YSM Issue 96.2

WHO WERE THE
FIRST COWBOYS IN
THE WORLD?
&
WHAT IS THE WORLD'S
MOST EFFICIENT
FORM OF URINATION?
By Victor Nguyen
Has inspiration ever hit you while you were on the toilet? For
scientists studying the potty period of the glassy-winged
sharpshooter, a half-inch-long insect in the Cicadellidae
family, a revelation between physics and biology was born. Known to be
serious agricultural pests, sharpshooters relieve themselves by forming
small droplets of urine at their anal styluses, which are appendages
involved in excretion. Eventually, the droplets grow to a diameter of
0.725 millimeters, and the anal styluses launches the particulates
repeatedly, accelerating up to forty times the force of gravity.
Sharpshooters developed this bathroom behavior due to their waterheavy
diets. The leafhoppers feed on plant xylem sap, which has a small
nutrient-to-liquid ratio. As a result, they drink up to three hundred
times their body weight. A closer analysis of this phenomenon,
published by researchers at Georgia Tech in Nature Communications,
showed that sharpshooters developed this biological mechanism to
conserve energy given their small size and energy output.
The sharpshooter’s urinary facilities mark a notable discovery because
they are the first observation of superpropulsion in a biological system,
a phenomenon in which a projectile moves faster than the launcher
that propelled it. Applications of the sharpshooter’s mechanisms have
a future in electronics. Researchers investigating the sharpshooters
foresee how the insect’s energy-efficient solution can be used to remove
solvents in micro-manufacturing or to eliminate water from complex
surfaces. This intersection of the physical and biological sciences sets
a precedent for finding unorthodox answers. Wherever and whenever
inspiration or the need to relieve strikes, innovation may soon follow. ■
By Jamie Seu
Stirrups. Leather boots. The Wild West. Cowboys have been
a subject of fascination for centuries, appearing in every
aspect of American pop culture from cliché Halloween
costumes to Hollywood blockbusters. However, the modern
perception of these equestrian cavaliers encapsulates only a
minuscule piece of the long, intertwining history of humans
and horses—a history that, according to recent archaeological
findings, could date back over five thousand years.
While evidence of equine domestication has been welldocumented
throughout history, proof of ridership and determination
of the practice’s exact origins have been difficult to establish. In a
paper published in Science Advances, a team of researchers from
Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and New York analyzed over
two hundred skeletal remains to unravel these mysteries. They found
the earliest bioanthropological evidence of horseback riding to date
in the skeletons of five Yamnaya individuals, a people noted for their
expansion across Eurasia during the Early Bronze Age in the third
millennium BC. Each skeleton was analyzed according to six specific
criteria indicative of “horsemanship syndrome.” The five skeletons
displayed at least four of the six traits, including wear on the pelvis
and femur, stress-induced vertebral degeneration, and alterations in
certain bone shapes and sizes.
The use of horses as a mode of transportation marked a dramatic
transition in societal evolution, dictating patterns of migration and
facilitating trade between previously isolated locations. So while the
first cowboys were not quite the gun-toting, saloon-loving buckaroos
we make them out to be, they—and their speedy, four-legged sidekicks
—may have been some of the most influential figures in history. ■
4 Yale Scientific Magazine May 2023 www.yalescientific.org