Someday these will grow into the biggest fish in North America, but for now, they’re the precious cargo of a state program to bring these freshwater giants back to their native habitat. (Read more about the world’s giant fish.)

A lake sturgeon seems to smile. Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic

Topping six feet (two meters) long and weighing nearly 200 pounds (90 kilograms), lake sturgeon once roamed rivers and lakes of the Mississippi River, Hudson Bay, and the Great Lakes. Unchanged from prehistoric times, the lake sturgeon has unusual features not seen in today’s fish, including an external skeleton that gives it an armored appearance.

But this ancient survivor has had trouble fending off human threats, including overfishing in the late 1800s, dams that have blocked migrations, and industrial pollution that has poisoned the fish’s spawning grounds. (Learn more about freshwater threats.)

Today there are genetically unique populations of sturgeons in at least eight rivers around Lake Michigan, with about 166 fish in the Kalamazoo River, according to Kregg Smith, senior fisheries biologist at the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

No one knows how many fish once lived in the Kalamazoo. But Smith and others did know the fish—deemed a threatened species in Michigan—needed a helping hand.

A lake sturgeon hooked in the Kalamazoo River this year is released back to its environment. Photograph courtesy Kregg Smith, Michigan DNR

So, starting in 2003, Smith and a team of nonprofits, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and native tribes set up the streamside rearing facility, which raises juvenile fish and releases them back into the rivers. So far they’ve sent 116 young fish back into the river, where they’ll eventually end up in Lake Michigan.

No Place Like Home

Inside the Kalamazoo River facility—a small trailer near a stand of trees a few hundred feet from the river’s banks—and USFWS fisheries biologist Elliott Kittel is showing me an image of a sturgeon egg zoomed in on a laptop.

Elliott Kittel shows a picture of a sturgeon egg zoomed in on his laptop at the Kalamazoo River streamside rearing facility. Photograph by Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic

Just days from hatching, I could see its curved backbone and healthy, clear yolk sac. In the wild, most of these babies wouldn’t make it—a female sturgeon can spawn millions of eggs, and “99.9 percent mortality is a good day,” Kittel said.

But eggs and larvae brought up in the rearing facility have better odds, since they’re less vulnerable to predation, disease, and starvation.

The sturgeon team’s strategy centers around rearing the young fish in water pumped from the Kalamazoo River, thus “imprinting” the juveniles with the chemical signature of the river. (Test your freshwater IQ.)

Young lake sturgeon are raised in this trailer near the Kalamazoo River. Photograph by Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic

Sturgeon live most of their lives in lakes, but are born in rivers and return to the same place to spawn—for males, that’s every two years; for females, every four to six. So the biologists hope that when the human-raised sturgeon grow old enough to spawn, they’ll “home” to the place where they were born.

This reduces the possibility that sturgeon will wander into other rivers, where the wayward fish could breed with other populations, diluting their genes. (See other pictures of megafishes around the world.)

As another backup, scientists take eggs that are naturally spawned by females living in the Kalamazoo and raise them in the rearing facility.

Males are sexually mature at 10, but females don’t start breeding until about 22 years of age. Sturgeons are incredibly long-lived, sometimes reaching over a hundred: A specimen caught in Canada in 1953 was 152 years old, according to a 1954 article in the Milwaukee Journal.

Once the babies hatch, the biologists get them up to about 6 to 10 inches (15 to 20 centimeters) long, tag them, and release them into the river in the fall. The team then monitors the fish to see if they return to the river to spawn.

Once they’re about six months old, lake sturgeon are released into the river. Photograph by Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic

But the sturgeon team will have to wait until 2021—when the first released males turn 10—to see if they come back, Smith said.

Personable Fish

To the people trying to save this unusual fish, there’s just something about sturgeon.

Ron Clark, a volunteer with the nonprofit Kalamazoo River Sturgeons for Tomorrow who was helping out at the Kalamazoo facility, said that being part of an effort to save such an ancient species “intrigued me.”

Clark, who has found the fish docile and easy to handle, said they seem to have individual personalities … they’re more like a [mammal] than a fish.”

Fisheries biologist Smith added that he likes the look of the prehistoric fish and its weird adaptations. For example, sturgeons have spiracles, which are holes in the side of the fish that allow them to breathe along with their gills.

He added that bringing the sturgeon back would give the public a chance to learn about a fish that had to survive during the dinosaur era.

“It’s the most unique fish in the Great Lakes.”

Surrounded by giant sacks of malt and wooden barrels, a glass of beer appropriately in hand, Suprise told a group of journalists he’s sending a simple message: “You can’t have a sustainable culture or society without our most precious resource, and that’s water.” (Learn more about freshwater.)

