The robot fish in its natural environment. (Credit: James Pikul)
When it comes to designing better gizmos, efficiency is the name of the game. Why have two separate components to do two separate tasks, if you can have one do both? We have a whole bird-killing metaphor about how great it is to be efficient.
Well, what’s good for the goose, it turns out, is also good
for the robot fish.
A team of engineers at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania have created a soft fish-shap ...read more
The James Webb Space Telescope -- minus the telescope -- recently underwent another round of testing. (Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn)
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is NASA’s long-planned – and long-delayed – successor to Hubble. But after a recent spate of testing to mimic the extremes of space, it’s looking like the telescope is still on track for its 2021 launch date.
The telescope itself, along with its instrumentation, passed many of its final tests last year ...read more
(Credit: POLIGOONE/Shutterstock)
I don’t know who said “you are what you eat,” but it really doesn’t make sense. I am objectively not made of peanut butter and coffee, though I’m certain that would be my fate if the sentiment were true. That said, the general idea — that what we eat matters — seems to hold more and more weight as studies of our diet pile up. Now, researchers say there's yet another wrinkle to the question of what to eat, one rooted in ...read more
Wildfires blazing in Siberia, as seen by one of the Sentinel 2 satellites on June 11th. (Source: Copernicus Sentinel image data processed by Pierre Markuse)
I started writing this post last week after seeing the stunning satellite image above showing a blazing Siberian wildfire.
When I returned to finish the post today, I learned from a story in the Siberian Times that wildfires in this part of Russia's Sakha Republic are now threatening a spectacular landscape feature known among locals ...read more
A section of limestone riddled with burrows bored by a unique rock-eating shipworm. (Credit: Shipway et al 2019, Proc. R. Soc. B 20190434. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.0434)
What would a shipworm do if a shipworm didn't eat wood? The humble bivalve has long had outsized influence on both its environment and even the global economy. That's because, until now, every known species consumes wood, sometimes with destructive results.
A shipworm species new to science, however, tunnels th ...read more
One honeybee, ah ah ah... (Credit: yod67/Shutterstock)
Humans, monkeys, pigeons, fish and honeybees can all grasp the concept of a greater than or less than sign and choose between bigger or smaller quantities. Now, new research from a team led by Martin Giurfa at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France is the first to show that honeybees, like other vertebrates, can also recognize a specific value, not just a relative value. That means they know the number 3, instead of s ...read more
Solar flares and coronal mass ejections were more common when the sun was younger, but it may still have been quieter than many other stars like it. (Credit: NASA/SDO)
Stars, like humans, are more volatile when they’re young. As sunlike stars mature past their first billion years, they all tend to slow in their rotation, eventually converging to roughly the same period we see now in our sun: about 27 days for a star the same mass as our sun.
But when stars are young, they rotate mor ...read more
Dogs likely evolved the gesture in response to human pressure. (Credit: Fotyma/Shutterstock)
You know that look Fido gives you from underneath the dinner table? Those puppy dog eyes, researchers recently discovered, are something unique to domesticated dogs that evolved over the 30,000 or more years that we've coexisted.
In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers used dissections and behavioral analysis to compare the facial anato ...read more
Seconds-long periods of sleep, known as "microsleep," are common during mundane tasks like driving. While these unintended brain naps can be difficult to control, getting adequate sleep is the key to preventing them. (Credit: pathdoc/Shutterstock)
Have you ever spaced out during a meeting, but been jolted back to reality by the sound of your boss calling your name a few times? If you’ve ever been in this awkward situation, you might have experienced "microsleep."
This weird state of ...read more
An artist’s rendering of ancient Arctic hyenas belonging to the genus Chasmaporthetes, now known to have roamed Canada's Yukon Territory. (Credit: Julius T. Csotonyi)
You might associate hyenas with Africa's sprawling savannas, but the animals were once right at home above the Arctic Circle.
Modern hyenas generally stick to Africa. (A decreasing number of one species, the striped hyena, can be found on the edges of southwestern Asia.) However, back in the day, various now-extinct ...read more
