Saturday Science Snippets #2

Nasa has a poo problem…

NASA have a problem and they are looking for help. Space science has achieved a lot and solved many of the problems of getting people and machines into space. But one problem still has a very primitive solution – the problem of going to the toilet in a space suit. Currently they just wear a big nappy!

To be fair to NASA they have been leaders in the development of nappy technology but they have plans to extend space suit wearing times from a few hours to a few days.

Spending several days in a nappy is obviously not a solution. So they have opened up the problem to the collective wisdom of the global public and offered a $30,000 prize to anyone who can come up with an effective space waste management solution in their “Space Poop Challenge”. Got an idea? Send it in!
Read more and enter here.

Pilot whales babysit for one another

Pilot whales are a social animal that live in pods of about 30 with very strong social bonds. Researchers in Nova Scotia have been studying these whales and found that at any one time about 1 in 4 young whales were being looked after by an adult that wasn’t their own parent. This kind of babysitting is fairly common in social species, it develops the young’s social skills and the parent’s probably appreciate it too.
Read more here.

A poo collector set a Guinness World Record

Yes, it’s the second poo story of the day, but when someone is awarded a Guinness World Record for having the largest collection of old poo we just have to say something. The technical word for these old, fossilised stools is coprolites, and the new record holder has 1,277 of them. His favourite is one he calls ‘Precious’ and weighs in at nearly 2kg! As they are fossils, coprolites are solid rock with no smell and they can tell us a lot about what was going and who was eating whom millions of years ago.

Read more here.

An “uncombable hair gene” has been discovered

Most parents have struggled to get a comb or a brush through a struggling child’s hair at some point. But spare a thought for parents of children with the rare genetic condition that makes it essentially impossible to comb their hair. This condition was only discovered in 1973 and there are only 100 known cases worldwide. No one knew the cause until a Regina Betz, a hair geneticist from the University of Bonn, recently managed to figure out that it is due to a mutation in one of three genes responsible for healthy hair development and now a molecular genetics test exists for the clinical diagnoses of ‘uncombable hair’.