A one in a million apple has been found on a property in Kingston in southern Tasmania. Half granny smith, half red delicious, it's thought that this mutation is the result of all the mutations that led to the Australian royal red gala, and this particular apple is trying to revert to a couple of its previous versions.

While they are super sweet, syrup made from this ancient fruit has antibacterial compounds that are more effective than honey. In case you've never had it or seen it before, dates are a thick, dark brown, and super-sweet fruit used in Middle Eastern cuisine. New research suggests that date syrup contains chemical compounds that help ward off a number of bacterial infections, including those caused by Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli. This was discovered after scientists inhibited the growth of these pathogens for about six hours, which researchers say is faster than manuka honey - a honey known for its antibacterial and wound healing properties. ...

The water beetle is about 1 mm in length and has been named Hydraena ateneo. Most of the discoveries made in the Philippines occur in their forests, making this discovery even more surprising.

Researchers have discovered a novel method to harness photosynthesis to create electricity. By attaching nanotubes to plant cells, the researchers were able to direct the electrons that plants free during photosynthesis down a wire and generate electrical current – and it was twice as powerful as electricity gathered from solar cells.

A new study involving researchers from UNSW Science has finally proved dingoes aren't a subspecies and actually belong to an entirely different group of predators than dogs and wolves. Welcome to the phylogenetic tree, Canis dingo! Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jzo.12134/abstract

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When Henry Molaison (now widely known as H.M.) cracked his skull in an accident, he began blacking out and having seizures. In an attempt to cure him, daredevil surgeon, Dr. William Skoville, removed H.M.'s hippocampus. Luckily, the seizures did go away — but so did his long-term memory! Sam Kean walks us through this astonishing medical case, detailing everything H.M. taught us about the brain and memory.

Near the town of Tragöß in Styria, Austria you can find this stunning lake known as Grüner See (Green Lake). Named Green Lake for its amazingly clear emerald green water it’s mostly the result of seasonal snowmelt from the surrounding Hochschwab Mountains and forests.



During winter months the lake is only 1-2m deep with the rest of the area used as a county park, however as spring arrives the lake grows in size from all the melting snow reaching at its peak around mid-May 12m deep in places. Not surprisingly the waters are a little chilly at 6-7oC, although it remains popular among divers during the peak months who love to pose on the underwater bench and visit the flooded green meadows. ...

This bizarre looking thing is "Ata the humanoid", a mummified corpse found in the Atacama Desert ten years ago. It's strange appearance led to many calling it an "alien", claiming it as proof that extraterrestrials have visited Earth.

Well, it's finally been submitted to a battery of tests and the results show it to be fully human. DNA analysis has even managed to pinpoint the location and nationality of its mother. The results do suggest that it was once alive and human, not a hoax, and so asks more questions than they answer.

The bone analysis suggests that this is not a fetus, but a child between the ages of 6-8. The specimen has just ten ribs (as opposed to 12), is just six inches long and has severe facial deformities. These symptoms do ...

The earliest evidence of ancient dentistry we have is an amazingly detailed dental work on a mummy from ancient Egypt that archaeologists have dated to 2000 BCE.

Have you heard about two new gigantic viruses that have been discovered? They measure around 1 micrometer long & half that across – larger than some eukaryotic cells! Massive genomes up to 2.5 Mb (millions of base pairs) are present to match their giant size. Their discovery raises many questions on viral diversity that remains unexplored.

Using high-resolution atomic force microscopy, a hydrogen bond has been imaged for the first time. This technique is quite similar to the one used to photograph bonds breaking and reforming that was announced earlier this year.

A bacterium previously unknown to science was found in two spacecraft clean rooms, one in Florida and the other in Guiana. Space agencies use these rooms to prepare spacecraft for launch and are considered two of the most sterile places on Earth.

A viscous fluid made out of citrate and water is what gives our bones flexibility. The gooey fluid is trapped between the tiny crystals of calcium phosphate that form our bones, absorbing shocks and allowing movement. Without this fluid the crystals fuse together and become less flexible and brittle.

Pixie Dust is a new display technology that uses sound waves to levitate tiny particles that are then arranged into images and animations. Imagine these floating particles suddenly coming together to form a computer or television screen.

This one is hard to believe, but a new study suggests that if you're learning a new language, you're better off listening to recordings of your lessons while you're asleep rather than while you're awake.

