Back in the late 1980s, a Canadian engineer called Tad McGeer built a remarkable pair of mechanical legs that were unpowered, had no actuators, no sensors and no computer control. But set them in motion down a slight incline and they started to walk with the lazy rolling gait of a gunslinging cowboy. By contrast, robotic legs are packed with sensors to monitor the position of each joint, computer processors to plan the trajectory of every movement and actuators to push the limbs into position. A ...read more
The extensive charcoal cave art at the Gura Sireh Cave on the island of Borneo appears to reflect decades of frontier violence, according to a new analysis.Cave art continued in Southeast Asia until the relatively recent past, the new paper says. Scientists carbon-dated some of Gura Sireh’s drawings to a period between 1670 and 1830. At the time, the indigenous hill tribes, the Bidayuh, suffered at the hands of the local Malay elites, who ruled the countryside.The cave art at Gura Sireh is onl ...read more
In the 1790s, George Shaw faced something of a mystery. As a keeper of the natural history department of the British Museum (which later became the Natural History Museum), Shaw had already spent some time examining samples of exotic wildlife coming from the newly colonized and largely unexplored continent of Australia.But around 1799, Shaw was presented with a pelt and a drawing of an Australian creature that seemed to be too exotic. Its physical features were so astonishing, he and others init ...read more
Animals can suffer from many of the same mental illnesses that humans do, such as anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But there’s one mental illness that, at least as far as we can tell, that animals don’t get: schizophrenia. Schizophrenia and Animals Admittedly, it would be difficult to know if an animal were suffering from schizophrenia. The National Library of Medicine describes the symptoms of schizophrenia as including hall ...read more
The creatures of the open ocean are often flashy, in both an abstract and literal sense, thanks to the flickering luminosity of many marine organisms. But maybe more fantastic than glittering squid and glowing, frilled fish are a group of animals that resemble nothing more than globs of gelatin or tangles of twine. Drifting through the mysterious depths of the water, siphonophores reach surprising lengths, and rule as some of the longest animals in the world.[embedded content]What Are Siphonopho ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine