The amazing, brilliant, fascinating world of spiders and more

Quirks and Quarks

A Zombie star’s outburst could soon be appearing in the night sky

In 1946 a stellar explosion brightened the night sky as the result of a zombie star going nova 3,000 light-years away reached Earth. The nova soon dimmed, but scientists are expecting a repeat performance any day now. NASA astrophysicist Elizabeth Hayes, the project scientist of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, described it as a white dwarf star devouring so much of its companion star that it reaches a critical threshold resulting in a thermonuclear explosion on its surface. When that happens, they expect we’ll be able to see it above the western horizon when it temporarily becomes as bright as any star in the Big Dipper.

A tiny dinosaur used wings to run fast, and possibly to fly

106 million years ago, in what is now South Korea, a bird-like dinosaur with wings ran across a muddy flat and left behind tiny footprints. By reconstructing its stride from these prints, paleontologists have found that it ran faster than could be explained if it weren’t using its wings to push it along. Dr. Hans Larsson of McGill university says this discovery gives new insight into the evolution of flight in dinosaurs. This study was published in the journal PNAS.

A climate-change disaster scenario could be closer than we think

This week, a group of 44 researchers from 15 countries presented an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers, to shed light on the potential collapse of a key ocean current system. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC, is a network of currents that brings warm water from equatorial regions North, and recirculates cool water South, and recent studies indicate it is slowing down because of climate change. A new study, from a team at the University of Oregon led by Christo Buizert, analyzed ice cores to look at what exactly happened when the AMOC had collapsed last, during the last ice age. Their results suggest that an ice sheet would have spread as far down as the South of France, or New York City, which would devastate ecosystems and plunge Europe into a deep freeze while disrupting rainfall distribution across Asia. The research was published in the journal PNAS.

Cloudy with a chance of great whites

A group of researchers in California is using drone footage along with artificial intelligence to develop a shark forecasting system. The team, led by Douglas McCauley from the University of California Santa Barbara, have been flying drones over the waters of Padaro beach in California to get daily shark counts, and compare that to oceanological details to determine what conditions make the water more or less “sharky.” While they spotted up to 15 sharks a day near unsuspecting surfers, this beach has very few interactions between humans and sharks in any given year. The results of the drone study have been published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

This biologist wants to change your mind about scary spiders

Spiders. For some they’re just a bit creepy. For others they’re nightmare fuel. But for a select few, they’re one of the most fascinating and intriguing creatures on our planet. Behavioural Ecologist James O’Hanlon is one of those people and he thinks we should trade in our arachnophobia for arachnophilia. He pleads his case in a new book, Eight-Legged Wonders The Surprising Lives of Spiders.