Brewing beer is a water-intensive process, as the grains—usually malted barley—have to be steeped in water before yeast is added for fermentation. Breweries that don’t track their water use can take up to 10 barrels of water to make 1 barrel of beer, according to Suprise. (Learn more about beer’s water footprint.)

According to NRDC’s Josh Mogerman, who was also on the media tour, 22 craft breweries have already joined the campaign, which is the first of its kind nationwide. So far, most of the brewers are located in Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin (see the full list).

Craft breweries—defined as small, independent, and traditional—are growing in the U.S., with a 15 percent increase in new businesses between 2011 and 2012, according to the Brewers Association. (Even President Obama is taking a crack at homebrewing with the White House Honey Brown Ale.)

Tim Suprise talks about clean water during a May 3 media tour. Photograph courtesy Michael Scott/IJNR

By emphasizing the importance of water to a person’s favorite local brew, Mogerman hopes to create “evangelism” for strengthening the U.S. Clean Water Act of 1972. Though the legislation has kept billions of pounds of sewage, chemicals, and trash out of the waterways, there’s still much to be done: One-third of U.S. waterways studied still don’t meet water quality standards, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Can you find a better spokesperson than a craft brewer?” Mogerman said. They’re “totally reliant on the watershed, so protection of water is important to them.”

Testing the Waters

Arcadia Ales takes its water from the Battle Creek city water system, whose main water source is a sandstone aquifer near the city. Battle Creek’s treated wastewater is then released into the Kalamazoo River, a 130-mile (209-kilometer) waterway in western Michigan with a polluted past. Paper mills once dumped PCBs—a type of carcinogenic synthetic chemical—into the water, harming wildlife, especially fish. The river is healthier now, and Suprise is building a new, more water-efficient brewing facility on the banks of the river. (Take a pledge to save a river with Change the Course.)

At the new brewery, his goal is to cut water use by 25 to 30 percent, mostly by recycling wastewater. Historically, water left over after making beer was dumped down the drain, where it ended up at local water-treatment plants.

“Today, we can take that same [wastewater] and put it in a big tote, [and] it’s picked up by a biofuel company and fermented into ethanol,” Suprise said.

That’s “one example of how we as brewers can minimize water usage and wastewater usage.”

Already, the Arcadia Ales team is more mindful of how much water they use to clean tanks and other brewing infrastructure, for example by using flow meters whenever possible, he added. Suprise doesn’t have hard numbers, but he said he’s sure that the brewery is already using less water.

Arcadia Ales has committed to using less water during its brewing process. Photograph courtesy Trudy E. Bell

Currently Arcadia’s ratio of barrels of water to beer is about 5-to-6 to 1, though Suprise hopes to bring that number down at the new facility.

All Hands on Deck

Mogerman acknowledges Brewers for Clean Water is “light green,” in that it’s a voluntary program meant to attract supporters for the Clean Water Act.

But just raising the profile of water conservation is crucial, especially since it’s a tough sell for many audiences—including young beer drinkers, according to water experts. (Calculate your water footprint.)

“For me, any partnership that’s going to bring attention to the need for clean water nationally brings value,” said Mark Gold, associate director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

Gold noted that the Clean Water Act regulations haven’t been updated this century. So “trying new ways and developing new partnerships with business becomes all the more important,” said Gold, who has worked with NRDC on other initiatives.

Jason Morrison, program director at the Pacific Institute, which works on water sustainability, noted the fact businesses are supporting water conservation is notable in and of itself.

“I’m old enough to remember the times when almost any piece of federal legislation was vehemently opposed by industry,” Morrison said.

Mike Antos, research manager at the California-based Council for Watershed Health, added by email that any business that’s sensitive to its water use “is a solid win.”

“We need all-hands-on-deck as we try to change how we use water,” he said.

This story was made possible in part by a fellowship from the Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources.

No, it doesn’t look like a giant white ape. But the battery-powered rover has all the toughness of an abominable snowman, surveying undetected hazards at research sites in Greenland and Antarctica. (See pictures of polar landscapes.)

Watch a video of Yeti at work.

Now, after six years of operation, a new study shows that Yeti and other polar robots have “great potential” to improve the safety and efficiency of scientific work at the Poles. (Also see “Sharp-eared Robots Find Whales—And Help Them Escape Danger.”)

“It’s simple and inexpensive, yet effective,” said Laura Ray, an engineer at Dartmouth College and Yeti project leader.

“On a $20,000 budget, designing from the ground up, undergraduates designed [and] fabricated a very reliable robot.”

The robot was designed and built to roam the Poles by a team of Dartmouth engineering students with a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. It’s a “testimony to their capabilities that Yeti has been so successful,” she said.