Australian scientists are creating a new herpes-blocking drug using a protein found in the blood of abalones. If successful, it could prevent the virus from entering human cells, thereby prevent future outbreaks of cold sores.

New research from the University of Chicago in the US shows that a class of bacteria known as Clostridia can block peanut allergies in mice, and suggests it could be used to treat similar conditions in humans.

Clostridia is one of the types of bacteria killed off by antibiotic use in early childhood, and this research supports the emerging theory that increased antibiotic use is one of the factors that has caused food allergies in kids to rise by 50% since 1997.

Source: http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20142708-26075.html ...

An international team of scientists has sequenced the coffee genome and has found that the caffeine in coffee plants evolved separately to the caffeine in tea plants.

Source: http://www.nature.com/nature/archive/category.html?code=archive_news&year=2014 ...

While it may sound counter-intuitive, new research suggests that selectively plucking hairs in very close proximity can stimulate some startlingly dense regrowth. The team behind the study, led by researchers at the University of Southern California, demonstrated that by carefully extracting 200 hairs, one-by-one, from the back of a mouse in a specific configuration and density, they could trigger the growth of around 1,200 new hairs in the area - a five-fold increase. The biological mechanism is shown below:



While it's very early days, the researchers say their findings, which were reported in the journal Cell, could pave the way for new treatments for balding, or alopecia. ...

Scientists have worked out why your eyes move when you’re dreaming. Scientists have known for decades that the rapid eye movements (REMs) that occur during sleep signal that we’re dreaming, but what do the individual eye motions really represent? It’s long been hypothesised that each movement of the eye reflects new visual information in our dreams, and now for the first time researchers have demonstrated that this is actually the case. According to a new study by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel, each flick of the eye that occurs during REM sleep accompanies the introduction of a new image in our dream, with the movement essentially acting like a reset function between individual dream "snapshots".

Source: http://www.sciencealer ...

Unlike most mammals, mature male orangutans exhibit different facial characteristics: some develop large 'cheek pads' on their faces (as shown above); other males do not. A team of researchers studied the difference in reproductive success between cheek-padded males and males without cheek pads. They found that those with cheek pads are significantly more successful in fathering offspring.

Source: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00265-015-1991-0 ...

Having more cells usually puts one at a higher risk for cancer - but not for the elephant. Despite packing 100 times as many cells as humans, this towering animal can keep cancer at bay thanks to extra copies of a tumor-fighting gene. Researchers found that Asian elephants harbor 30 to 40 copies of the gene that encodes the protein p53, one of the most important mechanisms for preventing cancer and maintaining cell division. If cells have DNA damage that could spawn tumors, p53 prevents them from dividing until they make repairs or spurs them to commit suicide. In contrast, humans sport only two copies of the gene for p53, and so does elephants’ closest living relative, the rock hyrax. The extra copies probably accumulated millions of yea ...

Meet the ninja lanternshark. It's a newly discovered animal that's really weird. It hides in the deep - and its black skin keeps it camouflaged - but it also glows in the dark.

The ninja lanternshark was discovered by a team at the Pacific Shark Research Centre, in Moss Landing, California. Its official Latin name is Etmopterus benchleyi, after Jaws author Peter Benchley.

The ninja lanternshark is roughly half a metre, or 18 inches long, and it lives at a depth of about 1,000 metres off the Pacific Coast of Central America. Its odd combo of dark and light helps it creep up on its prey, according to its discoverers.
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Dog owners often say they "know" that their dog understands what they’re feeling. Now, scientists have the evidence to back this up. Researchers tested 17 adult dogs of various breeds to see whether they could recognize emotional expressions in the faces and voices of humans and other dogs - an ability that’s considered a higher cognitive talent because two different senses are involved. Each dog took part in two test sessions with 10 trials. One by one, they stood facing two screens on which the researchers projected photos of unfamiliar but happy/playful human or dog faces versus the same faces with angry/aggressive expressions (as in the photo above). At the same time, the scientists played a single vocalization - either a dog bark, ...

A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid with properties that differ in any way from those of Newtonian fluids - it changes its viscosity almost instantly under stress, so you can punch it as a liquid and it’ll turn into a solid (watch the video below), and you can literally walk across a pool of it. On the contrary, a Newtonian fluid is defined as the perfect fluid, where its viscosity is influenced mostly by its temperature and pressure. So if you have water at a moderate temperature and pressure, it will continue to act like a liquid no matter how much you punch it. Depending on how you manipulate it, the fluid-like substance can change states from a liquid to a solid, but how this happens has remained a conundrum amongst physicists.

