Robat can’t fly. But the autonomous robot can use echolocation to survey its environment. (Robat is a fully-autonomous bat-like terrestrial robot that uses echolocation to navigate its environment. (Credit: Itamar Eliakim)
Bats can fly nimbly at night in large part because echolocation helps them “see” in the dark. Now researchers say they have created the first robot to use echolocation like a bat to help it explore its surroundings fully autonomously.
Bats echolocate by emi ...read more
Researchers witness a one billion year old galaxy blow molecular gas to its outskirts to avoid an overproduction of stars. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Spilker; NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello; AURA/NSF
The years following the Big Bang were undoubtedly an exciting time in our cosmological history, with galaxies birthing hundreds or even thousands of hot new stars each year. But despite rapid star formation being exhilarating, it’s far from sustainable.
Star Formation Secrets
Re ...read more
Adding wind and solar energy farms in Africa – and elsewhere – could bring increased rainfall, according to a new study. (Credit: Nebojsa Markovic/shutterstock)
Scientists want to power the world with solar and wind energy, a feat they say is possible with large-scale wind and solar farms. Now, an international team of researchers says that building such an energy factory in the Sahara desert would come with a surprising boon: more rainfall.
The discovery means feeding the global p ...read more
A rare sight: Two space shuttles prepped for launch simultaneously; Atlantis sits in the foreground on Launch Pad A, while Endeavor sits in the background on Launch Pad B. (Credit: NASA/Troy Cryder)
There was, at one point, a backup shuttle prepared. When the space shuttle Atlantis was launched for the STS-125 mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, the Endeavour was also ready as a backup in case something went wrong and the crew of the Atlantis needed to ...read more
Valentin Bondarenko, the burned man doctors thought was a killed cosmonaut. via Astronautix.
There’s an ongoing fascination with the idea of phantom cosmonauts. The story goes something like this: a handful of Soviets launched into space before Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth, but because they all died their missions and deaths were covered up. The stories are myth. No one flew in space before Gagarin. Even X-15 flights above the Karman line came after 1962. But like any enduring myth, the ...read more
Ethnobotanist Benito Treviño at his property, Rancho Lomitas, located 8miles north of Rio Grande City, Texas. (Credit: James Roper)
This story originally appeared in bioGraphic.
On a humid May afternoon beneath the shade cloth of the plant nursery on his South Texas ranch, Benito Treviño leaned down, magnifying glasses perched on his nose above an extravagant salt-and-pepper moustache, and used his pen knife to remove a bulbous growth from the top of a baseball-sized, dome-shaped ...read more
(Credit: Sirirat/Shutterstock)
As the crisis of antibiotic resistance deepens, researchers are looking for new ways to combat infectious diseases. One solution proposed by UCLA researchers: When one drug won’t work, try two. Or three, four or five.
Seeing What Sticks
In a new paper in Nature Systems Biology and Applications, scientists take a look at eight common antibiotics and run through thousands of combinations involving anywhere from two to five of them. They uncovered numerous com ...read more
Researchers excavate insect fossils from a rich dig site called the Karamay outcrop in China. (Credit: Daran Zheng)
Around 250 million years ago, a massive extinction event known as the “Great Dying” wiped out nearly every organism on Earth. Scientists know plants and animals bounced back a few million years later and exploded in diversity, but what about insects? These days they’re the most diverse group of organisms on Earth with estimates of as many as 30 million species.
...read more
Saturn’s hexagon swirling at the planet’s north pole.(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton University)
Above Saturn’s north pole, clouds swirl in a distinct and stunning hexagonal shape. Discovered by NASA’s Voyager mission in 1981, Saturn’s hexagon is striking to behold, and one new study suggests that this six-sided vortex may actually be hundreds of kilometers tall.
After the Voyager mission pushed human exploration far out into the solar system and, subsequent ...read more
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to extract natural gas, pumps water into the ground. That water can cause earthquakes. (Credit: Jens Lambert/shutterstock)
A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation.
Earthquakes in the central and eastern United States have increased dramatically in the last decade as a result of human activities. Enhanced oil recovery techniques, including dewatering and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have made accessible large quantities of oil a ...read more
