This video was created by the design team at The Glossary, (a “fine purveyor of stimulating videograms”) in Los Angeles. You can find them here. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

Leifer is an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But you’ll more often find him off campus, in a garage, next to a string of auto body shops near the airport.

The converted garage is jammed with computer workstations and a bunch of high tech gear, including a rack full of gas chromatographs — instruments that analyze air samples.

Leifer’s machines are tuned to look for hydrocarbons, especially methane. It’s the main ingredient of natural gas. Methane is also much more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in the atmosphere. So it’s important to know how much is in the atmosphere and where it’s coming from.

Back in 2010, Leifer headed to the Gulf of Mexico to measure methane that bubbled into the water during the Deepwater Horizon blowout. He needed to take his gas chromatographs with him to do these studies.

“And the standard way scientists usually deal with this is they pack everything up in a box and they ship it, but that means you have to trust that FedEx or whoever is taking it won’t accidentally drop it,” Leifer says. “So I thought, ‘Why don’t I drive it down?’ “

He rented a camper for the trip. And after his research cruise ended, Leifer thought, “Why not sample the air on the way back home?” So he jury-rigged a setup for these delicate instruments in the back.

“It involved a lot of work with an air mattress folded in half, a giant tarp filled with Styrofoam peanuts, bungees holding things to the wall and so on,” Leifer says. “It really looked like a Rube Goldberg kind of weird device in the back with this gas chromatograph sitting in the middle of it.”

Starting in Florida, Leifer and a couple of assistants took 6,600 methane measurements as they drove west. He says the measurements steadily increased as the RV approached Houston, which is home to hundreds of petrochemical plants. Driving around the plants and natural-gas pumping stations, he often found spikes of methane.

“And after we left the Houston area, we then continued westward, and the methane levels decreased and decreased and continued doing so all the way to the Mojave Desert,” he says.

The highest readings turned out to be in the Los Angeles area, specifically around the La Brea Tar Pits. These are areas of “natural” methane seepage, Leifer says. “Oil, tar and methane seep up to the surface and fill the pits.” The preserved bodies of Ice Age animals have been retrieved from the sticky muck.

Leifer qualifies the word “natural” because some of the leaks probably aren’t natural at all. They’re instead from old oil wells that were drilled in the early 20th century, and tapped into those same natural reservoirs of hydrocarbons. Back then folks weren’t so careful with their wells.

“When the company went bankrupt, they wouldn’t seal them up very well,” Leifer says. “They might just stuff trees and stones and rags in them. Literally.”

Methane also contributes to smog, so Los Angeles is very interested to figure out where its methane comes from.

Air mattresses and bungees actually aren’t required for this kind of research. A new type of chromatograph can withstand the bumps and bruises of the road. So, since Leifer’s road trip in the rented camper in 2010, there have been lots of similar methane studies by others.

But he says his was the first cross-country observation. It’s being published in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

Leifer was so intrigued by the possibilities here, he bought his own 37-foot diesel RV, and he’s souped it up to be a rolling chemistry lab, complete with a hydraulic lift to get all his gear into the back of the vehicle. It also has a mast that rises up five stories, like a periscope.

“Scientists are known to like cool stuff,” he says with a laugh. Of course, the mast is only up when the camper is parked.

Over the course of his expedition, Leifer says he not only learned that he really, really wanted a new RV to study pollution, but also got a firsthand sense of just how much methane gas simply leaks out of refineries, pipes and wells before it can get to would-be customers.

“We’re talking several hundred billion dollars of profit that’s just being lost,” he says. “It’s causing a lot of environmental damage. And this is one of those perhaps rare cases in which doing the right thing leads to a win-win situation for the shareholders [and] the economy, as well as the environment.”

The challenge now is for those companies to track down all those leaks, among half a million gas wells and hundreds of thousands of miles of pipeline. Sealing those leaks won’t always repay those companies in cash, but it will provide rewards to the planet in the form of less rapid global warming. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

That spring, the hot book — the one everyone was reading — was a gorgeously illustrated volume about insects by the French naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur. It was called Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire des Insects and in it, Réaumur mentioned that in all his years looking at bugs — and he was a very good looker — he had never seen a male aphid.

