Amazing Pictures: Baby Chameleon Doesn't Know It Hatched

The newborn, curled tightly in an egg-shaped ball, offers a rare insight into the life of a developing reptile.

By Maya Wei-Haas, National Geographic 

PUBLISHED JUNE 19, 2015

Looks like someone needs a wake-up call: This newborn baby chameleon hadn't yet realized it had hatched.

Nick Henn, owner of Canvas Chameleons in Reading, Pennsylvania, recently captured photographs of the panther chameleon after he helped it break out of its shell. (Also see "Pictures: Miniature Chameleons Discovered—Fit on Match Tip.")

Using cuticle clippers, Henn delicately cut away the egg and expected the baby to jump to attention.

Thinking it was still in its shell, the dime-size reptile stayed curled in a egg-shaped ball, its tail tucked over its shoulder—giving us a rare peek into a developing chameleon's world.  

Normally "you don't get to catch that moment when they first come out," Henn marvels.  

Bringing Up Baby

Growing up, Henn always longed for a blue panther chameleon, a species native to Madagascar. "It was like my life goal," he says, laughing. Once out of college, Henn started to breed and raise chameleons, particularly his beloved panther chameleons. (See more cool chameleon pictures.)

Under Henn's close watch, the panther chameleon eggs grow in their leathery shells for seven to eight months. When the big day arrives, the chameleon uses a special "egg tooth" on its upper jaw to slit the egg's inner membrane, which then contracts.  

It's "like a swimmer peeling off a wet bathing suit," says Robin Andrews, a biologist at Virginia Tech.

The baby can then crack—or pip—the end of the egg near its head to wiggle free. The whole process can take up to a day.

Panther chameleons are usually a hardy bunch, Henn explains, but this particular baby pipped the side of its egg and got stuck on its way out. In the wild, if a chameleon isn't strong enough to break free of its egg, it dies.

Lights, Camera, Action

Luckily, Henn came to the rescue. But why did the chameleon not wake right away? No one knows for sure.

It's possible there wasn't much light at the time. In Henn's experience, when captive chameleons are exposed to light, "they wake up and know it is time to rock and roll," Henn says.

Avid sunbathers, chameleons are very sensitive to light, relying on the sun to warm their bodies and set their internal clocks. The reptiles sense light through a receptor on their head. "It’s kind of like a window for them. It senses the time of day and the light cycles," explains Brett Baldwin, animal care manager at the San Diego Zoo.

Overall, incubating chameleon eggs in captivity is a "very tricky and complicated process," says Baldwin. The developing babies are sensitive to any slight differences in humidity and temperature.

In the wild, though, baby chameleons hatch in dark underground burrows, so light shouldn't matter—and may even prevent them from breaking out of the shell, explains Andrews.

"Just looking at the pictures," says Baldwin, "I would have thought, 'Oh, that guy died in the egg.'"

That's the reality in the wild: Many creatures lay a large number of eggs because most of their young won't survive. Tiny chameleons in particular are tasty morsels to predators.

As for this panther chameleon, it's alive and well after its ordeal. Sometimes all you need is a little helping hand.

3-D Printing Robots Will Build a Bridge in Amsterdam

A 3-D printer that makes steel structures appear out of thin air will try its hand at building — wait, printing — a pedestrian bridge.

MX3D is a Netherlands-based start-up that researches and develops 3-D printing technologies. Later this year the company is planning its most ambitious project yet: Using 3-D printers to construct a bridge over a canal in the heart of Amsterdam.

Build Me a Bridge

The MX3D team essentially takes everything you know about 3-D printing and turns it on its head. The traditional process would be this: Printers build objects from the bottom up by applying layer after layer of plastic goop from dispenser that shuttles back and forth along a horizontal plane. The end product has telltale layers that sort of resemble a topographic map.

This is not how MX3D printers work. Instead, the MX3D-Metal printer builds structures by ejecting small amounts of molten steel through a welding nozzle at the end of a 6-axis robotic arm — it can craft objects from any angle, rather than simply along a horizontal plane. As molten metal flows through the nozzle, it quickly sets, which allows the printer to produce straight lines, spirals or any other shape for that matter, out of thin air.

“3D printing like this is still unexplored territory and leads to a new form language that is not bound by additive layers. This method makes it possible to create 3D objects in almost any size and shape,” wrote MX3D on its website.

You can get an up-close look at the metal printer below:

A New Frontier

For their bridge, the team plans to use two teams of two robots. The teams would start on opposite sides of the canal and build until they meet in the middle, constructing their own supports along the way while moving forward on movable platform bases.

