Smithsonian.com

(Source: PNAS)

No, this isn’t a piece of lettuce (but that was a nice guess from our food blogger, Amanda). This is a sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, and it looks like a leaf because it has acquired chloroplasts from its algal prey and stored them in its gut lining. If you or I ate those algae, the chloroplasts wouldn’t do us any good because we don’t have the necessary genes to keep the chloroplasts going (the DNA in these organelles encodes for only about 10% of the proteins the chloroplasts need). But this sea slug has acquired those genes through some sort of transfer from the algae, letting the sea slug rely on solar power for weeks at a time.

Combine aluminum powder and a metal oxide (such as iron oxide) and you get what is known as a thermite reaction, which is very hot and very fast. Thermite’s main use is to bind train tracks. I suppose you could try cooking with it, but despite the video evidence above that it has been done, I wouldn’t recommend it. This may be faster than even the deep-fried bird, but doesn’t that meat look raw in the middle?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Turkey farm (Source: USDA-ARS)

In preparation for tomorrow’s big day, I offer you a selection of articles on the theme of turkey science:

How did the turkey in my oven get so big?

Should I have bought a Heritage bird (and what is a Heritage bird anyway)?

How do white meat and dark meat differ?

Should I worry that turkeys are given antibiotics?

Should I worry about hormones and steroids in my turkey?

Will the turkey make me sleepy?

And from my neighbor over at Food and Think, Smithsonian’s new food blog: Do we need to be concerned about how turkeys are treated at the farm?

At FaT you’ll also find an entire history (or eat-ymology) of the turkey. Already read up on your turkey facts? Try the turkey quiz.

One of the first Smithsonian articles I worked on was last year’s Guerrillas in Their Midst, about the endangered mountain gorillas of Rwanda and Congo. Though the animals in Rwanda appeared to be doing well and supporting a thriving tourism business, the story in Virunga National Park in Congo was not so pleasant.

A silverback mountain gorilla (via Wikimedia Commons)

In July 2007, four members of the Rugendo gorilla family, which had been visited by our reporter, were killed. A total of ten gorillas were killed that year in the park. Then in January, we reported that the rangers who protected the park had been barred from accessing the gorillas because of the conflict between the Congolese army and rebel forces led by ex-general Laurent Nkunda. Of course, the rangers weren’t the only ones affected by the fighting; 800,000 people were forced from their homes, according to the United Nations.

Fighting flared again in Congo in recent weeks, displacing another 200,000 people. Virunga’s park rangers, who had been able to return to some of the park in recent months, were forced to flee into the forests when their headquarters were overtaken by rebel troops.

But now some promising news: 120 rangers returned to the park on Friday after the chief warden, Emmanuel de Merode, negotiated their safe return. As he told the Environmental News Service, “Rangers are neutral in this conflict, and it is right that they should be allowed to do their job.”

Though the rangers now plan to start a long-neglected survey of the park’s gorilla population, cleaning up will have to be a priority. Their facilities have been abandoned for the last 14 months and much of their supplies and equipment were stolen in the conflict. It may be a long while until we know how many of the gorillas survived.

You remember Nicolaus Copernicus, right? He’s the 16th-century Polish astronomer who was the first to figure out that earth was not the center of the universe, that the earth and all the other planets orbited the sun. But he wasn’t always so well known. Copernicus worked as a church administrator since astronomy wasn’t a profitable career choice (thus relegated to hobby status). And when he died, he was buried in an unmarked grave in Frombork Cathedral, the church where he worked. A few years ago, though, archaeologists found what they thought were his remains.

When we last left this story, in 2006—in Copernicus Unearthed—a skull, missing the lower jaw, had been found buried near an altar where the astronomer had been known to pray daily. The archaeologists thought this might be our guy. The skull was from a 70-year-old male (which matched the approximate age for Copernicus when he died in 1543) and a forensic reconstruction looked like an older version of the astronomer’s portraits (such as the one on the left). But to confirm that they had indeed found their man, the archaeologists needed to perform a DNA test. The problem? Copernicus had no children and though his uncle was known to be buried in the same cathedral, no one knew where.

Now comes news that the archaeologists found a few hairs in a book Copernicus owned. The archaeologists brought in a geneticist who compared the DNA from the hairs to that found in some bones that accompanied the skull–a vertebra, a tooth and a femur bone. The DNA in two out of four hairs matched the bones. Those archaeologists really did find their guy. Congrats!