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This khaki-colored frog has white fringes on its legs and a spur on the heel, earning it the nickname “cowboy frog.” It looks pretty similar to another tree frog, the “convict tree frog,” but it doesn’t have the convict’s black and white stripes. Scientists from Conservation International discovered the cowboy frog on a small branch during a night survey in a swampy area of the Koetari River.

A new type of spiny catfish, henceforth known as the “armored catfish,” was about to be eaten as a snack until one of the scientists noted its unusual appearance. The local guide who was about to chow down was instead told to preserve the fish as a specimen. The team found a couple other types of catfish, too.

The team also found a new species of katydid, which they nicknamed the “Crayola katydid” for its bright colors. They are the only katydids known to employ chemical defenses, according to Conservation International. There’s a shiny water beetle and some damselfies to round out the list.

[Conservation International via BBC]

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Click to launch our guide to the upcoming year in science.

2012: THE YEAR IN SCIENCE

Garage Rocketeers Approach Orbit
Games Go Outside the Box
Now or Never for the Standard Model of Physics
China Steps Up
Congress Keeps Fiddling

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Is some research so dangerous it shouldn't be done at all?

The voluntary pause came a few weeks after an American advisory panel recommended censoring the research in the name of security. So it raises an interesting question — is some research just too dangerous to pursue? Not just for the scientists conducting it, but for the public in a post-9/11 world?

Voluntarily pausing science in the name of safety and public solace is certainly not common, but then neither is a potentially groundbreaking study into the mechanisms that could make bird flu more potent and more deadly. The decision, announced in Science and Nature, indicates influenza researchers want to quell public fears, but they also don’t want to censor their work.

Dr. Nancy Cox, chief of the Influenza Division at the Centers for Disease Control, said flu researchers will confer during the hiatus about how to proceed, including making modifications to security procedures or the biosafety requirements for labs doing this work. Flu is dangerous, but it’s not nearly as deadly as some of the other pathogens CDC studies, she noted.

“If you think of Ebola and Marburg, and some other pathogens with a high lethality, which are worked on in the lab and for which there aren’t antivirals and there aren’t vaccines, influenza falls into a little bit different category,” she said.

One of the two main labs at the center of this debate does not have a Biosafety Level 4 facility, the highest security level reserved for the most deadly pathogens. Issues like that will be a topic of discussion during the 60-day break.

“(The hiatus) is unusual, but because there was so much concern about the work, it was an appropriate action on the part of the laboratories that are involved in this type of research,” Cox said.

It does have some precedent, however, in a 1975 conference in which scientists agreed to pause research on recombinant DNA. That meeting, known as the Asilomar Conference, was organized to quell public concern, but also to allow scientists to agree among themselves about how best to proceed. At the time, recombinant DNA technology — the process of taking DNA from one organism, and recombining it with DNA from another — was still brand-new and researchers were still uncertain about the risks.

“There are always concerns about misuse of the products of research,” said Jeffrey Kahn, deputy director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. “Think about nanotechnology as another example, or genetically modified food. We like the benefits of these new technologies, but we always worry about he misuse, the misapplication, or the unintended consequences. The trick is, how do we oversee and prevent problematic outcomes, while still realizing the benefits of the technology?”

The flu moratorium stems from two separate studies prepared by scientists in the U.S. and the Netherlands (the latter having been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health) investigating how the avian influenza virus could mutate and become transmissible among mammals, including us. The main paper is by virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who engineered the genome of H5N1 to make a version that easily spreads among ferrets, the closest animal model of the human response to flu. After 10 virus generations, the mutated virus became airborne, infecting healthy ferrets who were housed near a sick one. The work was important because it disproves a previous assumption that avian flu could not easily adapt to mammals, requiring drastic changes to the virus’ genetic makeup that would render it unable to reproduce.