Babies Without Sex? Is It Possible?

“Where are they?” he wondered. Female aphids you find everywhere, on the undersides of leaves, on branches, on any number of plants. But males? Never.

Consequently, Réaumur said he had never seen the act of “aphid coupling.” Could it be that aphids are extremely discrete, or maybe, just maybe, they can reproduce without sex! With the biblical exception of the Virgin Birth, sex was considered the universal method of reproduction. But, Réaumur wondered, what if it isn’t?

Réaumur, in his book, said he had tried to figure out how aphids reproduce but didn’t have the time to do it right. Instead, he invited his readers to take the lead. And in the spring of 1740, one of those readers, a 20-year-old law student in Switzerland named Charles Bonnet wrote Réaumur to say he was going to give it a try.

The Virginal Aphid Experiment

The plan was to get a female who had never ever had any contact with a male — a Total Virgin — watch it very closely, and see what happens.

To do that, Charles took a newborn female aphid from its mother immediately after its birth — before it could be exposed to any other aphids — and put it in an isolation chamber (on a plant leaf stuck into a container of water, inside an overturned glass jar) like this …

… Then he watched from early in the morning — 4 or 5 o’clock — all day long till 9 or 10 at night, for 12 days, keeping his eye on his female “little prisoner” to make absolutely sure no insect — and definitely no male aphid — could make contact.

The baby female, meanwhile, nourished by the green spindle tree leaves in the glass tank, grew, molted, ate more, grew more, then molted again. Using a magnifying glass to watch, Charles Bonnet worried that she might slip from the leaf down into the pot and disappear in the soil below — but she held on, reached sexual maturity without ever having met, seen or in any way encountered a male aphid. And yet, amazingly, on the evening of June 1, 1740, at 7:30 p.m., this little lady gave birth to a brand new baby. A female. Charles Bonnet saw her do it.

Then over the next 21 days, she delivered 94 more. How she did it, Bonnet could not say, but that she did it, was unarguable.

Here are his lab notes, listing each of the 95 births. (“Pucerons” or “puc” are aphids. He put asterisks alongside births he didn’t actually see.)

Charles Bonnet then sent these notes, his findings and a cover letter on to Réaumur in Paris, who, enormously pleased with the discovery, read Bonnet’s letter in July to the assembled members of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. The next step, clearly, was to repeat the experiment, to see if another virgin would produce another batch of babies.

Bonnet had two young friends, 34-year-old Pierre Lyonet, (a lawyer at the Hague) and 30-year-old Abraham Trembley, a private tutor in Holland. Each was an avid insect collector and a big fan of Réaumur and his book. So at Réaumur request, they agreed, each of them, to repeat the experiment: to catch a baby aphid, isolate it and see if it reproduced.

The Bentinck Boys Join In

As it happens, Abraham Trembley, the tutor, was spending that summer on a vast estate in Holland, not too far from the Hague — home to enormous gardens, lots of insects, including a great many aphids — plus two little boys.

One of them, Antoine Bentinck, was 6 years old. Jean, his younger brother, was 3. Abraham, their tutor, taught them to read, write and hunt for insects. Their parents, Count and Countess Bentinck were squabbling that summer. She had run off with a lover to Germany. He was suing her for divorce. Neither had time for the boys, so Abraham was more or less their parent that summer, and when he signed up to do the aphid experiment, he told the Bentinck boys they were going to help do it with him, telling them, writes author Rebecca Stott, “that they were now engaged in a serious investigation that might put their names into the annals of science.”

So Abraham and the boys found another just-born aphid, put her in a similar jar, watched her grow, molt, reach maturity, watched her night and day, and the Bentinck aphid, like the Bonnet aphid (and, eventually, like the aphid from a third experiment, the Lyonet aphid), all produced babies.

“The Law Of Coupling Is Not A General Law”

When word of their findings got to Paris in August 1740, Réaumur sent his young (and very young) colleagues a letter of congratulations. “These are assuredly observations of great importance in natural history,” Réaumur wrote Charles Bonnett, “since they each show us that the law of coupling is not a general law.”