Yeti Power

As more scientists work at the Poles—studying subjects from climate change to the cosmos—it’s important that the areas they work in are safe, since polar regions are scarred with crevasses, or deep voids. (Test your knowledge about working in Antarctica.)

Yet many people still search for crevasses by using manual ground-penetrating radar surveys—exposing crews to possible risks.

Yeti robot in front of Mount Erebus, Antarctica. Photograph courtesy Kirsten L. Mabry

But the four-wheel drive Yeti removes this danger by accurately detecting treacherous terrain via ground-penetrating radar and global positioning systems (GPS).

A new study, published in the March/April issue of the Journal of Field Robotics, found that Yeti operated reliably at temperatures of -22 degrees Fahrenheit (-30 degrees Celsius), moved well over uneven snow, and acquired data on hundreds of crevasse encounters—which will help scientists identify where crevasses are, according to the authors.

The 160-pound (73-kilogram) robot is also lightweight enough that it can travel across crevasse bridges without falling in, said Ray.

So far Yeti’s been deployed on 12 projects, including one at the South Pole, where the robot discovered three buried buildings that could have been hazardous for people working in the area. (Read a first-person account of visiting the South Pole).

Ray hopes that Yeti can help scientists beyond finding dangers—for example, the rover’s data on crevasses can be used by scientists studying how ice sheets are changing as the world heats up.

So what would Yeti say if she could talk? “This is fun,” Ray suggested. “Yeti gets to … see the world.”

The top 10 stories on our radar today.
Tell @NatGeo what you’re reading with #NatGeoDaily

1. Mysterious Clear-Blooded Fish Found

   “Every animal with bones has blood with hemoglobin, which binds with oxygen and makes the blood appear red.Every animal, that is, except one.” Live Science
   Weird

2. Eerie Human-Like Robot Revealed?

   The PETMAN robot is being used to test protective clothing designed for hazardous environments. CNET
   Tech

3. Spanish Shipwreck Reveals Gold Treasure

   “Using a deep sea probe named Merlin, marine archaeologists discovered the bounty lost when a flotilla of merchant ships went down 400 miles off the Florida Keys killing some 500 on board, including 121 missionaries.” Telegraph
   Ancient

4. Nuclear Rocket Could Take Us to Mars?

   Experts are building components of a fusion-powered rocket aimed to clear many of the hurdles that block deep space travel, including long times in transit, exorbitant costs and health risks. PhysOrg
   Space and Tech

5. North Korea: Facts on the Ground

   While much in North Korea is secretive, here’s what we know about a country that seems to have retreated into a very dark corner.
   National Geographic News
   People

6. How Red Meat Hurts the Heart

   A chemical found in red meat helps explain why eating too much steak is bad for the heart. BBC News
   Environment

7. Pollution Stunts Coral Reefs

   “Fine particles in the air resulting from burning coal or volcanic eruptions can negatively affect coral growth, a team of climate scientists and coral ecologists from the UK, Australia and Panama has discovered.” Red Orbit
   Health

8. Tsunami Fish Ride Boat to California

   “What a long, strange trip it’s been for a small striped fish native to Japan that apparently hitched a cross-Pacific ride in a small boat believed to be part of a tide of debris from that country’s March 2011 tsunami.” Associated Press
   Animals

9. Ingredient for Life Common on Jupiter Moon

   “An analysis of infrared observations of Europa revealed that hydrogen peroxide is abundant on the ice-covered Jovian moon.” Space.com
   Space

10. Baby Otter Gets Swim Lessons

    Baby otters don’t know how to swim. Watch as mom teaches her baby how to navigate the water at the Oregon Zoo. Buzzfeed
    Just for Fun

This week, nearly 20 years later, I saw the film in IMAX with a new twist on a popular technology: 3-D. 

It was even better. The close calls seemed closer, the Velociraptors bigger and badder, the jump-out-of-your-seat moments even jumpier. I was also amazed how convincing the dinosaurs still looked, even after two decades of advances in special effects.

But I wondered how those two decades have changed what paleontologists know about the movie’s dinosaurs. So I called Thomas Holtz, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, College Park. The main difference? “Feathers, feathers, feathers, feathers,” he told me: Recent science suggests many of the movie’s dinosaurs bore plumage.

The feathered T. rex relative Yutyrannus, pictured in an illustration by Xing Lida, National Geographic

For instance, instead of the gray, pebbly skin portrayed in the movie, “Velociraptor would have been as feathered as a bald eagle,” he said. (Also see “‘Jurassic Park’ Raptors Had Feathers, Fossil Suggests.”)

Much of the evidence comes from raptor fossils discovered in China’s Liaoning Province (map), where ancient, low-oxygen lakes preserved the animals perfectly as they died. Some of the fossils still bear “true, honest to goodness” feathers; others have bumps on their shoulders that show where big wing feathers would have attached, Holtz said.