Scientists ...

Breast milk contains more than 700 species of bacteria!


Spanish researchers have traced the bacterial microbiota map in breast milk. The study has revealed a larger microbial diversity than originally thought (more than 700 species) and that it changes over the period of lactation, with the weight of the mother & by delivery method of the baby (c-section versus. vaginal).

To create this microbiome (the identification of the set of bacteria contained within breast milk) scientists used a technique based on massive DNA sequencing. Thanks to their study, additional pre- and postnatal variables influencing the micriobial richness of milk can now be determined. ...

In 1995 a group of NASA scientists repeated and refined some earlier tests on the effect that various drugs have on the web building abilities of the common garden spider. They tested the the effect of caffeine, benzedrine, marijuana and chloral hydrate and as you can see the results were pretty extreme!

The third largest asteroid to ever hit earth has been found in South Australia. According to scientists involved, the asteroid, which measured up to 20 km across, hit Earth approximately 360 million years ago. This was around the time of the Late Devonian mass extinction, strengthening the idea that asteroid impacts have been associated with many mass extinctions throughout the history of life on Earth.

Genetic testing of giant squid corpses discovered all over the world has found that not only are they all the same species, they have surprisingly low genetic diversity. This suggests that some time in the recent past they were pushed to the brink of extinction, but managed to rebound and are now found throughout the worlds oceans.

Schizophrenia has a variety of causes and a spectrum of severity of symptoms. Geneticists were able to cause schizophrenia-like symptoms by over-expressing Neuregulin-1 (NRG1). Scientists discovered that these mice not only had nearly the same symptoms as humans with schizophrenia, but they even develop the symptoms at the same stage in life. Geneticists have been able to modify the expression of NRG1 in adult mice, bringing it down to appropriate levels. This caused schizophrenia-like symptoms in these mice to disappear and behavior returned to normal. ...

This gorgeous creature is Typhochlaena costae, a species of spider recently discovered in Brazil.

Meet olinguito, or Bassaricyon neblina, the first species of carnivore discovered in the Western Hemisphere in 35 years. This cute teddy bear-like nocturnal mammal is native to Central and South America, and spends most of its time in the treetops, coming down to the forest floor occasionally to eat fruits such as guava.

"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

Alan Turing (left) was a hero to the British people and the free world whose work cracking the codes of Axis powers saved lives and helped the war effort.

He was highly influential in the development of computer science, giving a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer ...

Researchers from University of Otago have found that a natural fruit source of vitamin C – kiwifruit – is vastly superior to a purified supplement form.

The researchers are studying kiwifruit as a source of dietary vitamin C and found that in mice eating kiwifruit, vitamin C uptake was five times as effective as taking a purified supplement form.

The study was recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the highest ranking journal for human nutrition research. ...

Four species of legless lizard have been identified in the sand dunes of Antioch, California. This picture introduces Anniella grinnelli, one of the recently found species. It has a bright yellow belly and a lilac back with deep purple lines, and was named after Joseph Grinnell, the first director of the Berkeley Zoology Museum.

Carpenter ants (Camponotus cylindricus) are found in Borneo and expel the lethal sticky substance to defend their colony. Both ant and invader are killed in these attacks; they fall from the canopy as a pair into the leaf litter below, to eventually be eaten by something. Most of the bodies of the south-east Asian Camponotus cylindricus ants are for storage of the deadly secretion. The insects react quickly - when researchers lightly touched them with forceps their abdomen walls ruptured. ...

New data shows alpine swift can spend up to 200 days in the air.

It is a mystery how the birds are able to physiologically accomplish this feat. While their diet is relatively straightforward, they feed on airborne insects, how they rest in midair is not known.

Exposure to cold and eating chili peppers both appear to increase the activity of brown fat cells, which burn energy, rather than store it as typical "white" fat cells do, a study has found.

This is indeed the foot of a megalapteryx - better known as a moa. Moas were huge flightless birds that went extinct approximately 600 years ago. Keep in mind that all birds are descended from dinosaurs.

An invasive cockroach species has made it to New York. The roach is native to Japan, has an unusual resistance to cold weather and thrives on ice, but researchers still don’t know if it will spread to other American cities. This is the first time that this species of cockroach has been spotted in the US.

