(Image: Mark Thiessen/National Geographic Stock)

YOU wouldn’t want to be trapped inside this house, as searing embers from an approaching wildfire set it alight. Fortunately for those nearby, the wildfire is simulated and under control.

Spot the spectator. Hidden behind the pipes blasting the house with embers on the right, and wearing a flame-resistant hood and suit, this wildfire scientist is observing the building to see what sparks up first. In this case it’s the wooden decking and dried leaves in the gutters. “Many people think a wildfire burns right up to the house and then burns the place down,” says fire scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, embers like those shown in the picture are the main cause of houses catching fire during wildfires. Often flying through open windows or attic vents, the embers set furniture and carpets ablaze and burn the house from the inside out.

Wildfires bring death and destruction all over the world. To find better ways to protect people and property, research chambers like this one in the research centre in Richburg, South Carolina, set fire to test houses; a street of nine full-sized houses can fit in the huge, hanger-sized space. “It is also used for fire-fighter training and is a great visual tool for educating people on the best ways to protect your home from wildfire,” says Quarles. As well as fire, the test room can also stir up hurricane-force winds, hailstones and thunderstorms.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Fanning the flames”

The hairy bristles on the tongue of a particular bat that feeds on nectar help it draw up the sweet liquid. Now the precise way in which those bristles work has been glimpsed for the first time using high-speed video.

By filming at a high frame rate, and colleagues from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, have captured how hair-like structures lining the tongue actively change shape. The tiny projections usually lie flat and were thought to increase the tongue’s surface area in a static way. But the researcher’s footage reveals how their veins fill with blood as the tongue extends, increasing the length of the tip by 50 per cent (see video above).

The strategy is likely to have developed to help the bats gather nectar more efficiently. “As the hairs extend, they create little spaces between the rows that trap nectar,” says Harper. “This means the bat can draw up a greater column of nectar.”

Since hovering close to a flower uses up a lot of energy, other nectar-eating bats have also evolved strategies that exploit tongue action. The rare Ecuadorian bat Anoura fistulata, for example, has a tongue that is up to 1½ times its body length, proportionally the longest of any mammal. This gives it exclusive access to tubular flowers that bats with shorter tongues cannot feed from.

The speed with which G. soricina can change its tongue’s length and texture could inspire new technology. The researchers say the mechanism could be developed to help miniature surgical robots unclog arteries or explore conditions in the stomach.

Journal reference: , DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1222726110

(Image: Shawn Heinrichs/Barcroft Media)

These mighty opponents could take on – and unlike those fictional undersea combatants, their battle is real.

In the coastal waters around Sri Lanka, the waters churn and froth as a pod of killer whales ambushes another of sperm whales – the first time such a battle has been seen in the Indian Ocean. Like a pack of wolves, the marine mammals prowl the ocean in gangs and launch coordinated attacks on other whales and sharks.

The orcas break away for round two. Sperm whales are not usually on their menu because of their giant size and powerful tails that can deal deadly blows. But this time, it appears the orca pack was after a smaller juvenile whale.

These underwater images were after he leaped from a boat into the heart of the action. “I realised this was a once-in-a-life time opportunity and summoned up the courage to jump in the water and join the frenzy,” he says.

(Image: Michael Lohmann/GDT)

THE sand is still whipping through the air as the penguins come into view.

The Gentoo penguins emerge from the haze, their red-orange beaks and peachy feet flaring against the dreary beach of Sea Lion Island in the Falklands. The birds are hurrying home after a long day feeding at sea.

Penguins usually conjure up images of snow blizzards or ice sheets, but not these ones. The Gentoo penguins set up house on sandy or shingle beaches, with good open access to the sea.

Adults spend nearly the whole day hunting. Their diet consists mainly of krill or fish and occasionally squid. And they certainly seem to be thriving in the Falklands as Gentoo numbers are on the rise while other species have declined. Awkward waddlers on land, these are the fastest birds underwater, swimming at speeds of up to 36 kilometres per hour.

“After a big sandstorm I was waiting near by the beach until afternoon when the penguins usually come back from their daily trip to the ocean to feed themselves,” says photographer . He took this shot, Returning from the Hunt, after an assignment in the South Atlantic. The image bagged him the runner-up place in the bird category of the .

This article appeared in print under the headline “Homeward bound”

(Image: Erica van de Waal)

It seems that when in Rome our wild relatives would also do as the Romans do. This troop of vervet monkeys swapped from eating dyed-blue corn (maize) to the pink option when they moved to an area where pink was more popular.

Researchers had trained the monkeys to prefer blue corn by tainting the pink variety with a bitter flavour.

After a few months of blue-tinged snacking, even young monkeys that had never tasted a bitter kernel ignored the pink corn completely – even when the nasty flavouring was no longer used.

But when males migrated to an area where the local vervets stuffed themselves with pink corn and shunned the blue, the former blue-corn lovers were quick to switch treats.

This is the first time this powerful cultural effect has been seen in wild monkeys. In 2005, captive chimps were seen to follow their leader by using tools to poke or lift food out of a complicated apparatus.

Journal reference:

(Image: Jennifer Read, Natural Resources Canada)

Discovering a new species can be like searching for a needle in a haystack, so imagine the quest that turned up this new-found microscopic wasp, dubbed Tinkerbella nana. John Noyes of the in London captured it by sweeping a mesh net through vegetation at Costa Rica’s . He then combed through the leaf litter to spot this petite parasite.

At only 250 micrometres long, the fairy fly measures two-and-a-half times the width of a human hair. Its delicate, bristly wings may look ineffective, but they could help the minuscule bug to fly: the reduced surface area may reduce turbulence and drag on the wings.