The same may also go for T. rex. Just last year, scientists discovered Yutyrannus, a one-ton, distant cousin of T. rex that was covered in fuzz, like a chick. So “we can’t dismiss the possibility that even a giant T. rex had some feathers,” Holtz said.

(Also see “Did the Real T. rex Resemble the One in Jurassic Park?”)

Another Jurassic Park denizen that was also plumed: the ostrich-like Gallimimus, a flock of which nearly runs over Tim, Lex, and Alan Grant while they’re trekking through the park.

Feathers may have kept the prehistoric creatures warm, attracted mates, or even protected eggs if dinosaurs fanned their arms over nests, said Holtz, who is disappointed that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park 4—to be released in June 2014—won’t have feathers either.

I asked Holtz whether scientists still think Velociraptor was smart enough to open doors, which happens a few times in the movie—in one instance, a raptor turns a door handle to get to Lex and Tim hiding in the park’s kitchen.

He said that Spielberg and Crichton overshot while trying to dispel the idea that dinosaurs are dummies. Velociraptor was probably only about as smart as your backyard opossum, Holtz said. What’s more, further analysis of its skeleton has revealed it wasn’t nearly as fast as a cheetah, as game warden Robert Muldoon says at the beginning of the film. Instead it was short and stocky, like a jaguar, and relied on stealth instead of speed.

“It would have been dumber than in the movie, and slower than in the movie,” Holtz said. “But I still wouldn’t want to meet one without some serious weapons.”

And Holtz believes that Crichton made a mistake setting the book in then-modern times. That’s because adult Brachiosaurus—the four-legged giants that leave Ellie and Alan awestruck—take up to 30 years to mature, which means that the dinosaur-cloning technology would have had to exist in the early 1970s. Even in a cloning fantasy movie, that strains credulity, says Holtz.

Speaking of the cloning technology, Holtz noted we still can’t recover enough viable DNA to bring a T. rex back to life. However, scientists including North Carolina State’s Mary Schweitzer are recovering biomolecules from ancient fossils—so, in that sense, the “knowledge of biochemistry of ancient life has become a reality.”

Even if we did bring dinosaurs back, he added, there’s a fundamental problem—the chemistry of modern air.

“For creatures like passenger pigeons or even the woolly mammoth, the world hasn’t changed that much,” he said. “For a Cretaceous dinosaur, the atmosphere is going to be different [in terms of the] amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen—it’s not going to breathe properly in our atmosphere.”

Despite his nitpicks, Holtz said he liked Jurassic Park—it was the first movie he paid multiple times to see in the theater. It was also the first film to introduce the public to dinosaurs beyond T. rex—giving “scientists and the public a common language to use.”

After seeing Jurassic Park in 1993, I wrote hundreds of pages of a sequel, in which many of the park’s dinosaurs swim to an island off Honduras and establish themselves anew. (My plot also involves Ellie and Alan roaming the island on horseback, which just happened to be my teenage passion.) I never sent it to Crichton, but I’m happy that I’ve gotten the chance to write about the movie 20 years later.

Dubbed Spartobranchus tenuis, the odd creature is a type of soft-bodied marine animal that’s rarely preserved in the fossil record. The new specimen was first discovered in the early 1900s in an area called the Burgess Shale, a fossil-rich area in Canada‘s Yoho National Park. (Also see “Pictures: New Deep-Sea Worms Found—Have Big ‘Lips.’”)

The new worm species S. tenuis outside their tubes (above) and inside. Illustration by Marianne Collins

But the fossil went mostly unnoticed until a few years ago, when evolutionary biologist Jean-Bernard Caron of the University of Toronto “stumbled on drawers full of these worms” at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

“I said, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I noticed a lot of these worms in bizarre-shaped rings, like mini Michelin tires in the rock,” said Caron, a co-author of the study.

After Caron and colleagues looked more closely at the fossils, they realized the newfound worm “really connects a lot of dots” in the evolution of hemichordates.

Solving an Evolutionary Puzzle

Hemichordates, a group of marine invertebrates that includes S. tenuis, are closely related to modern starfish and sea urchins, as well as to chordates, or animals with backbones—such as primates. (Watch a video of a sea cucumber that fights with its guts.)

Two modern acorn worms, Harrimania planktophilus. The total length of a relaxed and uncoiled animal is approximately 32 millimeters. Photograph courtesy C.B. Cameron

There are two main branches within the hemichordates: enteropneusts and pterobranchs, Caron said. Pterobranchs live in colonies while enteropneusts don’t.

“That has always puzzled evolutionary biologists—what is the common ancestor of the hemichordates?” he said. (See more pictures of marine worms that fire “glowing blobs.”) 