This little gang of amateurs had together toppled “one of the central premises of 18th-century science,” says Rebecca Stott, “the belief in the universality of sexual reproduction.” They had just discovered parthenogenesis, the ability to reproduce without sex.

Show Me The Daddy!

For a while, skeptics insisted that the baby aphids had been impregnated in earlier generations and that fertile embryos had somehow been passed from mothers to daughters. The following summer, in July 1741, Charles Bonnet raised a series of virgin aphids for five generations, and all of them successfully produced offspring. The next summer, in 1742, he ran the experiment for nine generations, and still they produced babies. This, it seemed clear, is something aphid females can do.

So what about Réaumur first question, the one about the missing dads? Where are the male aphids?

They show up. Charles Bonnet saw one — but not in Spring. When the days get short and the weather turns cold, female aphids begin producing males, who do what they’re supposed to — mate with the females. And their eggs (in springtime, aphids produce live births; in fall, eggs) are stored over the winter until it’s time to reproduce again.

When Bonnet saw his first male, he wrote his tutor friend Abraham Trembley to say that it was roaring sexual, “perhaps one of the most ardent that there is in nature. It appears to me that it does nothing except have intercourse as soon as they day arrives.”

Making up for lost time, one supposes. You know, as Bonnet might have said, “guys.”

I read this story in Rebecca Stott’s book Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution. You can also learn more details here. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

About Mark Bezos’ TEDTalk

Volunteer firefighter Mark Bezos tells a story of an act of heroism that didn’t go quite as expected — but that taught him a big lesson: Don’t wait to be a hero. Give now.

About Mark Bezos

Mark Bezos works at Robin Hood, a poverty-fighting charity in New York City. Bezos is also the Assistant Captain of a volunteer fire company in Westchester County, New York, where he lives with his wife and four children. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

About Ron Finley’s TEDTalk

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA — in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.”

About Ron Finley

Ron Finley grows a nourishing food culture in South Central LA’s food desert by planting the seeds and tools for healthy eating. Finley’s vision for a healthy, accessible “food forest” started with the curbside veggie garden he planted in the strip of dirt in front of his own house. When the city tried to shut it down, Finley’s fight gave voice to a larger movement that provides nourishment, empowerment, education — and healthy, hopeful futures — one urban garden at a time. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

The work, published online Thursday by the journal Current Biology, could help those who struggle with mental arithmetic. But the study was small and the long-term effect wasn’t profound.

The study tested something called transcranial random noise stimulation, a technique that sends a tiny current to the brain.

The current, generated by a small electronic device, is delivered through two electrodes attached to the temple. The electricity seems to affect the brain’s neurons, which themselves use electrical signals to communicate with each other.

The results are preliminary, and alpha parents seeking an edge for their children shouldn’t risk electrocution. “Do not try this at home,” says Jackie Thompson, a psychologist at the University of Oxford in the U.K.

Some studies suggest that up to 1 in 5 of us has difficulty learning basic math, according to Thompson. Thompson and her colleagues thought that very slight electrical stimulation could help. Electrical stimulation has sometimes been shown to boost basic cognitive skills, Thompson says.

To find out if it could help with more complex brain functions, the team tried mathematics. They took 25 students and asked them to memorize a series of made-up mathematical equations. For example, 4 # 12 = 17. The idea was to test their ability to memorize sums that they hadn’t seen before.

All the students had two electrodes stuck to their foreheads, but only half received the tiny electrical signal. The signal was too small to be felt, and even the researchers conducting the tests didn’t know who had received a signal and who hadn’t.

When they went back and checked, they found that those who had received the stimulation appeared to memorize their sums faster and better than those who hadn’t. Moreover, the effect seemed to last for six months after the stimulation. But it wasn’t as strong.

Researchers aren’t quite sure how it works, but co-author author Thompson says that the electrical signal may get brain cells synchronized: “Kind of like if you have eight rowers in a boat, if they’re all rowing together they go faster,” she says.

Researchers hope that their new technique could eventually be developed into a tool to help those with learning disabilities, or anyone who finds they are severely math challenged. But Thompson says that more research is needed to see what method of stimulation works best. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

So yummy, in fact, that our scent is a big way the pesky insects track us down.

