, Dec. 4 (UPI) -- WORLD'S SMALLEST LIZARD FOUND IN CARIBBEAN
A tiny Caribbean island off the coast of the Dominican Republic is home to the smallest known lizard, according to a report in the December issue of the Caribbean Journal of Science. It also may also be the smallest of all 23,000 species of reptiles, birds, and mammals. "Many extraordinary species still await discovery and, unfortunately, the time left to discover them is rapidly disappearing because of habitat destruction and other forms of environmental degradation," said Larry Page, program director in NSF's division of environmental biology. "This discovery of what appears to be the world's smallest reptile is particularly interesting because of the physiological constraints associated with decreasing body size. Discoveries of unusual organisms have a great deal to tell us about biological evolution and our environment." The lizard is small enough to curl up on a dime and stretch out on a quarter.
HUMANS CAN TASTE FAT
Scientists generally believe there are five basic food tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, which is evoked by the addition of monosodium glutamate (MSG) to foods. New research suggests a new category: fatty. Fats have generally been thought to add only texture to foods, as well as a carrier that could deliver taste and odor compounds. But Richard Mattes, professor of foods and nutrition at Purdue University, showed that humans can indeed taste fat. "I wonder if the less-than-perfect performance of current fat replacers may be due to a lack of understanding of all mechanisms for fat perception," Mattes said. "Failure to account for a taste component may compromise quality." Earlier research had suggested that rats could sense fat, but Mattes and his collaborators found that subjects allowed to taste fat but not smell it had an immediate rise in their blood fat levels. "The taste, and not the smell, is what the body is responding to," Mattes said.
RUSSIAN SPACE DEBRIS PRODUCES FIERY SHOW
A week after the spectacular Leonid meteor shower, falling space debris put on another fiery show. On Saturday night, a fireball flew over the U.S. midwest, causing automobile traffic to stop and airline pilots to peer out cockpit windows. The show was put on by the remains of a Russian Proton rocket that 10 hours earlier had carried three navigation satellites to orbit. "The rocket ... was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. An 800 kg metal casing from the fourth stage of the rocket was on its third orbit around Earth when it burned up in the atmosphere over southern England and France," explained Alan Pickup, a satellite decay expert who works at the United Kingdom's Astronomy Technology Centre at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh.
'SNOWBALL EARTH' LIKELY DIDN'T INCLUDE OCEANS
Some theorists hold that all of the Earth's oceans were covered by a thick sheet of ice several times between 750 and 600 million years ago, and if true, this would have had nearly wiped out early life on Earth. There is little debate that glaciation was severe, but the idea of a completely ice-covered ocean is disputed. The results, uncovered by Martin Kennedy, from the University of California, Riverside and published in the December issue of the journal Geology, suggest that life in the oceans during the 'snowball' event went on as usual, making it unlikely that they were capped by ice. The team measured isotopes of the element carbon -- which provides a good measure of the activities of life -- from limestone and dolomite dating to between 750 million and 600 million years ago. "We did not find isotopic evidence that a global ice sheet impacted overall marine productivity. We would think that if an ice sheet covered the oceans, it would have had an impact on marine production or photosynthesis and we find no carbon isotopic evidence for this. The oceans just look normal."
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