The Burgess Shale region, with Wapta Mountain in the background. Photograph courtesy JB Caron

Now, they’ve found it in S. tenuis, an enteropneust that lived 200 million years before the previous earliest known specimen. 

The giveaway, Caron said, was that S. tenuis fossils were found with tubular structures. Modern-day pterobranchs live in these colonial tubes, but modern-day enteropneusts don’t. Finding the tubes with S. tenuis suggests the tubes were lost as enteropneusts evolved, but were retained over time in the pterobranchs.

These modern pterobranchs live in tubes similar to those preserved in the S. tenuis fossils. Photograph courtesy C.B. Cameron

What’s more, “understanding the origin of chordates can help us understand our own origins,” since we all shared an as yet-unknown worm-like ancestor, noted Caron, whose study was published today in the journal Nature.

Phallic Shape Withstood the Test of Time

S. tenuis lived in a different world—during the Cambrian period, Canada was tropical due to its position near the Equator. Other than that, though, the four-inch-long (10-centimeter-long) creature seems astonishingly similar to modern acorn worms. (See a prehistoric time line.)

“One of the things that blew my mind about this thing is that most animals in the Burgess Shale look nothing like modern-day animals, but this is so clearly an acorn worm,” said study co-author Christopher B. Cameron of the Université de Montréal.

“Except for losing the tube, the animal is virtually unchanged in 505 million years.”

For instance, S. tenuis and modern acorn worms both have flexible bodies with a long, narrow trunk that ends in a bulbous structure, which may serve as an anchor to pull itself backward into its tube quickly if there’s a threat. (See a picture of a mushroom named for its phallic shape.)

An undescribed species of modern acorn worm. Photograph by C.B. Cameron

The scientists also suspect that, like modern acorn worms, S. tenuis “would have been a recycler of organic material—a bit like earthworms in our gardens,” Caron said.

You probably don’t see acorn worms very often, though they’re widespread worldwide and likely burrow under the sand of your favorite beach.

The telltale signs of their presence are tiny sausage-shaped sand pellets that the animals push up to the surface, essentially the garbage from their work filtering the sand, Caron said.

So the next time you’re taking a long walk on the beach, think about the worm relatives busy at work, just under your feet.

Documentary filmmakers with BBC Nature recently captured common vampire bats feeding on a colony of Humboldt penguins—including babies—on the coast of southern Peru, near the Atacama Desert. (See penguin pictures.)

Vampire bats have extremely sharp, delicate teeth. Photograph by Bruce Dale, National Geographic

Scientists already suspected that vampire bats feed on penguins—there’s been evidence of bite marks on some penguins’ feet, for instance—but no one had actually witnessed it, producer Matthew Gordon told BBC Nature‘s website.

“As we scanned the colony using the infrared LED, the team observed the penguins reacting strangely to something on the ground, they nervously pecked and showed clear signs of agitation,” he told BBC Nature.

“We then fixed our cameras onto one area and waited. Finally, after several hours the team noticed glimmers of light reflecting from the vampire’s eyes as it darted around the penguins’ feet.”

But the BBC footage doesn’t curdle the blood of vampire bat expert Gerald Wilkinson, a biologist at the University of Maryland, College Park. “It’s not a surprise—it’s what they do,” he said.

Common vampire bats—which are widespread throughout tropical Latin America—generally snack on anything bigger than a medium-size rodent, usually feeding on livestock, Wilkinson said.

But what is surprising about the BBC video, noted James Eggers, director of education for the nonprofit organization Bat Conservation International, is that common vampire bats prefer mammals, not birds such as penguins.

There are two other species of vampire bat in Latin America that feed only on birds, but they live in wetter climates, Eggers said. It’s likely that a nearby sea lion colony attracted the bats to the area, Wilkinson added.

Lifeblood

Finding blood is life-or-death for vampire bats, which need a daily dose to survive. This need has given the bats a unique adaptation: it’s the only mammal that can use its leaf-shaped nose to detect heat in other animals.

Once a vampire bat finds an animal, it hops about—sometimes comically, Eggers said—sensing places where warm blood is coursing closest to the skin’s surface, which are usually extremities such as the feet, fingers, and ears.

Watch National Geographic’s video of vampire bats feeding.

The bat then uses its supersharp teeth to make a tiny incision, lapping up the flowing blood until it’s ingested its weight in blood. Suddenly too heavy to fly, the bat then urinates most of the blood, hanging on to the nutrient-rich blood cells. (See “Vampire Bats Hunt by Sound of Victims’ Breath, Study Says.”)

When all’s said and done, the bat’s tidy work leaves almost no trace, thanks in part to the tiny incision and anticoagulants in their saliva. In fact, most of the animals are asleep during the whole process.

