris's regenerative powers, the scientists noticed that a long portion of its penis is coiled up in a spiral inside its body, which it extends to replace the lobbed-off part.

Read the entire study here.

Images: coppertane/Flickr, Royal Society Biology Letters.

It would seem that no one's immune from the effects imposed by our increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence and robotics — not even doctors. As research from Indiana University has revealed, a new computer program is doing a better job than doctors when it comes to both diagnosing and treating health conditions — and by a significant margin.

The system, which uses decision making processes similar to the Jeopardy-bot, Watson, was recently given the task of analyzing and predicting the health outcomes of 500 real individuals. After plugging in the relevant data — which mostly had to do with clinical depression and chronic diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes — researchers Kris Hauser and Casey Bennett compared the outcomes to the simulated treatment prescriptions.

Here's what they discovered: The computer was nearly 42% better at diagnosing illnesses and prescribing effective treatments than human doctors.

To achieve such an impressive outcome, the computer used an artificial intelligence framework that combines Markov Decision Processes and Dynamic Decision Networks. It's a framework that employs sequential decision-making, allowing the computer to simulate a series of alternative treatment paths into the future. The machine can also make assumptions about a patient's health when data is not available, and re-adjust when new data is introduced. The system is also non-disease-specific and adaptable to virtually any health issue.

Essentially, it can deliberate about the future and consider all the different possible sequences of actions and effects in advance — even when it's unsure of the effects.

The researchers also noticed a significant disparity in cost. Doctors charge about $497 per unit of outcome change, whereas the computer cost only $189 for the same measure.

Looking ahead to the future, however, the researchers remain cautious about completely handing over the reigns to computers.

"Even with the development of new AI techniques that can approximate or even surpass human decision-making performance, we believe that the most effective long-term path could be combining artificial intelligence with human clinicians," they said in a statement. "Let humans do what they do well, and let machines do what they do well. In the end, we may maximize the potential of both."

"Artificial Intelligence Framework for Simulating Clinical Decision-Making: A Markov Decision Process Approach" was published in Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.

It appears that an iconic piece of the 23rd century just landed at the University of British Columbia's SPIN Lab. It's called Cuddlebot, and it looks — and even responds — in a way that's eerily reminiscent of Star Trek's tribbles. Developed by Anna Flagg, it can sense and react to nine different kinds of gestures. By using conductive fur, Cuddlebot can tell if someone's scratching it, tickling it, or blowing on it — and, after a while, can even tell who's doing it.

Flagg unveiled Cuddlebot at the IEEE Haptics Symposium last year and will be showing it off at a conference in Barcelona in a few weeks. The purpose of Cuddlebot is to test whether innovative and imaginative robots like this can be made to recognize touch and respond in appropriate ways.

Nidhi Subbaraman from MIT Review recently spoke to Flagg:

Other members of the SPIN lab are training machines to infer emotions from the gestures they recognize–the second part of the grand plan. Eventually, Flagg told me, bots like the Cuddlebot could become companions with therapeutic uses in hospitals. Cuddlebot has already participated in tests with kids and probably unsurpringly, was a hit.

But healthy adults could use Cuddlebot too. I've written about a cell phone hack that sent tactile messages to your conversation partner as you talked. I mentioned this to Flagg, who agreed that a Cuddlebot-inspired furry cover may come in handy in such an instance. One day, it may even correctly infer the emotion being sent. Flagg's collaborator Karen MacLean has said that a pocket-sized Cuddleblot, perhaps tucked away in your purse, could be useful as a portable stress detector. Connected with your phone, it might know when to bother you with certain alerts, and when not to.

More at MIT Review.

Images: Anna Flagg via MIT.

What better way to portray robots and androids on stage than by having actual robots and androids perform their own parts? Such is the thinking behind the Japanese Robot Theater Project. The troupe's latest productions, "Sayonara" and "I, Worker," feature robots that interact with live performers right on stage. And not surprisingly, they never miss their cues.

In addition to moving and interacting with the actors, some of the bots employ artificial voices, but the androids were given a real human voice in order to ensure realism — to cross the so-called "uncanny valley."

Writing in TechNewsDaily, Jeremy Hsu tells us more:

The robotic stars included a "Gemnoid F" android that appeared as a lifelike Japanese woman, as well as two "Robovie R3" models that looked more like oversized robot toys. The machines performed their prerecorded scripts alongside human actors from the Seinendan Theater Company.

"Sayonara" featured the Gemnoid F android acting as a poetry-reciting companion to a blonde girl suffering from a terminal condition. The android's humanlike appearance included blinking eyes, mouth movements and several facial expressions.

Despite Gemnoid F's acting limitations, audiences often interpreted the android's performance as conveying a much broader emotional range, said Bryerly Long, a multilingual actress with the Seinendan Theater Company who both supplied the recorded voice for the android and acted in the role of the dying blonde girl. She made her observation during a Q&A session following the two short plays.

An extended scene for "Sayonara" included a melancholy nod to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that followed in the wake of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Hirata, the playwright, took inspiration for the scene from news reports describing how robots could help in the radioactive zone surrounding the nuclear plant meltdown.

