Snakes alive! Preserved in a piece of amber about the size of a small potato, a tiny snake hatchling — less than two inches long — is unprecedented in the fossil record. At nearly 100 million years old, the baby snake's remains provide researchers with significant new information about the animals' development and global distribution. But wait, there's more...
The early Late Cretaceous hatchling, from Myanmar's northern Kachin province, was donated to rese ...read more
A new origami-inspired robotic claw that looks like a cross between a flower and a crab pincer could help marine biologists capture delicate underwater organisms currently unknown to science.
The oceans are the largest and least-explored habitats on Earth, with some estimates suggesting that up to a million unknown species lurk within its deepest waters. Marine biologists typically use submarines or remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to grab or scoop life from the seafloor, but plucking se ...read more
We’re not always the same person. The jokes you tell at home aren’t necessarily the ones you tell at work, and I don’t know about you, but I certainly talked differently around my grandmother than I did around my friends. Linguistics people call this tendency code-switching. People are complicated, multi-faceted, and some situations bring out certain qualities in us — it makes sense.
But we’re not the ...read more
Two robots traverse the desert floor. Explosions from a decades-old conflict have left a pockmarked and unstable territory, though many more improvised bombs lie concealed in its vast reaches. Sunlight splays off the beaten edges of Optimus, the smaller robot. Its motors whir as its claw grasps an unusual orb lying by its side. If Optimus were programmed to hope, it would hope the object was just a rock and not another bomb. It couldn’t afford to take many more hits, and its a ...read more
Think back to the earliest memory you have. How old were you? Three, maybe 2? Younger? If it’s the latter, you’re not alone. Problem is, you’re probably imagining it.
Most brain experts agree we’re not really capable of forming full, autobiographical memories until we’re a little more than 3 years old; our brains just aren’t that sophisticated yet. But a new paper published in Psy ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine