Certain army ants in the rainforests of Central and South America conduct spectacular predatory raids containing up to 200,000 foraging ants. Remarkably, some ants use their bodies to plug potholes in the trail leading back to the nest, making a flatter surface so that prey can be delivered to the developing young at maximum speed.Specialization by a minority can help the greater good. Photo by Scott Powell
Culture
Plasma astrophysicists at the University of Warwick have found that key information about the Sun’s 'storm season’ is being broadcast across the solar system in a fractal snapshot imprinted in the solar wind. This research opens up new ways of looking at both space weather and the unstable behaviour that affects the operation of fusion powered power plants.
When the movie Spider-Man 3 swung into theaters a few weeks ago, it found University physics professor James Kakalios waiting. A diehard fan of superhero comics, he takes a double interest in Spidey foe Sandman, who can transform all or part of his body into living sand.
The use of 12 tone intervals in the music of many human cultures is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech, according to researchers at the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.
An extraordinary underwater trackway with 12 consecutive prints provides the most compelling evidence to-date that some dinosaurs were swimmers. The 15-meter-long trackway, located in La Virgen del Campo track site in Spain's Cameros Basin, contains the first long and continuous record of swimming by a non-avian therapod dinosaur.
When Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter proposed a static model of the universe in the early 1900s, he was some 3 trillion years ahead of his time.
Researchers have found that bricks made from fly ash--fine ash particles captured as waste by coal-fired power plants--may be even safer than predicted. Instead of leaching minute amounts of mercury as some researchers had predicted, the bricks apparently do the reverse, pulling minute amounts of the toxic metal out of ambient air.
A team of Texas A&M University researchers will soon be recovering artifacts from a 200-year-old shipwreck that lies more than 4,000 feet beneath the Gulf of Mexico, making it the deepest such recovery effort ever attempted in the gulf.
The legislative push for "abstinence only" sex education has suggested that nonmarital sex negatively affects a teen's mental health but a new study says that the negative mental side effects of a teen's loss of virginity are confined to a small proportion of those who have sex -- specifically, young girls, but including both boys and girls who have sex earlier than their peers and whose relationships are uncommitted and ultimately fall apart.
Tracing the evolutionary history of wildlife could improve global habitat conservation, a major Cardiff University study has found.
Researchers in the School of Biosciences analysed the African bushbuck, a common species which lives in most sub-Saharan habitat types to test whether DNA similarity between populations living in different habitats can reveal the similarity of those ecoregions now and in the past.
The African bushbuck, a common species which lives in most sub-Saharan habitat types. Credit: Cardiff University
Restore Earth's energy balance. Feed some astronauts. It could all be possible thanks to a new fungi discovery by Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers.
Scientists have long assumed that fungi exist mainly to decompose matter into chemicals that other organisms can then use. But researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have found evidence that fungi possess a previously undiscovered talent with profound implications: the ability to use radioactivity as an energy source for making food and spurring their growth.
In the future doctors will be able to find more tumors at an early stage while using a smaller x-ray dose for each examination. Color x-rays offer new possibilities for medical diagnoses. This spring Mid Sweden University is presenting three dissertations in the field of digital color x-rays.
A new study by The George Institute for International Health was designed to determine the risk of a crash associated with passenger carriage compared with that of using a mobile phone while driving.
"Drivers with passengers were almost 60% more likely to have a motor vehicle crash resulting in hospital attendance, irrespective of their age group. The likelihood of a crash was more than doubled in the presence of two or more passengers," noted the study's lead investigator, Dr Suzanne McEvoy.
The contents of the deep Earth affect the planet as a whole, including life at its surface, but scientists must find unusual ways to "see" it. Only recently have researchers been able to produce the extreme temperatures and pressures found inside our planet to understand how it is forming and evolving. A special online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores the exotic world of high pressures as a window to understand a broad range of problems in Earth and planetary science.
Between 2000 and 2004, worldwide CO2 emissions increased at a rate that is over three times the rate during the 1990s—the rate increased from 1.1 % per year during the 1990s to 3.1% per year in the early 2000s.