Animals drift when they enter a fluid (liquid or gas) and are transported to a new location by gravity or currents. Drift is best known from rivers and ocean currents, but can also occur on land, whenever organisms leave their former solid position, pass into the air, and are moved significant distances by the combined […]
The usage of the words “Eskimo” and “Inuit” is one of these cases in which, all of a sudden, we are told we have been saying something wrong all along. Lawrence Kaplan from the Alaska Native Language Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks explained that the words “Eskimo” and “Inuit” do not mean the […]
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Fish communicate to stay close to each other Fish use calls to stick together as a group, a new study suggests. Researchers played recordings of bigeye vocalizations for captive wild bigeyes, and noted that their own vocalizations increased and they swam more closely together than they did when no recordings were played. “This study means […]
In 1928, just two years after the formulation of quantum mechanics, the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld modified the classical free-electron model by treating the electrons according to quantum mechanics. But the new theory still contained the unrealistic assumption that the electrons do not interact with the charged lattice ions except to collide with them. As […]
The biological world is composed of dense, communicating, and difficult to understand ensembles. Animals living in groups –a school of fish, a flock of birds– have evolved to act in concert, a quality needed for coordinated movement. More complex than just moving together, group carrying is fairly rare in nature and only social spiders, dung […]
We love Mars. Nobody is sure about the exact reason, but we love it. Is it the red color that caught our attention long before the spacecrafts? Or is it the tall mountains and deep valleys they revealed? It is probably a mix of all of the above and much more. It is also the […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Ancient grooves may be evidence of dinosaur mating ritual Four sites found in Colorado exhibit fossilized grooves that may have been made by dinosaurs doing a bird-like mating dance more than 100 million years ago. Scientists say the gouges could have been made by theropods performing a mating ritual common to modern birds. The Washington […]
Phragmosis is a method by which an animal defends itself in its burrow by using its own body as a barrier. This term was coined by W.M. Wheeler in 1927 to describe a cryptic defensive technique employed by arthropods that use specially modified body structures to block nest entrances. A well example is the mygalomorph […]
Electrical energy is now the dominant form of energy consumption in industrialized countries and is an essential element in the operation of many of the devices we use every day. For decades, one of the most poorly understood yet most practical properties of a piece of solid matter was its ability, or lack of ability […]
Robots will be ubiquitous in the near future, few people would argue against that, with some authors even talking of a “ Cambrian Explosion of robotics ” . This bigger presence of robots in our daily life has accelerated the subfield of roboethics , which is trying to establish how we must design, use and […]