Plastic may be with us a lot longer than we thought! A new type of rock made from plastic, volcanic rock, sand, seashells, and corals has begun forming on the shores of Hawaii. The discovery adds to the debate about whether humanity’s heavy hand in natural processes warrants the formal declaration of a new epoch of Earth history.

Simaetha sp. is a gorgeous gold and purple jumping spider recently discovered in the Sraburi Province of Thailand.

Scientists have discovered that the extraordinary ability for Sherpas and Tibetans to reach 4,000 m without experiencing altitude sickness is due to a gene inherited from Denisovans, a species of humans that went extinct about 40,000 years ago.

Researchers have uncovered the mechanism that allows spiders to build such strong webs. According to the study, both ends of the spider's silk grand have different pH levels, which helps these proteins become a solid fibre that can be spun into a solid web. The researchers also found that the pH level has different effects on the stability of the two regions at each end of the spidroin proteins.

“While one of the ends tended to pair up with other molecules at the beginning of the duct (N-terminal) and became increasingly stable as the acidity increased along the duct, the other end (C-terminal) destabilised as the acidity increased, and gradually unfolded until it formed the structure characteristic of silk at the acidic pH of 5.5”, ex ...

A study published by the Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Studies presents some of the first evidence showing the beneficial effects of opposite-sex friendships in the animal kingdom. According to the study, females that socialized with other females the most were 34 percent less likely to die in a given period than those who rarely interacted with other females, whereas socializing a lot with males lessened the chances of dying by 45 percent. ...

Two days ago, I streamed history being made for the first time ever online, and witnessed the Philae lander's touchdown on Rosetta's comet. The journey took 10 years, 6.4 billion kms away from here, and a 7 hour long landing.

Unfortunately, it was an awkward landing where Philae landed approximately 1km away from its intended landing site that currently, one of its 3 legs is not on the surface of the comet and it itself is oriented in a way that no sufficient sunlight is being recieved enough to charge its batteries ever 12 hour rotation.


At the moment, plans to try to "hop" the robot back into a position for enough sunlight are being studied, hopefully in time to execute them before Philae dies out sometime between next Friday and Saturday. ...

Israel-based company, StoreDot, has developed a battery made from a new material called nanodots that can charge a smartphone in just 30 seconds, and could be scaled up to charge an electric car within minutes. These special ‘nanodots’, which are artificial peptide molecules - about 2.1 nanometers in diameter - are released into the battery to rapidly increase its absorption and retention of power - almost like a sponge.

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I am not sure if such blogs are welcome here, but I will try sparking enthusiasm in this subject. Alongside my major field of interest, I have an unhealthy/obsessive curiosity distortion in the archaeology field, specifically Egyptology. And recently, two major discoveries have been made in the Ancient Egyptian land.

The first discovery made was that belonging to an Ancient Queen named Khentakawess's the 3rd's tomb, which was located near her husband's tomb, Pharoah Neferefre. These two, date back to the 4th or 5th dynasties, that is approximately 4000 years back in history. Around that time, the first three pyramids, yes, the ones that we see all the time and are the most famous pyramids of Giza, were being built by Pharoahs Khufu, his son ...

It turns out that butterflies with eyelike spots evolved to scare off predators. A recent study concluded that about 68% of the birds that were shown an image with eye-mimicking spots, flew away or showed signs of being startled such as chirping a warning call as they flew in for food (within a controlled setting). That’s on par with the 57% showing the same reactions to the owl with open eyes, the research team notes. The full study can be analyzed in the link below:

Source: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1806/20150202 ...

Our perception has heavily depended on how well we can accurately describe our surroundings. And this description relies on our language. Our ancestors apparently were not capable of perceiving the color blue. If they did, they were not capable of noticing it, simply because there was no term in language for blue. The first civilization to document and affirm the color blue was the Ancient Egyptian Civilization. In fact, the Ancient Egyptians were the only ancestors that were able to produce blue dyes! Moreover, philologists have compared Hindu, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew and many more languages only to find no mention of the color blue. However, just because the term for blue did not exist, does not mean our ancestors did not perceive blue.

T ...

Some of us may be guilty of procrastination, but we all are pre-crastinators at some level.