“I was a little disappointed that the title of the video said vampire bats attack penguin chicks—there’s no intention of harm,” Eggers said.

Life-Saving Vampires?

People have a tricky relationship with vampire bats, which can carry rabies and have bitten people while they sleep. However such cases are rare, and in many incidences, the bite is a result of the bats’ other prey being removed, Eggers said. (Rabies is a mammalian virus and can’t be transferred to birds, which includes penguins, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

Due to concern over rabies, some governments in the Caribbean and Central America have encouraged people to kill vampire bats, but often people don’t know what the three species look like and end up killing any type of bat, Wilkinson noted. That’s why Eggers’s organization works to educate people about vampire bats. (Explore an interactive about Panama’s bats.)

For instance, research shows that the anticoagulant in vampire bat bat saliva may be an effective way to break up blood clots that lead to strokes in people.

In that sense, Eggers said, “vampire bats are literally saving our lives.”

The vampire bat footage appears in the BBC One series Penguins: Spy in the Huddle.

More than 200 children were among those injured in the Chelyabinsk region, Russia’s Interior Ministry told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.

“Verified information indicates that this was one meteorite which burned up as it approached Earth and disintegrated into smaller pieces,” said Elena Smirnykh, deputy head of the Russian Emergencies Ministry press office, according to RIA Novosti. Warning that there could be a meteor shower, Russian authorities have cancelled school and told people to stay inside.

The meteor was likely moving at a speed in tens of kilometers a second, resulting in a “very, very violent event” that planetary scientist Marc Fries likened to “firing a rifle bullet into a swimming pool.”

The object’s size is still unknown, although some scientists suspect it may have been car-size.

On social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, video from central Russia showed a large ball of white streaking across the sky before crashing to Earth, appearing to send out a cloud of white light. Twitter lit up with news of the meteorite, with #RussianMeteor, #Chelyabinsk, and #meteor all trending on Friday morning.

“You can see in the videos that it glows brightly—it’s actually hotter than the melting point of stone at that point,” Fries, a research associate in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, said on Smithsonian’s website.

Meteorites this size are relatively rare, occurring about once a decade, he noted.

This video uploaded to YouTube contains the explosive sound of the meteorite’s shock wave:

Russia’s Internet and airwaves on Friday were swirling with rumors that the falling debris was evidence of an American weapons test.

In this frame grab made from a video done with a dashboard camera, on a highway from Kostanai, Kazakhstan, to Chelyabinsk region, Russia, provided by Nasha Gazeta newspaper, on Friday, Feb. 15, 2013 a meteorite contrail is seen. A meteor streaked across the sky of Russias Ural Mountains on Friday morning, causing sharp explosions and reportedly injuring around 100 people, including many hurt by broken glass. Photograph by Nasha Gazeta, AP

What’s a Meteorite?

There are hundreds of thousands of asteroids roaming our solar system that are the size of the Russian meteorite, noted Tim Swindle, director of the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

“What’s going on is you have this rock that’s happily orbiting the sun—from its point of view this morning a planet ran into it.”

At that moment, the asteroid slammed into our atmosphere at 10 or 20 times the speed of sound—producing a sonic boom and becoming what’s called a meteor. The impact—like hitting a wall—causes air friction that heats the meteor’s surface, shedding melted material and sometimes breaking into smaller pieces.

Any resulting pieces that make it to the ground are called meteorites. Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere, fall into the ocean, or crash into vast, uninhabited deserts, but at least every month or two there are eyewitness reports of fragments falling from the sky, Swindle said.

The number of injuries—most of them not thought to be serious, according to CNN—is the highest in recorded history due to a meteorite, according to Michael D. Reynolds, adjunct astronomy professor at Florida State College at Jacksonville and author of the book Falling Stars: A Guide to Meteors and Meteorites.

The last and only known incident in which a meteorite injured a person occurred in 1954 in Sylacauga, Alabama, when Ann Elizabeth Hodges was hit by a meteorite that crashed through her living room.

Meteorite hunters are likely headed to Russia this second, Reynolds and Swindle both noted—even though most of them are currently at a gem and mineral show taking place in Tucson. “A lot of tickets will be purchased to Moscow,” Swindle said.

Though it’s unclear how many pieces of the Russian meteorite ended up on the ground, Russian law allows any people who find meteorites to keep them.

Asteroid Flyby Today

The news came on the same day that an asteroid is expected to make its closest brush by Earth for an object of its size since astronomers started keeping records.

However, the Russian meteorite’s trajectory was “significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, making it a completely unrelated object,” according to NASA.

