A praying mantis making a meal of a ruby-throated hummingbird. (Credit: “What’s That Bug?”/Randy Anderson)
Poor hummingbirds. The fragile, fleet-winged birds often don’t make it past their first year of life as they are tasty snacks for cats, large-mouth bass, snakes, lizards…you get the idea. Now, perhaps surprisingly, we can add praying mantises to that macabre list.
A new paper reviewing the avian death-literature finds that praying mantises are enth ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
As a kid, Mouad Mkamel played with pet snakes, vipers and scorpions. As a Ph.D. student at University King Hassan II of Casablanca, Mkamel is now breeding scorpions and milking their venom using a robot he designed.
At $7,000 to $8,000 per gram, scorpion venom is one of the most expensive liquids in the world. Mkamel believes scorpion venom has the potential to “create a new generation of medicine,” estimating that there are about five million unstudied compo ...read more
A strange new paper reports “abnormal” brain activity in 10 patients with electrohypersensitivity (EHS) – a controversial condition allegedly triggered by electromagnetic fields from devices such as phones and power-lines.
But the methods used in this study were very odd.
According to the authors, Gunnar Heuser and Sylvia A. Heuser, the ten patients all suffered from symptoms such as
Headaches, impairment of cognitive function, tremors, weakness, and others. Multi-system comp ...read more
This animation consists of false-color images of the Russian coast and adjoining East Siberian Sea acquired by NASA’s Aqua satellite. On June 18, the offshore waters were choked with sea ice. By July 6, 2017, a lot of it had broken up. In the false-color scheme, land is green, black is indicative of open water, and ice is a light turquoise. The darker blue prominent in the June 18th image probably is indicative of melting snow and ice that’s causing liq ...read more
Mount Sharp on Mars, as imaged by the Curiosity rover. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Life on Mars … does it exist? Depending on when you last checked in with news about the Red Planet, you could probably be convinced either way. As we discover more and more about the composition and planetary dynamics of Mars, there has been cause for both elation and disappointment regarding the likelihood that organic life could manage to eke out a living on the planet.
The pendulum swung back towar ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