Androids aren't a threat to real actors just quite yet, but Oriza Hirata, the show's playwright and director, predicts that they will be in the next few decades.

Lots more here.

On February 15, asteroid 2012 DA14 is scheduled to pay us a visit. The 150 foot (45 meter) rock has no chance of hitting us — but it'll be the closest approach that's ever been observed by astronomers.

Here's everything you need to know about this unique event.

Asteroid 2012 DA14 was discovered last year by astronomers in southern Spain using the La Sagra Sky Survey at the Astronomical Observatory of Mallorca. The object was about 2.7 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) away at the time. Subsequent analysis showed that it was heading right for us — and that it was going to give us a close shave.

A really close shave.

The asteroid, which is half the size of a football field and 130,000 metric tons in mass, will pass by our planet at a paltry distance of 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometers).

Putting that into perspective, the average distance from the Earth to the moon is 238,607 miles (384,000 km). That places the distance of 2012 DA14's closest approach to 1/14th our distance to the moon, or 7%. That means it'll pass to within about 3.5 Earth radii of the Earth's surface.

What's more, the asteroid's trajectory will put it closer to Earth than our satellites in geosynchronous orbit, which is about 22,245 miles (35,800 km) above the equator. That's about 5,000 miles (8,046 km) closer to Earth than those satellites.

Now, it's unlikely that 2012 DA14 will smash into a satellite, but NASA issued a warning to satellite operators anyway, providing them with detailed information about the flyby. But to reassure them, a NASA statement indicated that:

There is very little chance that asteroid 2012 DA14 will impact a satellite or spacecraft. Because the asteroid is approaching from below Earth, it will pass between the outer constellation of satellites located in geosynchronous orbit (22,245 miles/35,800 kilometers) and the large concentration of satellites orbiting much closer to Earth. (The International Space Station, for example, orbits at the close-in altitude of 240 miles/386 kilometers.). There are almost no satellites orbiting at the distance at which the asteroid will pass.

Nor will the asteroid hit the Earth — which would have been a Tunguska-like event were it to happen. "Its orbit about the sun can bring it no closer to the Earth's surface than 3.2 Earth radii on February 15, 2013," notes NASA.

At its closest point, 2012 DA14 will be above Sumatra, Indonesia at 2:24 PM EST (19:24 GMT).

This flyby represents a remarkable opportunity for astronomers to study a near-Earth object (NEO). To that end, NASA will be monitoring its approach using the Goldstone Solar Systems Radar in California's Mojave desert. One of the things that NASA will be interested in learning is how the flyby will impact on its subsequent trajectory shift. That said, the space agency is confident that it won't loop around for a return visit.

Astronomers are also curious to see what it looks like. They've already classified it as an S-type asteroid on account of its silicate composition, but it'll be interesting to see it from up close.

Regrettably, 2012 DA14 won't be visible with the naked eye. Its luminosity is estimated at a magnitude of less than seven, which is just beneath human visual capacity. Moreover, it will make its approach during daylight hours in the Western Hemisphere. That said, stargazers in the Eastern Hemisphere using a telescope — and with a bit of luck — might be able to catch a glimpse. The asteroid will look like a small pinprick of light zipping across the sky from the southern evening sky into the morning north sky.

And zip it will. Asteroid 2012 DA14 is moving extraordinarily fast, about 17,450 mph (28,100 kph). That's 4.8 miles per second (7.82 kilometers per second) relative to Earth.

Four minutes after its closest approach to Earth, the asteroid will pass into the Earth's shadow for about 18 minutes before reappearing from the eclipse. It will be within the Earth/Moon system for about 33 hours.

Scientists say there are about 500,000 near-Earth asteroids the size of 2012 DA14 in our solar system. Of those, less than one percent have been discovered. Flybys like this one only happen about once every 40 years or so.

NASA will be livestreaming this celestial event from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The action gets started at 6:00 PM EST on Friday February 15, and will run until 9:00 PM EST.

Sources: NASA (here and here), Space.com.

Images: Credit: ESA/La Sagra Sky Survey and NASA.

Earlier this month, a pod of about 100 to 150 pantropical spotted dolphins became stranded and disoriented in shallow waters at Two Peoples Bay Nature Reserve about 250 km south of Perth, Australia. The Western Australia Department of Environment and Conservation arrived on the scene, where they quickly assessed the seriousness of the situation. After one of the dolphins died, they put a plan into place that involved some ingenious thinking — and a tiny baby dolphin.

According to conservationist Deon Utber, it's unusual for a large pod of dolphins to become stranded in this region. Thankfully, the spotted dolphins weren't beached, instead milling around in the water. But because they weren't leaving on their own, DEC had to take matters into their own hands.

To help the pod get to where it needed to go — and at the critical time — the DEC team waited until high tide. Then, the conservationists "translocated" one of the baby dolphins to deeper water, where it began to emit a distress signal.

That was the trick. Once the calls started, the dolphins swam to the deeper waters and met up with the juvenile. Once reunited, the pod swam out to sea. There was no sign of the group the following morning.

Sources: Department of Environment and Conservation, Wildlife Extra and TheJournal.ie.

Image: dec.wa.gov.au.