“Information is still being collected about the Russian meteorite, and analysis is preliminary at this point. In videos of the meteor, it is seen to pass from left to right in front of the rising sun, which means it was traveling from north to south. Asteroid DA14′s trajectory is in the opposite direction, from south to north,” the agency said.

(See: Asteroid to Make Closest Flyby in History.)

The office-building sized chunk of rock, known as 2012 DA14, will come closer to Earth than most orbiting communication and weather satellites, according to NASA.

Visible to some skywatchers in the Eastern Hemisphere, the asteroid will be at its closest at 19:24 UTC (2:24 p.m. EST/11:24 a.m. PST) as it flies over the eastern Indian Ocean.

Overall, planetary scientists are keeping a close eye on any asteroid big enough to cause widespread death and destruction on the scale that likely wiped out the dinosaurs, the University of Arizona’s Swindle said.

“We are the first species to be able to see these coming.”

—Dan Gilgoff, Andrew Fazekas, and Jeffrey Tayler contributed reporting.

See More on Friday’s Meteor Shower in Russia

• Video: Predicting Meteorite Impacts
• Top 5 Videos of Russian Mega-Meteor
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• From Our Vault: 1897 Meteorite Recovery

Since the dawn of life, excrement has been a source of energy and food, and an important recycler of nutrients in nature. Yet in many modern societies, poop is perceived as a problem—potentially dangerous waste that has no place in our lives.

So, in the cleverly named The Origin of Feces, Canadian veterinarian and epidemiologist Waltner-Toews does the dirty work of dispelling that perception, detailing how poop can be a solution to many environmental and health challenges, especially energy. For instance, in the slums of Nairobi, human poop powers hot showers and other services. In California, dog doo-doo keeps a dog park electrified. (Also see “Human Waste to Revive Haitian Farmland?”)

Waltner-Toews gave Weird & Wild the poop on his new book, which is available for preorder before it’s published in May by ECW Press.

David Waltner-Toews rolls up his sleeves making paper out of elephant dung in Thailand. Photograph courtesy ECW Press.

How did you approach a topic as broad as excrement?

I looked at the way it had been dealt with by other writers. Some people dealt with it as a management problem, some dealt with it as a public health problem. I’m very much interested in evolution and ecology, so I wanted to do sort of the evolutionary story of poop—where does it fit into the evolution of life and the ecological networks on this planet? It seemed to me that was the root of the problem we were facing—we had somehow taken poop out of context, and I wanted to put it back in.

[That approach] fit into the evolutionary story, which is where the title came from. I later discovered [The Origin of Feces] is also the title of a gothic metal rock album [by Brooklyn group Type O Negative]. I don’t listen to gothic metal, so I didn’t know.

I see you went to Tanzania to check out dung beetles. What was that like, and what other adventures did you have in writing the book?

I spent a lot of time traveling to other countries looking at poop—much to my wife’s dismay. One of the best experiences I had was in Tanzania when we were out in the bush with a couple of guides—they had elephant rifles in case we got attacked by large wild animals.

Everyone else is looking for megafauna such as elephants, rhinos, and giraffes, and I’m looking for scat and dung beetles, because I’d never actually seen a dung beetle in action. In Thailand at an elephant sanctuary, I got involved in making paper from elephant dung. You make a soup of the dung, dry it on racks, and then it makes a very nice paper. (See “Dung Beetles’ Favorite Poop Revealed.”)

A dung beetle rolls its ball of feces in South Africa. Photograph by Chris Johns, National Geographic

Explain what you mean by “Unless we change how we think about [poop], we are doomed to forever live in it.”

Until very recently, people thought of poop like just a big pile of manure [that needs to be disposed of]. So it ends up in waterways, creating pollution that leads to people getting sick. We need to think about ways to use the energy in that poop in various ways. For example, people are using poop to produce electricity and heat with biodigesters. Countries like Rwanda have mandated that public institutions have to take waste and put it through biodigesters—this creates methane that in turn produces heat or electricity. So it’s not just waste.

Can you describe some more unsung benefits of poop?

The thing about excrement in general is that it’s part of life. Part of the argument I make in the book is that as soon as you have life, you have essentially poop. As life developed, the waste for one animal became food for another animal. We depend on a web of recycling of nutrients, and poop is an important part of that. People get sqeaumish but they shouldn’t be. If you don’t think of it as poop, but instead think of it as recycling nutrients, this is a really interesting and sustainable way to produce food.

It seems like poop is stigmatized a lot.

There’s a reason for that. When people became urbanized, they were taking drinking water from places where they pooped, creating cholera epidemics. We have this cultural memory of people getting sick because there was poop in the water. That doesn’t mean we can’t use it—we have to be careful about how we do it [for example, composting poop before it’s used as fertilizer]. We’ve got this conflicted sense of poop—on the agricultural side it’s useful as a fertilizer, but as we get urbanized, it becomes a pubic health problem. We might be able to reclaim poop as important and essential. (See “Fake ‘Poop’ Created, Could Cure Infections.”)

