Brown tree snakes, Boiga irregularis, are one of Guam's most successful - and devastating - invasive species.
That's prompted an international team of scientists, led by the University of Queensland, to study what's made the species so successful. And their venom and traveling ability is the key, according to research published this month in the Journal of Molecular Evolution.
With a venom that’s 100 times more toxic to birds than mammals, brown tree snakes have devastated Guam’s ...read more
In a magnetic milestone to make Nikola Tesla proud, scientists have created the strongest controllable magnetic field ever produced.
Energy crackled and sparks flew back when physicists from the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo powered up their 400 million amp megagauss generator system. That’s hundreds of times the current of an average lightning bolt.
The device was created by University of Tokyo physicist Shojiro Takeyama and his team. And it generated ...read more
Fruits come in a glorious rainbow of colors. Raspberries, kumquats, lemons, avocados, blueberries, figs; the colorful array rivals a 96-pack of Crayola crayons. But scientists have long debated whether fruits evolved their vibrant pigments to entice animals to eat them and spread their seeds. After all, some fruit eating — or frugivorous — seed-dispersers are color blind. Now, researchers show fruit color evolved in response to the visual abilities of local fruit-feasting animals.
An ...read more
In what is perhaps the strangest update we’ve heard from ecologists in a while, a Brazilian researcher has documented – on video – a moth feeding on the tears of a sleeping bird.
The researcher, Leandro João Carneiro de Lima Moraes from the National Institute of Amazonian Research, was conducting amphibian and reptile surveys in the Brazilian Amazon last November when he noticed the behavior – twice in one night – and got it on camera.
Though a human observ ...read more
It has been quiet at Kīlauea in Hawaii. The eruption on the lower East Rift Zone that captured the planet's attention over the summer trickled to a stop in late August and since then there hasn't been much going on at all at the giant shield volcano. In fact, the Hawaii Volcano Observatory reports that carbon dioxide emissions at Kīlauea are lower than anything they've seen in over a decade. Earthquakes and collapses are now infrequent on the volcano and nary a lava flow can be se ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine