The male praying mantis (Hierodula tenuidentata) eating a guppy fish (Poecilia reticulata) starting from the tail, while the fish is still alive and breathing in the water. (Credit: Rajesh Puttaswamaiah)
There’s nowhere you can hide from the praying mantis. The ferocious insects are known to feast on a veritable buffet of living creatures, including everything from butterflies and newts to snakes, mice and hummingbirds. And now, just when you thought it was safe to live in the ...read more
(Credit: g-stockstudio/shutterstock)
Firms in competitive industries are often seen as cutthroat and intense places to work. But while the work might be intense, the employees tend to trust and cooperate with each other, according to a study published Wednesday in Science Advances. The high stakes appear to bring about group cohesiveness, which might have deep evolutionary roots.
The Canadian and American researchers examined several workplace surveys for America, such as the US Census of Firm ...read more
(Credit: Aerovista Luchtfotografie/Shutterstock)
An adult albatross can spend days without ever touching the ground. Long wings that lock into place provide enormous amounts of lift. And a keen sense for thermals and air currents lets the birds soar with little energy expenditure. Sleeping, eating, drinking and bathing all take place on the wing, over the course of journeys that can span up to 10,000 miles.
Entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg wish they could fly like an albatross ...read more
Scientists studied captured shipments of ivory tusks and managed to tie them to cartels. (Credit: Joe Mercier/shutterstock)
Nearly 40,000 elephants die each year from illegal poaching orchestrated by large criminal organizations. The perpetrators are after ivory — the white, teeth-like material that forms the main part of elephants’ tusks. It also funds an illicit $4 billion annual industry. Now, an international team of scientists has used forensic genetics to identify three major ...read more
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Every single episode of MacGyver would have been ruined had he gotten his hands on a few patches of a new robotic skin developed by researchers at Yale University.
A diversion to distract cartel enforcers? Wrap a stick of dynamite in robotic skin and it’ll walk itself around the corner and explode. Snatch keys from the warden’s neck? Stick a few of those skins together to make a robotic arm. Escape from a flying airplane? Well, in that situation he tied a parachute to a con ...read more
September 2006 MODIS image of southern California taken by the Aqua satellite. NASA Earth Observatory.
The revolution in how we survey and image the surface of the Earth has had profound impacts on the geosciences. This shouldn’t be a shock to anyone as that’s what geoscientists do — study the Earth — and as we get more and better data on the planet and its surface, the better our understanding will become (and the more questions we can ask). Few technological leaps have ...read more
A new study of stars in the Milky Way reveals evidence of a cosmic near miss collision with a smaller galaxy sometime in the last billion years. (Credit: ESA)
Our Milky Way galaxy holds hundreds of billions of stars. Many of those suns were formed locally from clouds of gas — at the rate of handful every year —over billions of years. But our home galaxy gets stars another way, too. It steals them.
The Milky Way has cannibalized smaller galaxies throughout the eons, adding them to o ...read more