The final design of the bridge and its exact location are still to be determined, but construction is expected to begin in September.

The project is about much more than just a bridge; it could serve as a glimpse into what future construction sites might look like. Rather than workers in hard-hats and neon yellow vests, autonomous 3-D printers might be the new norm. If we can 3-D print a bridge, Gizmodo’s Maddie Stone points out, why not build a skyscraper with 3-D printing cranes? The MX3D team seems to agree with the broader impact their bridge project could have, as they state on the project website:

This bridge will show how 3D printing finally enters the world of large-scale, functional objects and sustainable materials while allowing unprecedented freedom of form. The symbolism of the bridge is a beautiful metaphor to connect the technology of the future with the old city, in a way that brings out the best of both worlds.

Although MX3D has tested their bridge-printing robots on smaller scales, they’ll likely face a host of new challenges once the project gets started. Their bots will have to contend with irregular terrain, changing weather conditions and other factors that are typically controlled in the lab.

We’ll just have to wait and see if MX3D’s bridge leads to new possibilities for the technology, or if they simply ended up building a bridge to nowhere.

WATCH: GoPro falls from space and captures spectacular footage of Earth

Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, shares a lot of videos of its rockets, much of the footage showing those rockets blasting off into space.

This time, the team strapped a GoPro camera to a metal fairing on a Falcon 9 rocket and captured this incredible video as that part of the rocket fell back to earth. SpaceX designs its rockets to be reusable. That’s why it was returning to earth.

Naturally, they chose Johann Strauss II’s "Blue Danube" as the soundtrack, used as it was in a 2001: A Space Odyssey during those long scenes with the lunar landing and space-station docking. SpaceX made history as the first commercial rocket company to dock with the International Space Station. It is currently testing the Dragon Rocket that will carry the company’s first human astronauts in 2017.

Musk famously hopes to one day colonise Mars.

This is what those humans might see one day as they return to earth:

5 Chemistry Breakthroughs That Shaped Our Modern World

Did you know that the discovery of a way to make ammonia was the singlemost important reason for the world’s population explosion from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7 billion today? Or that polythene, the world’s most common plastic, was accidentally invented twice?

The chances are you didn’t, as chemistry tends to get overlooked compared to the other sciences. Not a single chemist made it into Science magazine’s Top 50 Science stars on Twitter. Chemistry news just don’t get the same coverage as the physics projects, even when the project was all about landing a chemistry lab on a comet.

So the Royal Society of Chemistry decided to look into what people really think of chemistry, chemists and chemicals. It turns out most people just don’t have a good idea of what it is chemists do, or how chemistry contributes to the modern world.

This is a real shame, because the world as we know it wouldn’t exist without chemistry. Here’s my top five chemistry inventions that make the world you live in.

1. Penicillin

There’s a good chance that penicillin has saved your life. Without it, a prick from a thorn or sore throat can easily turn fatal. Alexander Fleming generally gets the credit for penicillin when, in 1928, he famously observed how a mold growing on his Petri dishes suppressed the growth of nearby bacteria.

But, despite his best efforts, he failed to extract any usable penicillin. Fleming gave up and the story of penicillin took a 10-year hiatus. Until in 1939 Australian pharmacologist Howard Florey and his team of chemists figured out a way of purifying penicillin in useable quantities.

However, as World War II was raging at the time, scientific equipment was in short supply. The team therefore cobbled together a totally functional penicillin production plant from bath tubs, milk churns and book shelves. Not surprisingly the media were extremely excited about this new wonder drug, but Florey and his colleagues were rather shy of publicity. Instead Fleming took the limelight.

Full-scale production of penicillin took off in 1944 when the chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau took Florey’s Heath Robinson-esque design and converted it into a full-scale production plant.

2. The Haber-Bosch process

Nitrogen plays a critical role in the biochemistry of every living thing. It is also the most common gas in our atmosphere. But nitrogen gas doesn’t like reacting with very much, which means that plants and animals can’t extract it from the air. Consequently a major limiting factor in agriculture has been the availability of nitrogen.

In 1910, German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch changed all this when they combined atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia. This in turn can be used as crop fertilizer, eventually filtering up the food chain to us.

Today about 80% of the nitrogen in our bodies comes from the Haber-Bosch process, making this single chemical reaction probably the most important factor in the population explosion of the past 100 years.

3. Polythene

Most common plastic objects, from water pipes to food packaging and hardhats, are forms of polythene. The 88m tons of the stuff that is made each year is the result of two accidental discoveries.

