A high-vitamin D supplement could boost kakapo breeding during low-fruit years.Photo / Jim Eagles
A high-vitamin D supplement could boost kakapo breeding during low-fruit years.Photo / Jim Eagles
While China's pandas have been given Viagra and shown porn to get the old spark going, perhaps one of New Zealand's endangered icons prefers to keep it a bit more organic.
Kiwi researchers have found the rimu berries our native kakapo favours are very high in vitamin D and calcium, which might explain why the birds do not breed unless there's a plentiful supply of berries, since these nutrients are essential for egg laying and chick development.
A high-vitamin D supplement could therefore boost kakapo breeding during low-fruit years.
It might be worth chucking a Marvin Gaye record on all the same.
Of all the cringey team-building outings your boss could suggest, you'd think a group sing-along would be the most certain to hit a bum note.
Not so, say UK researchers, who have found that getting together and stretching the vocal chords is a great way for a new bunch of people to break the ice.
Over seven months, they measured the closeness between a group that hosted singing sessions and one that didn't, and found that while the groups were equal at the end of the test, the singing group was closer aftera month. "Singing may have evolved to quickly bond large human groups of relative strangers," the report said.
Wait, haven't we been there already?
The last time humans were on the moon was in 1972, when Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt left with NASA's Apollo 17 mission.
While Nasa is aiming to put the first humans on Mars, probably some time in the 2030s, Russia has its sights a little lower by landing astronauts on ... the moon.
Reports suggest Russia is working on a new spacecraft to land astronauts there by 2029, six decades after Nasa astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
The European Space Agency is also in talks with how to get its own people on the moon, and China is reportedly investigating human spaceflight capabilities after landing a rover there two years ago.
The last time humans were on the moon was in 1972, when Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt left with NASA's Apollo 17 mission.
Fiction to fact: Star Wars tractor beam
Remember the tractor beam from Star Wars that pulled the Millennium Falcon into the Death Star? It might become the latest piece of science fiction to turn science reality, with Spanish and UK researchers finding that sound waves could be used to lift up tiny things and move them. By co-ordinating the timing of the waves the researchers were able to make objects smaller than 1mm levitate, move and spin. They also studied the possibility of acoustic structures such as tweezers, twisters and bottles, which can be used as "tractor beams" for container-less transport.
Losing your hair? Just print some more
The phenomenon of three-dimensional printing has given us printed guns, printed cars and printed hamburgers - now it might have ushered in the age of printed hair.
While 3D printers typically produce hard plastic objects, US researchers have found a way to produce hair-like strands, fibres and bristles using a common, low-cost printer.
The plastic hair is produced strand by strand, so the process isn't fast - it takes about 20 to 25 minutes to generate hair on 10sq mm. But it requires no special hardware, just a $450 3D printer, and resulting hair can be cut, curled with hot air, or braided.
Was the T-Rex a cannibal?
Bite marks on a recently-unearthed tyrannosaur bone has suggested the T-Rex might have liked to indulge in a spot of cannibalism.
Bite marks on a recently-unearthed tyrannosaur bone has suggested the T-Rex might have liked to indulge in a spot of cannibalism.
The bone, unearthed by paleontologists in the US, bears peculiar teeth marks that strongly indicate it was gnawed by another tyrannosaur, in a find that could be some of the best evidence yet that the feared dinosaurs were not shy about snacking on their own kind.
A particular give-away was that the bone was covered in grooves that were very deep, said Matthew McLain of Loma Linda University in California. "The grooves were clearly those of an animal pulling the flesh off the bone - pulling in a direction perpendicular to the bone, in the same way humans eat a piece of fried chicken."
