Trunk power!

A 34-year-old African elephant at Zoo Atlanta, in Georgia, has just taught mechanical engineers, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a thing or two about how to move water. For one thing, she showed that her trunk doesn’t operate as a simple straw. To suck up water, she dilates that trunk — expands it.

Elephants are the only living land animals with a long, boneless trunk. But precisely how elephants use those muscular trunks for feeding was always been a bit of a mystery.

Ultrasound imaging showed that the available volume of each nostril could balloon as it snorted in liquid. Based on the amount and rate of water snuffed up by the elephant, Schultz’s team estimates that airflow through her narrow nostrils can at times exceed 150 metres per second (335 miles per hour). That’s more than 30 times as fast as a human sneezes.

Schultz and his team shared their findings online in the June Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Rabbits that do headstands, but can’t hop

A flawed gene might turn some bunnies’ hops into handstands, a new study suggests. A breed of domesticated rabbit called ‘sauteur d’Alfort’ has a funny way of walking. To move quickly, they send their back legs sky high and walk on their front paws. That strange gait may be due to a mutation in a gene that helps limbs move. Researchers reported their finding March 25 in PLOS Genetics.

The gene is called RORB. And sauteur d’Alfort rabbits aren’t the only animals to adopt an odd scamper if there’s a mutation in this gene. Mice with a mutation in RORB also do handstands if they start to run. And even while walking, the mice hike their back legs up to waddle forward like a duck.

Rabbits with the defective gene can alternate their front and hind legs to walk normally. To hustle or to travel over long distances, rabbits hop, which requires synchronised hind legs to jump. Spinal-cord nerve cells are called interneurons. They help coordinate the left and right side of the body by passing along nerve signals. Properly working interneurons are key for a normal walk or hop. If the special nerve cells don’t have the RORB protein, the rabbits may not be able to coordinate what their hind limbs are doing. That restricts their ability to hop.

Birds and quantum physics

European robins don’t need a compass. That’s because they can sense magnetic fields that help them tell north from south. Some scientists had thought this superpower might be based on quantum physics. That’s the science of very small stuff, such as atoms and electrons.

Songbirds like European robins need to sense Earth’s magnetic field to navigate as they make yearly long-distance treks. A special protein in the birds’ eyes could be behind this. That protein is called CRY4. It’s short for cryptochrome (KRIP-toh-kroam) 4.

Quantum is the world of the super small. Some scientists think CRY4 acts like a tiny compass needle. In the future, the researchers hope to perform studies on actual eyes. And that would give them a literal bird’s-eye view.

World’s longest plastic water slide

Ahorizontal plastic water slide — also known as a slip and slide — set up in West Virginia broke a Guinness World Record when a rider glided 2,021 feet across the surface.

The Canaan Valley Resort, a West Virginia State Park, hosted the record and set up a massive water slide for employees to attempt to break the record.

Guinness requirements stipulate that the water slide is measured by how far a rider can travel in a single slide.

A Guinness adjudicator was on hand and verified that the record was broken when an employee managed a run of 2,007 feet, but further attempts managed to increase the record to 2,021 feet.

Published in Dawn, Young World, July 24th, 2021