In a manuscript prepared last year, Fouchier describes his methods and processes, hoping to shed light on the ways in which the virus could mutate naturally. A separate paper by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Tokyo had similar results. The papers could help virologists look for vaccines or antiviral treatments. But some observers fear the work could create an extremely potent bioweapon, should the mutated virus escape from the lab — or should the work be replicated by someone with ill intentions. Interestingly, the moratorium letter (online here) does not address the latter concern, focusing instead on lab procedures.

“We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release,” the letter reads.

The Asilomar Conference also led to a hiatus and had similar goals, as scientists sought to regulate themselves before government bodies did it for them. Researchers were able to shape their own rules, so when the National Institutes of Health did create an oversight committee, scientists thought it was legitimate, recalled Alexander Capron, a professor at the University of Southern California and co-director of the Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics. Capron was a participant at Asilomar and sees several parallels between that meeting and the flu debate, he said. Along with mitigating physical risks in the lab, scientists need to balance the risks of publishing their research with the risks of not publishing it, and the precedent that would set.

“It’s much easier to ask what you can do to prevent physical risks from manifesting, than what you can do to prevent knowledge risks,” he said. “The only surefire way is to not disseminate the knowledge at all.”

But no one really wants that, said Kahn, who noted the public health value of understanding how H5N1 works.

“It’s really important to know that for the purpose of planning and preparedness, but it has all these potential risks associated with it,” he said. “If there weren’t any good scientific reason to do it, or good policy, we’d say, ‘It’s just mad scientist stuff.’ But it isn’t.”

Most researchers agree that after the moratorium, the work must go on.

“Understanding why some animal viruses jump into humans, and can be transmitted from human to human and others don’t, is one of the central questions we are trying to understand in the field of influenza,” said Cox, the CDC scientist. “There are probably multiple different pathways. Influenza is a very simple organism, but it’s also very complex in that it mutates very quickly, and with all those mutations come a danger. It’s a pathogen that really keeps those who study it on their toes.”

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In pursuit of fleet-footed prey, the northern goshawk wings through thick forest canopies and underbrush at breakneck speeds, dipping and diving to avoid colliding with trees or other obstacles. But it can only go so fast, apparently obeying an unspoken speed limit dictated not by biology, but by the density of its environment — beyond a certain threshold, it is certain to crash into something. This is an important lesson for makers of drones and other flying objects, according to researchers at MIT and Harvard.

Most drones fly relatively slowly, especially at lower altitudes where they might encounter obstacles and require plenty of time to react. Biologists at Harvard and roboticists at MIT have been studying flight behaviors in goshawks and other birds, aiming to improve algorithms that would allow unmanned aerial vehicles to cruise more quickly through forests, urban areas or other cluttered landscapes.

Goshawks don’t necessarily see everything ahead on their path, so they must judge the density of the forest and assume they’ll find an opening. In an interview with MIT News, aeronautics professor Emilio Frazzoli aptly compares it to backcountry skiing. You don’t always know where the next tree stands, but you cruise downhill anyway and assume you’ll be able to navigate around it when the time comes. Beyond a certain speed, though, you might not have time to stop or turn before hitting the as-yet-unknown tree. So (if you’re smart) you obey an innate, self-imposed, environment-dictated speed limit. Programming this into a robot is difficult, however.

Frazzoli and some grad students devised a differential equation expressing all the possible positions of a bird at a given location at a given speed. Then they developed a model of a forest, using statistical distribution models used by ecologists. Then the team calculated the probability that a bird would hit a tree while flying at a certain speed. They figured out that for any given density of trees (or other obstacles of choice), there exists a speed above which there is no “infinite collision-free trajectory,” as MIT News explains. The bird will surely crash, because there’s no way for it to avoid the obstacles. But below that threshold, things should be fine.

“If I fly slower than that critical speed, then there is a fair possibility that I will actually be able to fly forever, always avoiding the trees,” Frazzoli said.

This theoretical speed limit equation could be extrapolated to any obstacle-filled environment — an actual forest, a city with tall buildings, and so on. So a drone could fly forever unimpeded, so long as a drone obeys its own speed limit.