New method to measure mass in space devised — A scale for measuring weight in space that does not depend upon the attraction of gravity has been devised…. In [William Thornton’s] method, the weight of the mass is determined [by] mechanically oscillating a weight in a tray. The heavier the mass, the slower the oscillation rate. The scale is tied to an electronic unit measuring the time required for five cycles of oscillation. A reference to a chart gives the mass’s weight. — Science News, October 1, 1966

UPDATE
Not much has changed. The International Space Station has two spring-based contraptions for weighing in astronauts. An individual rides the Body Mass Measurement Device like a pogo stick — in four or five bounces, it calculates weight. The Space Linear Acceleration Mass Measurement Device uses springs to pull an astronaut; the acceleration reveals weight. In 2012, researchers in Europe experimented with compact computer imaging technology — developed for video games — using photos to estimate mass based on a person’s shape and size.

Dogs may look to humans for help in solving impossible tasks thanks to some genes previously linked to social disorders in people.

Beagles with particular variants in a gene associated with autism were more likely to sidle up to and make physical contact with a human stranger, researchers report September 29 in Scientific Reports.

That gene, SEZ6L, is one of five genes in a particular stretch of beagle DNA associated with sociability in the dogs, animal behaviorist Per Jensen and colleagues at Linköping University in Sweden say. Versions of four of those five genes have been linked to human social disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and aggression.
“What we figure has been going on here is that there are genetic variants that tend to make dogs more sociable and these variants have been selected during domestication,” Jensen says.

But other researchers say the results are preliminary and need to be confirmed by looking at other dog breeds. Previous genetic studies of dog domestication have not implicated these genes. But, says evolutionary geneticist Bridgett vonHoldt of Princeton University, genes that influence sociability are “not an unlikely target for domestication — as humans, we would be most interested in a protodog that was interested in spending time with humans.”

Most dog studies take DNA samples from pets or village dogs and wild wolves. Jensen’s team instead studied beagles that had been raised in a lab. None of the dogs had been trained. To test sociability, the researchers gave the dogs an unsolvable problem in a room with a female human observer whom the beagles had never seen before. The puzzle was a device with three treats that the dogs could see and smell under sliding lids. One lid was sealed shut and could not be opened.

After opening two lids, the dogs “get very confident that this is not a difficult task, but then they encounter the third lid and that’s where the problem gets impossible,” Jensen says. Wolves would have kept trying to solve the problem on their own (SN: 10/17/15, p. 10). But after some futile attempts, many of the beagles looked to the human observer for help. Some dogs tried to catch her eye, glancing back and forth between the woman and the stuck lid. Other dogs made physical contact with or just tried to stay to close to the woman.

The researchers then looked for places in the dogs’ DNA where the most and least human-friendly dogs differed. A region on chromosome 26 kept popping up, indicating that genes in that region could be involved in social interactions with people.
The finding is a statistical signal, but doesn’t establish what the genes might be doing to influence the dogs’ behavior, says Adam Freedman, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard University. And since the researchers only examined the beagles, it’s not clear that the same genes would affect behavior in other dogs, he says.

The 2016 Nobel Prize in physics is awarded for discoveries of exotic states of matter known as topological phases that can help explain phenomena such as superconductivity.

The prize is shared among three researchers: David J. Thouless, of the University of Washington in Seattle, F. Duncan M. Haldane of Princeton University and J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the prize October 4.

At the heart of their work is topology, a branch of mathematics that describes steplike changes in a property. An object can have zero, one or two holes, for example, but not half a hole. This year’s Nobel laureates found that topological effects could explain behaviors seen in superconductors and superfluids. “Like most discoveries, you stumble onto them and you just come to realize there is something really interesting there,” Haldane said in a phone call during the announcement.

Elephants don’t wear high heels, but they certainly walk like they do.

Foot problems plague pachyderms in captivity. But it hasn’t been clear what about captivity drives these problems.

