Nature shares a study that found that bumblebees somehow communicate the solutions to complex puzzles to each other, something that only humans were thought to do. Instead, the insects… Read the rest “Bumblebees teach each other.”
Wired reveals a very strange insect-monitoring device called DAS, or “distributed acoustic sensing,” normally used to track vibrations made by seismic shifts and volcanic… Read the rest “Cicadas are so loud, they cause fiberoptic-cable interference.”
A raspberry beetle and its favorite fruit, from a very special category on Wikimedia Commons.
We do love an encyclopedia.
This is a plant bug. That’s the technical term – it’s part of that group of insects called “true bugs,” the family Miridae; plant bugs are the subfamily … Read the rest “Science Art: Habitus images of Chimairacoris lakshmiae, 2015.”
Science News brings tidings from Central Africa, where painted lady butterflies born in Europe spend their winters in the longest migration of any butterfly:
… Read the rest “The last leg of the longest butterfly migration has been mapped at last.”Pinpointing exactly where
Thanks to an unexpected gift from an old friend, I was just reading an article in the print edition of Scientific American about the Sora people of eastern India, who have a unique culture … Read the rest “Science Art: Papillons, from Larousse Universe, 1922”
The National Science Foundation follows researchers taking a second look at “junk” DNA – the genes that don’t seem to do anything and instead just sit in a genome… Read the rest “Butterfly wing-patterns come from ancient DNA, switched around by junk.”
The National Science Foundation puts a spotlight on Tufts University, where researchers have taken proteins from the cocoons of silk moths and used them to create a new water-repellent… Read the rest “Silk for Teflon. Non-stick silk. Silk without friction.”
New Scientist reveals an accidental discovery that happened when a passing swarm of bees got close to a weather station on a clear day – and the sensors noted a jump in atmospheric electricity… Read the rest “A bee swarm can generate 8 times more electricity than a storm cloud.”
MIT Technology Review offers a strange solution to a serious problem. They’ve got robot bees who can dance inside a bee hive to direct workers to pesticide-free flower patches:
… Read the rest “Robot honeybees can steer hives to safer flowers.”After
Reuters reports on a painstaking headcount that proves that for every one of the nearly 8 billion humans on Earth, there are 2.5 million ants:
… Read the rest “In case you ever wondered, there are 20 quadrillion ants in the world. And that makes them important.”“Ants certainly play a very central role
Rice University robotics engineers are playing with dead things – spiders, to be precise – and say they’ve come up with a breakthrough in precision picker-uppers by… Read the rest ““Necrobotic” spiders grab things more precisely than machine fingers.”
Science News takes a long whiff of a chemical that smells like oranges and flowers that’s given off by people (and other mammals) infected with dengue and Zika. The chemical seems … Read the rest “The orange-blossom odor of mosquito-borne diseases… actually attracts mosquitoes.”
These are beetles, mostly from southern Asia except the last one, Dexoris, which is from Sierra Leone. These specific beetles became British (perhaps posthumously) and were recorded … Read the rest “Science Art: Lycidae, Plate XVIII, Edw. A. Smith, 1879”
This is a collection of bits and pieces (including “male genital armature” in 1s and 1t) of Pseudotremia cavernarum, the cave millipede. Yes, the researchers got up close … Read the rest “Science Art: Lysiopetalum Cavernarum, Etc., Emerton & Packard, del., 1888.”
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