Fungus grows on elephant dung in Malaysia. Photograph by Yusri Hashim, Your Shot

What kind of reactions have you gotten to the book?

People think of it as a funny thing to be writing about. I tried not to make it too heavy of a book. I’m of the opinion if you’re going to write science you want people to read it. A lot of it’s funny and entertaining—it doesn’t have to be dry.

What are the main takeaways people should get from your book?

If we don’t know s*** we sholdn’t be talking about other types of energy and sustainability. If we do know s***, we can begin to understand not just excrement but different ways of organizing ourselves and feeding ourselves on the planet.

What does your wife think of the book?

She’s already told people not to ask what I do for a living at the dinner table.

This Q&A has been edited for length and content.

The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy, and move in a line relative to it, according to recent experiments in South Africa.

“This is a complicated navigational feat—it’s quite impressive for an animal that size,” said study co-author Eric Warrant, a biologist at the University of Lund in Sweden.

A dung beetle rolling its ball in South Africa. Photograph courtesy Eric Warrant.

Moving in a straight line is crucial to dung beetles, which live in a rough-and-tumble world where competition for excrement is fierce. (Play “Dung Beetle Derby” on the National Geographic Kids website.)

Once the beetles sniff out a steaming pile, males painstakingly craft the dung into balls and roll them as far away from the chaotic mound as possible, often toting a female that they have also picked up. The pair bury the dung, which later becomes food for their babies.

But it’s not always that easy. Lurking about the dung pile are lots of dung beetles just waiting to snatch a freshly made ball. (Related: “Dung Beetles’ Favorite Poop Revealed.”)

That’s why ball-bearing beetles have to make a fast beeline away from the pile.

“If they roll back into the dung pile, it’s curtains,” Warrant said. If thieves near the pile steal their ball, the beetle has to start all over again, which is a big investment of energy.

Seeing Stars 

Scientists already knew that dung beetles can move in straight lines away from dung piles by detecting a symmetrical pattern of polarized light that appears around the sun. We can’t see this pattern, but insects can thanks to special photoreceptors in their eyes.

The Milky Way glimmers over Indonesia. Photograph by Justin Ng, Your Shot.

But less well-known was how beetles use visual cues at night, such as the moon and its much weaker polarized light pattern. So Warrant and colleagues went to a game farm in South Africa to observe the nocturnal African dung beetle Scarabaeus satyrus. (Read another Weird & Wild post on why dung beetles dance.)

Attracting the beetles proved straightforward: The scientists collected buckets of dung, put them out, and waited for the beetles to fly in.

But their initial observations were puzzling. S. satyrus could still roll a ball in a straight line even on moonless nights, “which caused us a great deal of grief—we didn’t know how to explain this at all,” Warrant said.

Then, “it occurred to us that maybe they were using the stars—and it turned out they were.”

Dapper Beetles

To test the star theory, the team set up a small, enclosed table on the game reserve, placed beetles in them, and observed how the insects reacted to different sky conditions. The team confirmed that even on clear, moonless nights, the beetles could still navigate their balls in a straight line.

To show that the beetles were focusing on the Milky Way, the team moved the table into the Johannesburg Planetarium, and found that the beetles could orient equally well under a full starlit sky as when only the Milky Way was present. (See Milky Way pictures.)

Lastly, to confirm the Milky Way results, the team put little cardboard hats on the study beetles’ heads, blocking their view of the sky. Those beetles just rolled around and around aimlessly, according to the study, published recently in the journal Current Biology.

The scientists put hats on the dung beetles to block their ability to see stars. This beetle, which is wearing a clear hat, acted as a control in one experiment. Photograph courtesy Eric Warrant.

Dung beetle researcher Sean D. Whipple, of the Entomology Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said by email that the “awesome results …. provide strong evidence for orientation by starlight in dung beetles.”

He added that this discovery reveals another potential negative impact of light pollution, a global phenomenon that blocks out stars.

“If artificial light—from cities, houses, roadways, etc.—drowns out the visibility of the night sky, it could have the potential to impact effective orientation and navigation of dung beetles in the same way as an overcast sky,” Whipple said.

Keep On Rollin’

Study co-author Warrant added that other dung beetles likely navigate via the Milky Way, although the galaxy is most prominent in the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere.

What’s more, it’s “probably a widespread skill that insects have—migrating moths might also be able to do it.”

As for the beetles themselves, they were “very easy to work with,” he added.

“You can do anything you want to them, and they just keep on rolling.”