But just how much mosquitoes like Eau de Human may not be entirely up to the bugs.

Mosquitoes are more attracted to human odors when they’re infected with the malaria parasite, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE.

Entomologists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine gave malaria-transmitting mosquitoes two places to land: a clean, nylon sock and one worn for 20 hours on the foot of young Dutch man.

All the mosquitoes gravitated more toward the dirty sock than the fresh one. But the bugs infected with malaria landed on the smelly nylon more frequently. And while they were there, the parasite-possessed bugs were more likely to try and bite the sock than the malaria-free insects.

It’s almost like mind control. The parasite changes the behavior of the insects for its own benefit. The more biting the bugs do, the more they spread the protists.

This kind of parasitic mind control isn’t limited to mosquitoes and malaria. One type of fungus is notorious for turning carpenter ants into so-called zombies. After the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects the ants, the insects march to a precise location on a leaf that is optimal for dispersing the fungus’s spores. Eventually, the ant dies at this location and the Ophiocordyceps sprouts from the dead corpse.

Malaria appears to be more subtle with its subterfuge. It just amplifies the mosquitoes’ preference for human blood.

Scientists have known for a decades that the malaria vector Anopheles gambaie is highly attracted to people. In fact, these ladies – it’s only the females that bite us — actually prefer to feast on humans than many other animals. They even have a strong aversion to cow odor.

So what’s in our bouquet that makes us so alluring to mosquitoes?

Human skin emits over 350 different odor molecules. The An. gambaie mosquitoes have odor receptors in their antennae specifically built to detect a handful of these scents.

One these compounds, known as mushroom alcohol (because it’s made by mushrooms), gives our skin a moldy or meaty smell. Another compound, diacetyl, has a buttery scent. It’s the same molecule found in Chardonnay and added to microwave popcorn to simulate butter. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

The water samples came from holes drilled by gold miners near the small town of Timmins, Ontario, about 350 miles north of Toronto. Deep in the Canadian bedrock, miners drill holes and collect samples. Sometimes they hit pay dirt; sometimes they hit water, which seeps out from tiny crevices in the rock.

Recently, a team of scientists (who had been investigating water samples from other mines) approached the miners and asked them for fluid from newly-drilled boreholes.

Greg Holland, a geochemist at Lancaster University in England, and his colleagues wanted to know just how long that fluid had been trapped in the rock. So they looked at the decay of radioactive atoms found in the water and calculated that it had been bottled up for a long time — at least 1.5 billion years.

“That is the lower limit for the age,” Holland says. It could be a billion years older. That means the water was sealed in the rock before humans evolved, before pterosaurs flew, and before multicellular life.

As Holland announced this week in the journal Nature, this is the oldest cache of water ever found.

But how did it end up underneath that gold mine in northeastern Canada? Where did it come from?

“The fluids that we see now are actually preservations of ancient oceans,” Holland says.

About 2.7 billion years ago, the landscape of small-town Timmins looked a bit different. Beneath prehistoric seas, tectonic plates were spreading and magma was welling up to form new rock. As the rock matured under heat and pressure, water was trapped inside tiny cracks.

The rock drifted around the globe for eons, helping form continents and mountain ranges, and all the while it kept its cargo of water sealed up tight inside.

“It’s managed to stay isolated for almost half the lifetime of the Earth,” Holland says. It’s a time capsule. And it doesn’t just hold water. “There’s a lot of hydrogen in these samples.”

That’s significant because hydrogen is food for some microorganisms. Hydrogen-eating microbes have been found deep in the ocean and in South African mines where chemical reactions in the rock produce a steady supply of hydrogen.

And that hydrogen, says Holland, “could provide the energy for life to survive in isolation for 2 billion years.”

Holland’s colleagues are now testing the water samples for evidence of microbes. They hope to have results within a year. If life is found, it would have evolved distinctly from the surface world and might give a unique insight into the earliest forms of life on Earth. Its discovery would also give hope to people searching for life in places that are even more remote.

Carol Stoker, a research scientist with NASA, is focused on searching for life on Mars.

“If you go back to the very early history of Earth and Mars, sort of the first billion years after the surfaces cooled, Earth and Mars looked very similar,” Stoker says.