But how small can bugs go? The smallest flying insect found to date is a Hawaiian relative, the Kikiki huna Huber fairy fly, which measures a mere 150 micrometres. At the other end of the scale, Atlas moths have wingspans up to 25 centimetres.

Fans of tiny animals should take a look at the world’s smallest vertebrate, enormous in comparison, and take heart from the trend for climate change to cause animals to shrink.

Journal reference:

The first signs of resistance to the front-line malarial drug artemisinin emerged in Cambodia in 2009. If this resistance spreads worldwide, it will leave people with malaria without an effective drug to treat their illness.

at the University of Oxford, and a large international team, studied the genomes of 825 malarial parasites from south-east Asia and west Africa in an effort to understand why some parasite populations become resistant.

The work identified three drug-resistant ±Ę.Ěý´Ú˛ą±ôł¦ľ±±č˛ą°ůłÜłľ sub-populations in western Cambodia that were different from each other, and different from populations in eastern Cambodia, neighbouring countries and west Africa.

“For the first time we have identified the emergence of sub-populations associated with a drug resistance to artemisinin,” says Miotto.

Why Cambodia?

Cambodia is thought to be a breeding ground for resistance. Past drug therapies in the country encouraged sole use of artemisinin to treat malaria, which could have been a factor.

Demographic factors could also have played a part: the Khmer Rouge regime of the late 1970s left the country with poor infrastructure and small, isolated communities. In those circumstances, a resistant strain can replicate itself quickly through inbreeding: in west Africa there is more outbreeding, which may slow the spread of resistance there.

“This research sheds light on the evolution of artemisinin resistance and suggests that the situation is more complicated than we thought,” says from the University of Glasgow, UK, who was not involved in the study.

A full understanding of the mechanisms that build resistance is still out of reach, but the new study does mean researchers will be able to use genetic tests to identify any geographical spread of the three resistant sub-populations in future.

“Being able to detect if there is a sudden explosion of one particular type of parasite will indicate if something is going wrong,” Miotto says.

Journal reference:

The temperature disparity was first recorded by early 16th century explorers, who noticed icebergs floating in the southern hemisphere at latitudes where they wouldn’t have been in the north. The northern hemisphere is currently 1.5 °C warmer on average than the southern hemisphere.

To find out what is going on, and colleagues at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany used climate models to simulate what would happen if the North Atlantic heat pump, a northward-moving mass of warm water and part of the global thermohaline circulation, was turned off. Having controlled for factors such as land mass, they found that the temperature gap almost disappeared.

The heat pump is driven by cold, salty water in the north Atlantic sinking and pulling warmer surface water from the tropics to replace it. This warm water then releases heat into the atmosphere. As there is no returning flow of warm water to the south, the warmer air is trapped in the north.

This mechanism explains 90 per cent of the disparity, with differences in the amount of light reflected from the poles responsible for the rest, says Feulner, who presented the work at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna this month.

“It is fascinating that a detailed study of the reasons for this hemispheric contrast has not been done until now,” says of the British Antarctic Survey. The results could also help explain the more when Earth was coming out of the last glacial period, he adds.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Central heating keeps northern hemisphere hot”

(Image: ESA/Herschel/T. Cavalié et al; NASA/ESA/Reta Beebe (New Mexico State University))

This image shows the water-drenched stratosphere of Jupiter, captured yesterday by the Herschel space observatory, superimposed on a Hubble space telescope photo of the planet. Astronomers think that 95 per cent of the water arrived on comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which smashed into Jupiter in July 1994.

It seems the planet’s upper atmosphere was unevenly splashed. White and cyan indicate a higher concentration of water in the southern hemisphere, whereas the darker blue in the north signifies less water there. The south’s greater moistening may be due to the fact that the comet struck here at mid- to far southern latitudes.

Dermal fillers are no more controlled than floor cleaner, according to a UK Department of Health review of cosmetic interventions published today.

Concern over the regulation of cosmetic treatments was triggered in 2010 after faults with breast implants made by French firm Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) went undetected. Due to a poor record-keeping, there was no way to trace the estimated 50,000 women who had had the implant surgery.

The new report focuses largely on non-surgical treatments such as dermal fillers, Botox or laser hair-removal, which account for nine out of 10 cosmetic procedures carried out in the UK.

Recommendations from the government to improve regulation include mandatory qualifications for those who perform procedures. “There are no checks on people’s qualifications in the private sector – not in the same way as under the NHS,” says , medical director of the NHS, who led the review.

Blindness risk

Dermal fillers – injections of hyaluronic acid gel into wrinkles to fill them out – can be performed by anyone, with no specific qualifications required. But if not performed correctly, there is a risk of unwanted outcomes such as include infection, lumpiness, prolonged swelling, scarring and, in extreme cases, blindness. The review recommends that dermal fillers should only be prescribed by a doctor. General practitioners should also be made aware if their patient is undergoing any kind of cosmetic surgery.

The review also highlights a problem with inappropriate marketing that gives people false sense of how safe cosmetic procedures are. “This is an alert,” says Simon Withey, a cosmetic surgeon who was a member of the review committee. “Patients should not blindly put their trust in those undertaking the procedures.”

Nor should procedures be promoted with such wild abandon. People are winning cosmetic procedures as part of a prize, or having them promoted as a “buy one, get one free” or time-limited deal, says Keogh. The review says that bodies such as the UK Advertising Standards Authority should ban such financial incentives related to cosmetic therapies and only allow registered practitioners with the newly proposed mandatory qualifications to promote their products.