Lapping up as much nectar as possibleRebeccaBloomPhoto/Getty By Leah Crane Some bats use their hairy tongues to slurp up nectar from flowers, and now we know why they’re so good at drinking. The spacing of their tongue hairs has evolved to be almost exactly optimal for sucking up as much nectar as possible. To figure […]
Many Bornean orangutans are the victims of deliberate killingTim Laman / National Geographic / Getty By Andy Coghlan Borneo’s orangutan population has halved in just 16 years. Worse, it was not a tragic by-product of the growth of farming, as many had believed. Instead, most of the lost orangutans were deliberately killed. “It’s not a […]
Hair today, damaging the climate tomorrowFairfax Media via Getty Say air pollution and we tend to think of car exhausts, large factories and open fires. But in Western cities, the biggest source of air pollution is something else entirely: household items like your deodorant and shampoo. A team including Brian McDonald and Jessica Gilman of […]
Top Story Since the discovery of the remarkable properties of graphene, scientists have increasingly focused research on the many other 2-D materials possible, both those found in nature and those concocted in the lab. However, growing high-quality, crystalline 2-D materials at scale has proven a significant challenge. A pair of papers published online in two […]
Top Story Researchers have developed a new type of malleable, self-healing and fully recyclable “electronic skin” that has applications ranging from robotics and prosthetic development to better biomedical devices. Electronic skin, known as e-skin, is a thin, translucent material that can mimic the function and mechanical properties of human skin. A number of different types […]
Top Story In many modern animated movies, the trick to achieving realistic movements for individual characters and objects lies in motion-capture technology. This process often involves someone wearing a tracking suit covered in small, colored balls while a camera captures the position of those colored balls, which is then used to represent how the person […]
Top Story While serious violations like those in the Flint, Michigan, crisis are rare, ensuring reliable access to safe drinking water poses challenges for communities across the country. Researchers found that between 1982 and 2015, 9 million to 45 million people annually were affected by water quality issues, and that low-income, rural regions were most […]
Top Story While serious violations like those in the Flint, Michigan, crisis are rare, ensuring reliable access to safe drinking water poses challenges for communities across the country. Researchers found that between 1982 and 2015, 9 million to 45 million people annually were affected by water quality issues, and that low-income, rural regions were most […]
An unknown worldMario Tama / Getty By Jessica Hamzelou AN EXPEDITION to an unexplored, newly revealed Antarctic ecosystem began this week. An international team set off to study a mysterious area of the ocean that has been concealed for thousands of years. The ecosystem was hidden under the Larsen C ice shelf for 120,000 years. […]
When’s the next big one?NASA/NOAA By Alice Klein “It was blowing a perfect hurricane, the squalls coming down in regular gusts… the sea at this time running mountains high, and very broken.” That was one of the last things written in the logbook of a ship called the Catherine Hill, before a giant storm drove […]