Procrastination is a serious problem to many of us that like to put off work and cram the night before. Not only is procrastination a behavioral problem, but also one with a psychological implication. Procrastination is the "thief of time". On the other hand, precrastination, discovered to be the complete opposite, is the tendency to do things ahead of time - and really ahead of time- just for the sake of completion.



Precrastination was found to be exhibited in pigeons as well. And the fact that we and pigeons have separated in phylogeny 300 million years ago suggests that precrastination is a behavior also found earlier in phylogeny. How has this be ...

Sometimes it pays to have big, bad neighbors! Tiny black-chinned hummingbirds (shown above) have learned to build their homes near hawk nests. The hawks are too big to be interested in teeny hummingbird eggs, and they scare off the medium-sized birds that are.

According to the study, of the 342 hummer nests studied over three years, 80% were near hawk nests - and for good reason. The researchers monitored hummingbird egg and fledgling survival near six active and six inactive hawk nests. Those hummers unlucky enough to be near inactive nests lost all but 8% of their young, while those in a “good” neighborhood had a 70% success rate, they report.

Source: http://news.sciencemag.org/plants-animals/2015/09/why-hawk-hummingbird-s-best-friend ...

When homing pigeons fly home they rely on smells, magnetic fields, and vision to guide their way. But how important visual memory is for pigeons has long remained a mystery. According to a new study, pigeons that learned their way home with a blocked left eye couldn’t repeat the same journey when they wore a patch over their right eye, and vice versa. Instead, they flew slightly off course, following more of a curve than a straight line. Since birds lack a corpus callosum, this suggests that a birds’ lack of this key neural structure greatly affects how pigeons are able to find their way home.

Source: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1816/20151957 ...

Isn't it strange, two FDA-approved drugs - topical ruxolitinib or tofacitinib - can reawaken dormant hair follicles! According to the study, within 3 weeks, mice that received topical ruxolitinib or tofacitinib had regrown nearly all their hair (right photo; drug was applied only to the right side of the mouse). Little to no hair growth occurred in control mice during the same timeframe (left photo). According to researchers at Columbia University Medical Center, inhibiting a family of enzymes inside hair follicles that are suspended in a resting state restores hair growth.

These drugs, known as JAK inhibitors have been approved to treat blood diseases (ruxolitinib) and the other for rheumatoid arthritis (tofacitinib). Both are being tested ...

Someone who greatly enjoys sweet foods is said to have a "sweet tooth." Experimental evidence now shows us that eating sweets forms memories that may control eating habits. In other words, people may enjoy eating sweets because the taste is correlated with positive memories.

The findings, published online in the journal Hippocampus, show that neurons in the dorsal hippocampus, the part of the brain that is critical for episodic memory, are activated by consuming sweets. Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events experienced at a particular time and place.

In the study, a meal consisting of a sweetened solution, either sucrose or saccharin, significantly increased the expression of the synaptic plasticity marker called activity ...

According to a new study, it's your voice that is to blame if your joke ever falls flat. Researchers recorded men and women telling corny one-liners and then manipulated the pitches of their voices. Artificially lowered voices made the speakers sound more dominant; higher pitched voices made them sound less so. Volunteer listeners then rated each joke’s funniness. Female listeners laughed or groaned regardless of the comic’s voice pitch, but for men it depended on how burly and dominant they were. Guys with bigger biceps and higher self-rated attractiveness were more likely to prefer lower-pitched jokes than less dominant listeners, and vice versa, according to a study in press in Evolution and Human Behavior. The researchers suggest humor ...

As cigarette smoking rates fall, more people are smoking tobacco from hookahs: communal pipes that enable users to draw tobacco smoke through water. A new meta-analysis shows that hookah smokers are inhaling a large load of toxicants. According to the study, compared with a single cigarette, one hookah session delivers approximately 125 times the smoke, 25 times the tar, 2.5 times the nicotine and 10 times the carbon monoxide (CO). The latter stat accounts for the light-headedness and high that smokers experience when inhaling the smoke, since CO reduces the amount oxygen capable of binding to circulating red blood cells.

In addition to these estimates, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that, for the first time ...

You've probably heard the saying 'don't eat yellow snow', for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts, you shouldn’t eat any snow. Snow has been found to act as a rather effective sink for tiny particles that are found primarily in car exhaust fumes, so any consumption of it is effectively like eating a pollution-flavored Popsicle.

