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
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