Olga Panagiotopoulou of the University of Queensland in Australia and colleagues tested walking in nearly wild elephants. The team trained five free-ranging elephants at a park in South Africa to walk over pressure-sensing platforms to map the distribution of weight on their feet. The team compared the data with similar tests of Asian elephants in a zoo in England.

Regardless of species or setting, a trend emerged: Elephants put the most pressure on the outside toes of their front feet and the least pressure on their heels, the team reports October 5 in Royal Society Open Science. Thus, elephants naturally walk on their tiptoes. The harder surfaces of captive environments must cramp a natural walking style, the researchers conclude.

Accidental chair squeaks in a lab have tipped off researchers to a new world of eavesdroppers.

Spiders don’t have eardrums, though their exquisitely sensitive leg hairs pick up vibrations humming through solids like web silk and leaves. Biologists thought that any airborne sounds more than a few centimeters away would be inaudible. But the first recordings of auditory nerve cells firing inside a spider brain suggest that the tiny Phidippus audax jumping spider can pick up airborne sounds from at least three meters away, says Ronald Hoy of Cornell University.
During early sessions of brain recordings, Hoy’s colleagues saw bursts of nerve cell, or neuron, activity when a chair moved. Systematic experiments then showed that from several meters away, spiders were able to detect relatively quiet tones at levels comparable to human conversation. In a hearing test based on behavior, the spiders also clearly noticed when researchers broadcast a low droning like the wing sound of an approaching predatory wasp. In an instant, the spiders hunkered down motionless, the researchers report online October 13 in Current Biology.

Jumping spiders have brains about the size of a poppy seed, and Hoy credits the success of probing even tinier spots inside these (anesthetized) brains to Cornell coauthor Gil Menda and his rock-steady hands. “I close my eyes,” Menda says. He listens his way along, one slight nudge of the probe at a time toward the auditory regions, as the probe monitor’s faint popping sounds grow louder.
When Menda first realized the spider brain reacted to a chair squeak, he and Paul Shamble, a study coauthor now at Harvard University, started clapping hands, backing away from the spider and clapping again. The claps didn’t seem earthshaking, but the spider’s brain registered clapping even when they had backed out into the hallway, laughing with surprise.
Clapping or other test sounds in theory might confound the experiment by sending vibrations not just through the air but through equipment holding the spider. So the researchers did their Cornell neuron observations on a table protected from vibrations. They even took the setup for the scary wasp trials on a trip to the lab of coauthor Ronald Miles at State University of New York at Binghamton. There, they could conduct vibration testing in a highly controlled, echo-dampened chamber. Soundwise, Hoy says, “it’s really eerie.”

Neuron tests in the hushed chamber and at Cornell revealed a relatively narrow, low-pitched range of sensitivity for these spiders, Hoy says. That lets the spiders pick up rumbly tones pitched around 70 to 200 hertz; in comparison, he says, people hear best between 500 and 1,000 Hz and can detect tones from 50 Hz to 15 kilohertz.
Spiders may hear low rumbles much as they do web vibes: with specialized leg hairs, Hoy and his colleagues propose. They found that making a hair twitch could cause a sound-responsive neuron to fire.
“There seems to be no physical reason why a hair could not listen,” says Jérôme Casas of the University of Tours in France. When monitoring nerve response from hairs on cricket legs, he’s tracked airplanes flying overhead. Hoy’s team calculates that an 80 Hz tone the spiders responded to would cause air velocities of only 0.13 millimeters a second if broadcast at 65 decibels three meters away. That’s hardly a sigh of a breeze. Yet it’s above the threshold for leg hair response, says Friedrich Barth of the University of Vienna, who studies spider senses.

An evolutionary pressure favoring such sensitivity might have been eons of attacks from wasps, such as those that carry off jumping spiders and immobilize them with venom, Hoy says. A mother wasp then tucks an inert, still-alive spider into each cell of her nest where a wasp egg will eventually hatch to feed on fresh spider flesh. Wasps are major predators of many kinds of spiders, says Ximena Nelson of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. If detecting their wing drone turns out to have been important in the evolution of hearing, other spiders might do long-distance eavesdropping, too.