Living Paintings

Jack Pettigrew of the University of Queensland and his research team may have discovered why vibrant rock paintings from the Bradshaw rock artworks in western Australia's Kimberly region have not lost their visual intensity in the 40,000-70,000 years since they were painted. According to a a new study published in the journal Antiquity, the paint is long gone; the figures of humans and megafauna depicted are colored by a biofilm of microbes that are direct descendants of microbes that infected the original paint. The microbes in question are predominantly a black fungi, Chaetothyriales, which replicates by cannibilizing its predecessors, and a reddish organism that seems to be a cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria obtain energy through photosynthesis. Pettigrew speculates that both the fungi and bacteria were in the original paint in the Bradshaws, and that over tens of thousands of years the fungi has provided water to the bacteria and the bacteria in turn has given carbohydrates to the fungi.

Got Milk?

Mare's milk, all the rave 5000 years ago, is back in fashion. * Cleopatra may have bathed in ass's milk when horse's milk would have done just fine. * Milk lovers may live longer. * Adding milk to black tea wrecks its health benefits. * Failure to-date: trying to turn grass into milk without use of a cow. * Giving a cow a name may boost her milk production. * Breast milk ice cream, anyone? * A mother's laughter may improve the health benefits of her breast milk. * A laser-assisted robot milkmaid in Sweden milks cows anytime they want, and they want it a lot. * Tit birds like milk (but we should have known that). * Breast milk should be drunk at the same time of day that it is expressed. * Space Yoghurt.

Sex Appeal

Women seeking short-term relationships like men with facial scars. * Oh, that cave man look (women still fall for it). * Why cosmetics work (it's about contrast). * Hamburger makeup artistry. * Nefertiti's eye makeup, and the face cream preferred by ancient Rome's women. * Neanderthal cosmetics. * What a computer likes to see in a woman. * Soft, touchable skin for robots. * Wasps that wear makeup suffer a rude awakening. * Shoppers buy more from attractive sales people. * A woman's belly button may signal her mating potential (and outies are out). * When penis enhancement surgery goes awry. * The future of cosmetics (bioengineered skin color). * Etc.

In Discover Magazine This Month: What Happens in Las Vegas Gets Flipped by Plate Techtonics

In November's Discover Magazine:

Just a few miles from the perfectly enclosed, artificial worlds of the Strip's casinos, there lie some beautiful and accessible spectacles of nature.

See article.

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Nanotechnologoy

In the July-August issue of Discover Magazine:

1 Get small. A nanometer is about the width of a strand of DNA; if you design, build, or use functional systems smaller than 100 of these, you’re a nanotechnologist.

2 By that definition, we have been doing nanotech for centuries. For instance, the colors in medieval stained glass windows result from nanocrystals created in the heating and cooling of the glass.
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3 Size matters. At the nano scale, materials take on unusual properties. Their color, transparency, and melting point often differ significantly from those of larger clumps of the same stuff.

See "things" 4-20.

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Dogs

In June's Discover Magazine:

1 The sultry “dog days of summer” get their name from ancient astronomers who noticed that those days coincide with the period when Sirius, the Dog Star, rises at the same time as the sun.

2 Bad astronomy: Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, but it is just one 10-billionth as bright as the sun and has no effect on our weather.

3 Nerd. Fido will touch his nose to a computer screen if it has a picture of a dog on it but not if it shows a landscape, University of Vienna researchers have found.

See "things" 4-20.

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Water

In May's Discover Magazine:

1 Water is everywhere—there are 332,500,000 cubic miles of it on the earth’s surface. But less than 1 percent of it is fresh and accessible, even when you include bottled water.

2 And “fresh” can be a relative term. Before 2009, federal regulators did not require water bottlers to remove E. coli.

3 Actually, E. coli doesn’t sound so bad. In 1999 the Natural Resources Defense Council found that one brand of spring water came from a well in an industrial parking lot near a hazardous waste dump.

See 4-20.