Both planets had vast surface oceans and thick atmospheres — they were good places for life to begin. On Earth, it did.

“The logic is if that If that happened on Earth, why shouldn’t it have happened on Mars?” she says.

As Mars got colder and drier, surface life would have died off. But Martian microbes might still survive deep in the planet’s crust — preserved in isolated pockets of water, just like the ones found in Canadian bedrock. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

They said Wednesday that they have cloned human embryos and then harvested the embryo’s stem cells.

The discovery, if it holds up, means scientists would be able to make personalized stem cells, with their genetic code almost perfectly matched to that of a patient.

One day, designer cells like these could help to treat an array of diseases, like diabetes, Parkinson’s and heart problems.

So how did the scientists do it?

Specifically, they used a method called somatic cell nuclear transfer. Despite its complex name, the technique is pretty simple. Take an egg donated by a woman and pull out its DNA. Then insert DNA from a patient’s skin cell into the empty egg.

As the embryo develops, it makes stem cells that the scientists can collect and grow in the lab.

The technique dates back to the 1960s, when John Gurdon at Oxford University cloned a frog using just one cell from a tadpole’s gut. He eventually won a Nobel Prize for that experiment.

Then in 1996, a team in Scotland used a similar method to clone the first mammal: a sheep named Dolly. This discovery triggered a rash of clonings — rabbits, horses, cows, goats and, of course, cats and dogs.

But getting the technique to work with humans eggs has been an exercise in frustration.

For more than a decade, researchers have been tripped up at the same point. After they drop the new DNA into a human egg, it divides a few times and then it gets stuck. It stops growing.

But Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his team at Oregon Health & Science University figured out how to keep the embryo dividing until it creates stem cells.

Mitalipov says they had to trick the egg into thinking it’s been fertilized by a sperm. “Even if you transplant the skin cell inside the egg, the egg still needs some kind of signaling — usually [it's] delivered by the sperm.”

The magic signal is quite complex. It includes an electric shock, a cocktail of chemicals and a splash of caffeine. Really.

Adding a little caffeine to the embryo’s food helps it grow and make stem cells.

Mitalipov and his team then harvested the caffeine-charged cells and demonstrated that they could be transformed into a variety of cell types, including heart cells that beat inside a petri dish.

The process is efficient enough, Mitalipov says, that he can get stem cells from each women who donates five to 15 eggs. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

Astronomers said Wednesday that a reaction wheel that keeps the orbiting telescope pointed at tiny, distant patches of sky to look for Earth-like planets, has failed. If they can’t fix it, Kepler will be relegated to a less prestigious mission, directing its gaze much closer to home in a search for so-called “near-Earth objects”, i.e., meteors and asteroids.

As NPR’s Geoffrey Brumfiel reports Kepler, launched in 2009, was designed to “monitor 100,000 stars in a single patch of sky. It looked for tiny eclipses of Earth-like planets.”

And it’s done an amazing job in the past four years, Brumfiel says:

“Just last month, scientists announced the spacecraft had seen three new planets around distant stars. But Kepler has also been aging and mission managers now say it can no longer focus on the patch of sky it had been watching.”

Bill Bouroki, Kepler’s principal investigator, says that the space telescope has given his team plenty of potential planets to study.

“We have at least two years of work ahead of us with the data we already have,” Bouroki says.

While Kepler still has some life in it, scientists say it could use its remaining maneuvering fuel to watch out for asteroids, like 2012 DA 14 that brushed past Earth in February and (coincidentally), the meteor that slammed into Russia at almost exactly the same time.

Kepler has identified 115 planets and has a list of 2,740 other candidates. It has concentrated on stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, “looking for dips in starlight caused by planets passing, or transiting, in front of their suns,” according to The New York Times:

“Since Earth transits only once a year, two more years would have given astronomers a chance to see more transits of the planets they are looking for. Without the extra time, the data will be noisy, astronomers say, and so the answer will be a little more uncertain than it might have been.

‘It was one of those things that was a gift to humanity,’ said one astronomer who spoke on condition of anonymity because NASA had not yet made the news public. ‘We’re all going to lose for sure.’”

[Copyright 2013 NPR]