A cricket’s constant chirping may seem a bit ballsy, but just wait until you hear about their testicles. For at least one species of cricket, the tuberous bushcricket (Platycleis affinis), the testicles take up 14 percent of the insect’s body mass!
The Daily Mail made a stunning observation:
To put this into perspective, a man with the same proportions would have to carry testicles weighing as much as five bags of sugar each.
The discovery, made by a team led by Karim Vahed, was publ ...read more
Whales don’t wear sunscreen. And because these massive sea mammals must surface to breathe, they are being exposed to more and more ultraviolet radiation sneaking through the weakened ozone layer. According to Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, lead author of a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, some whales are getting serious sunburns at an alarming rate.
From 2007 to 2009, her team sampled fin, sperm, and blue whales in the sun-drenched Gulf of California, which is the long, skinny ...read more
The Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Montreal was great fun. For one thing it was in Montreal; for another I got to hang out with Doctor Free-Ride; and as a bonus there were some interesting and provocative talks about the nature of time. I chatted with Tim Maudlin, Huw Price, Craig Callender, Nick Huggett, Chris Wuttrich, David Wallace, John Norton, and other people I always learn from when I talk to. Philosophers always force you to think hard about things.
Here are the slides ...read more
Some insects, such as ants, lead famously social lives, with massive colonies of individuals, cooperating for a common good. These insects also tend to have unusually large brains. For over 150 years, this link has been tacitly taken as support for the idea that social animals need extra smarts to keep track of all their many relationships. But Sarah Farris from West Virginia University and Susanne Schulmeister from the American Museum of Natural History aren’t convinced.
After comparing ...read more
Last month, a new kind of aquatic robot took a test cruise through the waters of Monterey Bay off California. The Tethys autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), developed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), could be just the thing to circumvent some of the problems that have been holding back marine research bots:
The two types of AUVs that researchers have relied on in the past both had their drawbacks. Propeller-driven vehicles could travel at a relatively quick pace an ...read more
