Europe’s olive trees are suffering. The culprit — Xylella fastidiosa, a devastating bacterium that’s common in the Americas — can infect up to 350 different plant species. The pathogen made its way across the pond only recently. Farmers in Europe have to move fast to stop its spread (usually by sap-eating bugs), or else risk destruction of their crops. In response, experts have developed an aerial remote-imaging system that scans orchards to pick out infected trees before ...read more

A mantis shrimp, fists at the ready. (Credit: Beverly Speed/Shutterstock) Mantis shrimp — four-inch long seafloor crustaceans — knock out prey with a punch that accelerates faster than a .22 caliber bullet. Now, researchers have figured out exactly how the tiny stomatopods wind up their forceful blows. It’s all thanks to a double-layered saddle-shaped spring made from surprisingly brittle material. “If you asked a mechanical engineer to make a spring that can store a lo ...read more

This visualization of the Hyperion proto-supercluster, discovered using the VIMOS instrument on the ESO’s VLT, was generated using real observations of the growing structure. (Credit: ESO/L. Calçada & Olga Cucciati et al.) There are clusters of galaxies, and then there are superclusters of galaxies. In the local universe, the Virgo and Laniakea Superclusters reign supreme, the latter stretching some 500 million light-years across and containing about 100,000 gal ...read more

A reconstruction of a young Gorgosaurus eating the ceratopsian. (Credit: Marie-Hélène Trudel-Aubry) As heavily armored as Triceratops and its cousins often were, they were far from invulnerable. That’s apparent in a new fossil scientists have unearthed from a juvenile member of the horned dinosaurs. It’s got obvious bite marks in it that might have come from a tyrannosaur or raptor. Paleontologists examined a fossil roughly 76.5 million years old excavated from the bad ...read more

A team of researchers used this chip to create the first-ever space-based Bose-Einstein condensate. (Credit: DLR) Space-Based Matter By blasting a miniature, experimental chip into space, scientists have created the first space-based Bose-Einstein condensate. The feat could allow for the more precise exploration of gravitational waves, dark matter, and add to our fundamental understanding of physics. Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are a state of matter in which a cloud of atoms is ...read more

A photo taken during the Orionid meteor shower. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) A Gift From Halley This weekend, go outside and look up in the dark hours before dawn to witness the annual Orionid meteor shower, which will hit its peak overnight on October 21-22. You may have seen a few stray meteors zooming across the sky, leftover Draconids whose peak passed earlier this month or leftover meteors from the South Taurid shower that’s still ongoing. But this week, and more specifically th ...read more

(Credit: Stephan Junek) Pity the cuttlefish that tries to play poker. Where humans might blush when embarrassed or go white when frightened, cuttlefish wear their thoughts on their skins much more literally. Our own color transformations are caused by nothing more than changes in the blood flowing right under our skin, and it’s a poor marker of what our actual thoughts are. Cuttlefish, by contrast, are covered in up to millions of tiny pigment-filled cells called chromatophores. Muscles ...read more

(Credit: Oleksandr Lipko/Shutterstock) Dandelion blowing may be about as close to a universal experience as there is. Kids and adults alike delight in huffing the white fluffy seeds from a dried sample of Taraxacum officinale, and watching them fly away. But as with all things in nature, it only happens that way because it works. Dandelion seeds can travel for miles before setting down, making them particularly efficient fliers. And scientists didn’t really know why. Other plant seeds, s ...read more

Neutron star mergers are believed to generate jets that could produce gamma-ray bursts detected at Earth. This diagram shows each step of the merger process, including the formation of a black hole when the two neutron stars collide and the resulting jet. (Credit: NASA/AEI/ZIB/M. Koppitz and L. Rezzolla) Co-author Geoffrey Ryan of the University of Maryland (UMD) and the Joint Space-Science Institute, who called the events “cosmic look-alikes,” said, “They look the same, act ...read more

This funky-colored fish was nothing to trifle with: Researchers say newly-described Late Jurassic Piranhamesodon pinnatomus was the piranha of its day. (Credit: Jura Museum) Jumping right out of nightmares and into my heart (it’s kind of cute, isn’t it?), meet Fincutter, the Bavarian Piranha. Less than three inches long, the Late Jurassic fossil is the earliest ray-finned fish with flesh-ripping teeth — and paleontologists say it was preserved alongside some of its prey. Piran ...read more