Brood parasites are organisms that rely on others to raise their young. The strategy appears among fishes, birds and insects, including some species of ants. Slave-making ants capture brood from other ant species to increase the worker force of their colony through regular, destructive raids that frequently finish with the killing of many workers and […]
Newton suggested that the apparent colours of natural objects depend on which colour is most strongly reflected or scattered to the viewer by the object. In general, there is no simple way of predicting from the surface structure, chemical composition, etc., what colours a substance will reflect or scatter. However, the blue colour of the […]
We got it wrong. Media have outlined a rosy picture of Oxytocin as the “love hormone” that floods our brain when we interact with toddlers, puppies and beloved ones. However, scientific evidence portrays a dark side of Oxytocin, which better matches the ambivalences of human nature. In addition, Oxytocin has a long time ignored sibling […]
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Lots of dark matter may lurk inside dwarf galaxy Triangulum II, a dwarf galaxy that doesn’t have any star-forming regions, may harbor a vast amount of dark matter. The discovery was made while attempting to measure Triangulum II’s mass. “The total mass I measured was much, much greater than the mass of the total number […]
Ants are among the most diverse, abundant and ecologically significant organisms on earth. They have colonized almost every landmass on Earth and the only places lacking indigenous ants are Antarctica and a few remote or inhospitable islands. Ants thrive in most ecosystems and may form 15–25% of the terrestrial animal biomass. Although their species richness […]
We now refer to light as the form electromagnetic radiation to which the human eye is sensitive and on which our visual awareness of the universe and its contents relies. If we want to go a step forward we could say that its macroscopic behaviour is best explained by a set of differential equations proposed […]
In 1912, a French chemist named Louis Camille Maillard published a paper to explain what happens when amino acids react with sugars at elevated temperatures . And I guess you are thinking: so what? Well, it turns out that this chemical reaction is one of the most important flavor-producing reactions in cooking since produces what […]
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Stability improved by allowing plasma closer to fusion reactor walls Researchers studying magnetic confinement fusion have found that allowing plasma to get closer to reactor walls may make the system more stable. It was a scary proposition because if their experiment didn’t work, it would have melted the reactor. Teams from China and the US […]
Mutualistic interactions are ubiquitous phenomena occurring between many classes of organisms . The mutually beneficial relationship between ants and honeydew-producing mealybugs (hemipterans) is a very well-studied example. Mealybugs belong to the family Pseudococcidae and they are unarmored scale insects found in moist and warm climates. The ants collect and exploit the honeydew produced by the […]
We know that incident light can provoke a strong optical response in metallic nanostructures due to the excitation of resonant plasmonic modes, i.e, the electrons in the metal become excited by the photons in the incident light and oscillate collectively. One of the most interesting properties of plasmon resonances is their associated enhancement and confinement […]