Researchers of this study found that from just one hour of exposure, the levels of pollutants within the snow increased dramatically, with toxic particles becoming trapped within the small ice particles or dissolved within pockets of meltwater. This means that snow is a particularly effective “sink” for car exhaust pollution.

Sour ...

The magic number is 42 m/s (94 mph). Using mathematical data and physical experiments, scientists say they have found the law that governs the resistance of wooden beams under stress. According to the study (link), researchers hung weights from wooden rods and pieces of pencil lead to record the amount of force needed to snap the cylinder. As one might sense, they found that for a fixed length, increasing the diameter made the rods stronger: They could bend more before breaking. This would make tall skinny trees most vulnerable, but, as the team points out, trees don’t grow taller without getting disproportionately thicker as well. By incorporating established laws of tree allometry - which explain the relationship of tree size parameters ...

For the first time, scientists have discovered a link between heavy marijuana use and reduced dopamine production. Just so you know, dopamine is the hormone/neurotransmitter that is released during any kind of satisfaction - it's the same hormone that is released in your brain when you eat chocolate. In a recent study, lower dopamine release was found in the striatum - a region of the brain that is involved in working memory, impulsive behavior, and attention, in addition to subregions involved in associative and sensorimotor learning, and in the globus pallidus. Previous studies have shown that addiction to other drugs of abuse, such as cocaine and heroin, have similar effects on dopamine release, but such evidence for cannabis was mis ...

For decades, scientists have debated whether rapid eye movement sleep - the phase where dreams appear - is directly involved in memory formation. Now, a study provides evidence that REM sleep does, indeed, play this role in mice.

In this new study, the researchers used optogenetics, a recently developed technology that enables scientists to target precisely a population of neurons and control its activity by light. For this study, the neurons in the hippocampus were targeted (hippocampus being the structure that is critical for memory formation during wakefulness and is known as the 'GPS system' of the brain).

To test the long-term spatial memory of mice, the scientists trained the rodents to spot a new object placed in a controlled environm ...

Researchers have discovered a new compound, named 'darwinolide', inside an Antarctic sponge, Dendrilla membranosa (above, middle), that has shown to kill 98.4 percent of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) cells it comes in contact with. Lab tests so far suggest that it has a unique structure that allows it to penetrate the 'biofilm' that MRSA throws up to protect itself from treatments.

The next step is to synthesise darwinolide in the lab, so they don't have to rely on extracting it from live Antarctic sponges. If the researchers are able to show that they can use darwinolide to fight MRSA in a clinical setting, it could save the lives of tens of thousands of people every years.

Source: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac ...

Digging 3 meters down into the dark marine mud of a former log storage pond in Mindanao, Philippines, scientists have discovered five live specimens of an elusive creature previously known only through the 1 to 1.5–meter-long calcium carbonate shells it left behind.

By carefully chipping away at the end of a chalky tube (right, above), researchers found a long, black, wormlike mass oozing from its casing – the first live specimen of the giant shipworm Kuphus polythalamia. The animal’s length makes it the longest of any living bivalve, a class of typically small critters including clams, oysters, and scallops. And as far as shipworms go, which usually burrow into and feed on wood from ships or sunken trees, K. polythalamia is unique for squa ...

The Soviet-built space probe, Venera 3, was the first spacecraft to ever land on another planet back on March 1st, 1966, after being launched on November 16, 1965 from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

The mission of this spacecraft was to land on the Venusian surface. The entry body contained a radio communication system, scientific instruments, electrical power sources, and medallions bearing the State Coat of Arms of the U.S.S.R.

Unfortunately, the probe crash-landed on Venus, causing its communication systems to fail before it could return any information about the planet. The spacecraft impacted on the night side of Venus, near the terminator, around -20º to 20º N, 60º to 80º E.

The Venera program, however, would go on to successfully submit data f ...

Plants have evolved a remarkable array of strategies to defend themselves against herbivores, and one such strategy involves attracting insects that act as natural enemies to these plant-eating pests. The fascinating interplay between plants, insects, and the chemical signals they utilize continues to captivate researchers in the field.

In the case of the beet armyworm caterpillar, scientists have discovered that its saliva contains a chemical called volicitin, which plays a crucial role in eliciting a defensive response from the plant. When the caterpillar feeds on corn seedlings, the volicitin triggers the release of chemical signals from the leaves, effectively attracting parasitic wasps. These wasps, in turn, prey on the caterpillars, pr ...