The first occurred in 1898 when German chemist Hans von Pechmann, while investigating something quite different, noticed a waxy substance at the bottom of his tubes. Along with his colleagues he discovered that it was made up of very long molecular chains which they termed polymethylene. The method they used to make their plastic wasn’t particularly practical, so much like the penicillin story, no progress was made for some considerable time.

Then in 1933 an entirely different method for making the plastic was discovered by chemists at the now defunct chemical company ICI. They were working on high-pressure reactions and noticed the same waxy substance as von Pechmann. At first they failed to reproduce the effect until they noticed that in the original reaction oxygen had leaked into the system.

Two years later ICI had turned this serendipitous discovery into a practical method for producing the common plastic that’s almost certainly within easy reach of you now.

4. The Pill

In the 1930s physicians understood the potential for hormone-based therapies to treat cancers, menstrual disorders and, of course, for contraception. But research and treatments were held back by massively time-consuming and inefficient methods for synthesizing hormones. Back then progesterone cost the equivalent (in today’s prices) of $1,000 per gram while now the same amount can be bought for just a few dollars.

Russel Marker, a professor of organic chemistry at Pennsylvania State University, slashed the costs of producing progesterone by discovering a simple shortcut in the synthetic pathway. He went scavenging for plants with progesterone-like molecules and stumbled upon a Mexican yam. From this root vegetable he isolated a compound that took one simple step to convert into progesterone for the first contraceptive pill.

5. This Screen

Incredibly, plans for a flat-screen color displays date back to the late 1960s! When the British Ministry of Defense decided it wanted flat screens to replace bulky and expensive cathode ray tubes in its military vehicles, it settled on an idea based on liquid crystals. It was already known that liquid crystal displays (LCDs) were possible; the problem was that they only really worked at high temperatures. So, not much good unless you are sitting in an oven.

In 1970 the MoD commissioned George Gray at the University of Hull to work on a way to make LCDs function at more pleasant (and useful) temperatures. He did just that when he invented a molecule known as 5CB. By the early 1980s, 90% of the LCD devices in the world contained 5CB, and you’ll still find it in the likes of cheap watches and calculators. Meanwhile derivatives of 5CB make the phones, computers and TVs of today possible.

Audi has made a synthetic, high-grade fuel from plant sugars

Just last month, German car manufacturer Audi invented a carbon-neutral diesel fuel, made from water, carbon dioxide and renewable energy sources, and they say their pilot plant in Dresden will pump out 160 litres of the of the stuff every day in the coming months to power their Audi A8 cars.

Now, they’ve announced the development of another new type of environmentally friendly, petroleum-free synthetic fuel, which they’re calling 'e-benzin'. Manufactured in France by Audi’s partner company, Global Bioenergies, the fuel is produced by converting corn-derived glucose - a renewable source of biomass sugar - into isobutane gas.

Commonly used in refrigeration systems and aerosols, isobutane gas is also one of the staples of the petrochemical industry. About 13 million tonnes of it is extracted annually from oil, and used to produce various types of fuels, plastics and elastomers. In this case, the team at Global Bioenergies refined it into a clear, high-grade, 'unleaded’ fuel.

"The next step in the process was to run the material through a conditioning and purification process, allowing it to be collected and stored in liquid form under pressure," Eric Mack reports for Gizmag. "Some of it was then sent to Germany to be converted into isooctane fuel, creating a pure, 100 octane gasoline."

That last point refers to the octane rating of the fuel, which is the standard measure for how much compression a type of engine or aviation fuel can withstand before it ignites. While a low octane rating is better for diesel engines, a high rating is required for gasoline engines, and the higher the rating, the more efficient it is to use.

The team says their Isooctane fuel can be used as an additive to regular unleaded fuel to make it more efficient, or can be used on its own as a fuel. And because their new fuel contains no benzene or sulphur, they say it burns very cleanly. While the next step of the process will be figuring out how to produce the fuel in large quantities, the company also aims to modify the manufacturing process so that no biomass is required - just water, hydrogen, CO2 and sunlight, like how they're producing their new 'e-diesel' fuel.

"We're thinking we're bringing green-ness to a field that desperately needs green-ness," Rick Bockrath, vice president for chemical engineering at Global Bioenergies,told Gizmag. "It's basically how we're moving away from an oil-based economy towards something that has a renewable, sustainable future to it."

With an 'e-gas'- or synthetic methane - being made on an industrial scale already, and projects dedicated to getting 'e-ethanol’, Audi 'e-diesel' and Audi 'e-benzin' on the market in the coming years, it’s hard not to be impressed by a car company that appears to be so invested in making petroleum-based fuels a thing of the past.