Fruit flies in the flight performance assay work to control their descent after an abrupt drop into a flight column. Credit: Spierer AN, et al., 2021, PLOS Genetics Flies have developed excellent flying skills thanks to a set of complicated interactions between numerous genes influencing wing shape, muscle function, and nervous system development, as...
U Mon's primary star, an elderly yellow supergiant, has around twice the Sun's mass but has billowed to 100 times the Sun's size. Scientists know less about the companion, the blue star in the background of this illustration, but they think it's of similar mass and much younger than the primary. Credit: Credit: NASA's...
In this schematic, the teal balls represent boron and the red balls are hydrogen. Credit: Northwestern University Northwestern University researchers have, for the first time, created borophane—atomically thin boron that is stable at standard temperatures and air pressures. Researchers have long been excited by the promise of borophene—a single-atom-thick sheet of boron—because of its...
Tagged peregrine falconMust credit Andrew Dixon. Credit: Andrew Dixon A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Cardiff University say they have found the strongest evidence yet of a "migration gene" in birds. The team identified a single gene associated with migration in peregrine falcons by tracking them via satellite technology and combining...
The Andean condor is one of the largest birds of prey in the world Rosendo Quira silently shakes a medicinal plant to attract a condor to the bait. The bird of prey glides through the clouds over Colombia towards a mountain pass some 3,200 meters above the sea. As this scene plays out, a...
The Atala butterfly (Eumaeus atala) and its five closest relatives in the genus Eumaeus display their toxicity. This sextet's toxicity comes from what they eat as caterpillars: plants called cycads that have been around since before dinosaurs roamed the Earth and contain a potent liver toxin called cycasin. New research published in the Feb....
Infographic created by van Zinnicq Bergmann. As it turns out, poop can tell you a lot about a shark's diet. Traditional methods to determine the diet of a shark aren't very pleasant. With a living shark, its stomach can be partially pulled out through its mouth for a quick visual examination—which is mostly done...
Soil researcher Adrienne Keller installing an ingrowth core at one of the forest plots. Credit: Rich Phillips, Indiana University Trees are often heralded as the heroes of environmental mitigation. They remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which slows the pace of climate change, and sequester nutrients such as nitrogen, which improves water and air...
A Galápagos Toroise. Credit: Alexander Forryan New research has unlocked the mystery of how the Galápagos Islands, a rocky, volcanic outcrop, with only modest rainfall and vegetation, is able to sustain its unique wildlife habitats. The Galápagos archipelago, rising from the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean some 900 kilometres off the South American mainland, is...
Fig.1. DPC all field of view response acquisition system. Credit: HUANG Chan Recently, researchers from the Optical Remote Sensing Center of the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (AIOFM), Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) have successfully improved the accuracy of directional polarimetric camera (DPC) laboratory polarization calibration via new methods. DPC, which...