A special glue from worms

It may help hold human bones together :

Scientists often look to the natural world for inspiration and ideas. Now, we may be able to thank an unusual worm for a new kind of superglue. At the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, scientists have created a powerful adhesive that works underwater and hardens quickly, which means it may be useful inside the human body. Most glues don't work well inside the body, where everything is wet. When surgeons operate on a person to repair broken bones, for example, they may be able to use the new glue to hold the bones together.

The Utah scientists were inspired to make the new glue by a little sea animal called the sandcastle worm. It lives on the coast in an area between the water levels for high and low tides. During high tide, their homes are underwater; when the tide goes out, their homes are left high and dry. This sea creature gets its name from its house. A Sandcastle worm builds its own house by collecting grains of sand, broken shells and other debris and stacking these bits all around. The worm also produces a glue that is used to stick all these pieces together, forming a solid tube. The worm's glue hardens underwater in less than 30 seconds, and within a few hours the glue gets tough like leather.

Russell Stewart, one of the scientists who worked on the new glue, says that in the same way the sandcastle worm glues together grains of sand, surgeons may be able to glue together broken bones. The worm "literally glues skeletons together underwater, so we thought it would be a good model for wet surgery," he says.

Stewart, who is a bioengineer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and his colleagues set out to understand the worm's adhesive, so they could then make their own. First, they studied the Sandcastle worm's glue in the laboratory. They found many proteins, which are tiny molecules that are the construction material of most living things. The researchers learned which proteins give the glue its super-sticking power by studying the proteins structures. Half the proteins had strong positive or negative electric charges. Positive and negative charges are attracted to each other and stick together, and this helped make the glue extra sticky. Once they identified and understood the proteins, the scientists made their own version of the glue in the laboratory. They tested their creation and found that it worked underwater "and was about twice as strong as the worm glue. Further tests showed that the glue isn't poisonous to human cells. At the end of the experiment, the scientists had invented a new superstrong glue that worked underwater and was not toxic, which means it didn't cause harm. These three qualities"strong, working underwater, nontoxic" could make the glue an important part of surgeries in the future. Plus, researchers are now looking at ways to make the glue able to dissolve, which means that over time, as the bones healed, the glue would disappear. Stewart and his team may have found a new way to help bones heal"all because of a funny little worm on the beach. Courtesy: Science News

New species of giant rat discovered

"A Smithsonian Institution biologist, working with the Natural History Unit of the BBC, has discovered a new species of giant rat on a filmmaking expedition to a remote rainforest in New Guinea.The discovery was made in the crater of an extinct volcano named Mount Bosavi in Papua New Guinea's Southern Highlands province. This gigantic volcano's crater is two and half miles wide and rimmed with walls nearly half a mile high, trapping the creatures inside a "lost world" of mountain rainforests

probably rarely visited by humans.Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and Muse Opiang, a biologist with the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research, were first on the scene when the rat was found by a tracker from the Kasua tribe that lives outside the crater.Weighing nearly 3.5 pounds, and measuring 32 inches from nose to tail, the Bosavi woolly rat is one of the biggest rats in the world. Most surprising was that the rat was completely tame, a sign that animals in the isolated crater were unfamiliar with humans. "It is a true rat, closely related to the rats and mice most of us are familiar with, but so much bigger," said Helgen.

The gigantic rat is silvery grey, with thick woolly fur. It has a vegetarian diet of leaves and roots, and probably builds underground nests beneath rocks and tree roots. A member of the genus Mallomys, it has yet to receive its formal scientific name.

The discovery came in the middle of the night after days of searching in the crater's chilly mountain rainforests, often in the pouring rain. "Our hearts were in our throats," said Helgen. "It was an unbelievably exciting moment. It was all the more incredible that the BBC was there to film it." "As biologists, we spend plenty of cold, muddy nights in the rain, but rarely can we expect to be rewarded like this," said Opiang.New Guinea is famous for its diversity of rodents. More than 70 species of rats and mice (the rodent family Muridae) can be found on the tropical island, several of which have been named as new species in the past by Helgen.

It is currently estimated that along with the new species of giant rat, the expedition found approximately 16 species of frogs, one species of gecko, three species of fish, and at least 20 species of insects and spiders. Also on the list is an animal Helgen calls the Bosavi Silky Cuscus, which may be a new subspecies of tree-living marsupial.

The animal "which looks like a small bear" is a marsupial that feeds on fruits and leaves. Weighing 5 pounds, it has dense silky fur adapted for a mountain environment. "Finding an animal like this for the first time in the 21st century is certainly cause for celebration", said Opiang.

Rainforest habitats in Mount Bosavi's crater are currently pristine, but extensive logging operations can be found just a few miles to the south. "Discoveries like this should remind us how much of the world is still left to explore," said Helgen, and also how much stands to be lost when any rainforest is threatened.

-Science Daily

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