March 20, 2016 at 04:17AM

Today I Learned: 1) Ants can carry liquid drops in their jaws! Some species that feed on nectar-secreeting aphids and other sugar-water-rich food sources will carry drops of nectar home in their jaws. They bring the nectar into the nest, then kind of wave their heads around until an interested ant splits the droplet and takes some of it. After splitting, the ants each imbibe a little of the nectar, then offer the remainder for other ants. They do this several times, until the whole drop is gone. On the topic of ants, today I also learned that most ants, social bees, and other social insects typically communicate with a bandwidth of around 4 bits, which, in terms of giving directions, is the informational equivalent of telling somebody to go "south by southeast". 2) So... here's an interesting story. Back in January, the open access online journal PLOS ONE published an article about the biomechanics of hand coordination while grasping objects. In most respects, it was a normal article, but it contained several lines that sparked instant and vociferous controversy. The lines in question talk about... well, for example, the introduction contains the line "Hand coordination should indicate the mystery of the Creator’s invention." There are two other similar sentences, one in the abstract and one in the discussion. Word actually didn't get out particularly quickly -- it looks like it sat almost entirely unread until early this month, when word got out that PLOS ONE had a paper talking about "The Creator". The journal editors quickly decided to retract the paper, though it's still available for viewing here: http://ift.tt/1T2Fz2i. The authors, who are Chinese, apparently had no idea the word "creator" would be problematic in an English science journal -- in Chinese, "the creator" is apparently a common metaphor for nature, and by "creator's invention" they just meant "the product of natural selection and evolution". It's still a pretty big faux pas for PLOS ONE to not have caught this in peer review, though. Nature recently put out a news piece on the issue, which summarizes all of the events surrounding the paper and its retraction in a surprisingly balanced way (you can view it here: http://ift.tt/1Pk7nIy). I say "surprisingly" because PLOS ONE grew out of a movement against the scientific journal industry, which is best exemplified by Nature and Science. I would have thought Nature would *love* to take the opportunity to slam PLOS given the chance, but apparently they're still too classy for that. If you want to see readers' reactions to the paper itself, check out the comments tab in the paper link I provided above. There's quite a range of responses in there. 3) There is some evidence -- just a smidge! -- that Alzheimer's Disease may be transmissible. The evidence came from the brains of patients who had accidentally been exposed to the prion that causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from injections of human growth hormone derived from human cadavers. Turns out that all of those brains had Alzheimers-like plaques in their brain, despite them being young and having no symptoms of Alzheimers. It's possible that the patients were also exposed to "seeds" of misfolded or aggregated amyloid beta, which eventually grew into plaques. Now, this isn't very strong evidence -- Alzheimerss takes a long time to develop, and there's good reason to think that plaques show up before symptoms. Still, it's an interesting possible twist in the Alzheimerss story. Full story here: http://ift.tt/1T2FBXI This also reminds me of an interesting claim I heard a couple of years ago from a scientist (whose name I unfortunately do not recall) who suspects that the primary causitive agent in Alzheimer's Disease might be a so-far-undetected *virus*. His claim is that the pathology and progression of the disease is typical of an infection, rather than a metabolic disorder or genetic disease or something like heart disease. I wouldn't bet on him being right, but it was an interesting idea and something I've been keeping an eye out for evidence for and against ever since.