A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. Hear the word “antenna” and you might think about rabbit ears on the top of an old TV or the wire that picks up radio signals for a car. But an antenna can be much smaller – even invisible. No matter its shape or size, an antenna is crucial for communication, transmitting and receiving radio signals between devices. As portable electronics become increasingly common, antennas must, too. Wearable monitors, flex ...read more

Brown tree snakes, Boiga irregularis, are one of Guam's most successful - and devastating - invasive species. That's prompted an international team of scientists, led by the University of Queensland, to study what's made the species so successful. And their venom and traveling ability is the key, according to research published this month in the Journal of Molecular Evolution. With a venom that’s 100 times more toxic to birds than mammals, brown tree snakes have devastated Guam’s ...read more

In a magnetic milestone to make Nikola Tesla proud, scientists have created the strongest controllable magnetic field ever produced. Energy crackled and sparks flew back when physicists from the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo powered up their 400 million amp megagauss generator system. That’s hundreds of times the current of an average lightning bolt. The device was created by University of Tokyo physicist Shojiro Takeyama and his team. And it generated ...read more

Fruits come in a glorious rainbow of colors. Raspberries, kumquats, lemons, avocados, blueberries, figs; the colorful array rivals a 96-pack of Crayola crayons. But scientists have long debated whether fruits evolved their vibrant pigments to entice animals to eat them and spread their seeds. After all, some fruit eating — or frugivorous — seed-dispersers are color blind. Now, researchers show fruit color evolved in response to the visual abilities of local fruit-feasting animals. An ...read more

In what is perhaps the strangest update we’ve heard from ecologists in a while, a Brazilian researcher has documented – on video – a moth feeding on the tears of a sleeping bird. The researcher, Leandro João Carneiro de Lima Moraes from the National Institute of Amazonian Research, was conducting amphibian and reptile surveys in the Brazilian Amazon last November when he noticed the behavior – twice in one night – and got it on camera. Though a human observ ...read more

It has been quiet at Kīlauea in Hawaii. The eruption on the lower East Rift Zone that captured the planet's attention over the summer trickled to a stop in late August and since then there hasn't been much going on at all at the giant shield volcano. In fact, the Hawaii Volcano Observatory reports that carbon dioxide emissions at Kīlauea are lower than anything they've seen in over a decade. Earthquakes and collapses are now infrequent on the volcano and nary a lava flow can be se ...read more

There's Big Bird and then there's really big birds. The elephant birds of Madagascar, which went extinct about a thousand years ago, have long been counted among the largest birds ever to walk the planet. But a second look at the bones they left behind has led researchers to rethink the birds' family tree — and just how big they got. Before we get into details of the new research, here's the tidbit I know you want: Newly designated species Vorombe titan, an extinct flightless bird f ...read more

Where did Mars’ moons come from? It’s a question that is deceptively difficult to answer, with two competing theories: Either the moons were captured, or they came from Mars itself. Though the obvious answer remains elusive, new “old” evidence uncovered from within 20-year-old data indicates that Mars’ moon Phobos may have formed following an impact on the Red Planet. The evidence, published September 24 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, comes from ...read more

For decades, scientists have been scanning Mars’ surface for signs of ancient life. But by digging a little bit deeper, they’ve come across historic habitable zones in unexpected places. After expanding their search, a team of researchers found that the Red Planet’s ancient subsurface could have housed microbial life for hundreds of millions of years. By borrowing hydrogen electrons from water, microbes could’ve had enough energy to not only survive underground ...read more