Pink diamonds take the Barbiecore craze to another level, but the rosy color comes at a cost. These gems are among the most rare and valuable diamonds around. And they’re far from perfect. “They’re actually damaged diamonds,” said Hugo Olierook, a geoscientist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.
The color comes from the warping of the gem’s crystal lattice under intense pressure. While all diamonds form under pressure, even more force turns once clear diamonds colorful. A slight extra squeeze turns a diamond pink, and a hard squash turns it brown.
More than 90% of the pink stones ever found came from the Argyle mine in Western Australia, one of the world’s most productive diamond deposits until it ceased operations last year. Many of Argyle’s diamonds have a chocolaty brown or tawny hue. But out of every thousand gems, a couple would pop up in the rarer pink.
Now Olierook and his colleagues have a new estimate for when and how these gems arrived on Earth’s surface. In a new study, they report that some 1.3 billion years ago, the blushing and brown stones were pushed through the relatively thin continental edges during the demise of Nuna, one of Earth’s earliest supercontinents. The work hints at the possibility that ancient continental junctures may be hiding more of these colorful gems.
The diamonds that would emerge at Argyle formed deep underground, near the stable continental roots. As landmasses smashed together to form Nuna, collisions near Australia’s northwestern edge provided the pressure needed to color the once-colorless gems.
In the late 1980s, a team led by Robert Pidgeon, now an emeritus professor at Curtin, found that Argyle’s diamond-studded volcanic rocks erupted roughly 1.2 billion years ago. — MAYA WEI-HAAS
You May Have This Blobby Animal to Thank for Your Nervous System
For hundreds of millions of years, pancake-shaped animals the size of a needle tip have been roving the seas with an appetite for tasty microbes and algae. They’re called placozoans, and are among the simplest of the major animal lineages.
As simple as they are, a team of researchers has found compelling evidence of neuronlike cells in placozoans. And given how long these animals have existed, it’s possible that placozoans served as the blueprint for the nervous systems in more complex animals, including humans.
Look under a microscope and you may think at first glance that placozoans are amoebas. But the organisms are animals, more closely related to cnidarians (which include sea anemones and corals) or bilaterians (the supergroup that contains vertebrates) than lineages such as ctenophores or poriferans. While these other animal lineages have nervous systems governed by the nerve cells known as neurons, placozoans were thought to be different.
“No one would have thought that these organisms had anything even resembling neurons,” said Xavier Grau-Bové, a researcher in Barcelona, Spain.
Placozoan bodies are simple, only three cell layers thick. But that’s enough to glide around, absorb and digest food, and respond to their surrounding environment. Instead of being controlled by neurons, some of these behaviors are regulated by peptidergic cells, which release short chains of amino acids that activate surrounding cells. — SAM JONES
Brainless Jellyfish Demonstrate Learning Ability
In the waters of Caribbean mangrove forests, tiny box jellyfish bob in and out of the shade. Box jellies are distinguished from true jellyfish in part by their complex visual system — the predators have 24 eyes. But like other jellyfish, they are brainless, controlling their bodies with a network of neurons.
That network, it turns out, is more sophisticated than you might assume. A new report indicates that the box jellyfish species Tripedalia cystophora have the ability to learn. Because box jellyfish diverged from our part of the animal kingdom long ago, understanding their cognitive abilities could help scientists trace the evolution of learning. The tricky part about studying learning in box jellies was finding an everyday behavior that scientists could train the creatures to perform in the lab.
Researchers focused on an about-face that box jellies execute when they are about to hit a mangrove root. The scientists produced images of alternating dark and light stripes, representing the mangrove roots and water, and used them to line the insides of buckets about 6 inches wide.
When the stripes were stark black and white, box jellies never got close to the bucket walls. With less contrast between stripes, box jellies immediately began to run into them. After a few collisions, the box jellies changed their behavior. Less than eight minutes after arriving in the bucket, they had nearly quadrupled the times they did the about-face maneuver. — VERONIQUE GREENWOOD
This Tiny Parasitic Wasp Can Drill Through Plastic
By the time Matvey Nikelshparg was 13, he was obsessed with parasitoid wasps, tiny insects that lay their eggs on or inside other bugs. Under a microscope in a lab he had assembled at home, he discovered that one species had a startling superpower: It could use an organ that protrudes from its abdomen to drill through a plastic petri dish.
Nikelshparg said his “amazement reached its peak” when he observed that the wasp had not only drilled through the petri dish, but had laid an egg outside the container that later grew into a healthy adult. The young researcher, who recently started to pursue his bachelor’s degree in Russia, reported his discovery in The Journal of Hymenoptera Research.
Eupelmus messene is a whisper of a wasp. Smaller than a grain of rice, this eensy arthropod bores into hardened plant growths, called galls, with an organ called an ovipositor. The insect’s target is the larvae of other wasp species, which lay their eggs inside galls in an effort to protect them from danger. By piercing its prey’s botanical fortress, E. messene bestows on its young a ready-made meal and grants it the same protection from the elements that its target originally sought.
In his experiments at home, Nikelshparg had set out to study what would happen if there were multiple E. messene wasps and only one host larva. He placed one host in a petri dish with 12 females. Most of the wasps immediately scrambled to jab the larva with their ovipositors, he said, “and began pushing and biting each other in a competitive struggle for reproduction.”
But one wasp, curiously, opted for a different “host” — the polystyrene wall of the dish itself. — DARREN INCORVAIA
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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