Recent biological studies on water strider insects revealed how they maintain stability and maneuver on the surface of water. While macroscale bodies use buoyancy, these very small insects use surface tension force to balance their weight on water. This paper proposes a biologically inspired miniature robot that […]

Transitions to terrestriality have been associated with major animal radiations including land snails and slugs in Stylommatophora (>20 000 described species), the most successful lineage of ‘pulmonates’ (a non-monophyletic assemblage of air-breathing gastropods). However, phylogenomic studies have failed to robustly resolve relationships among traditional pulmonates and affiliated marine lineages that comprise […]

“Scientists from the University of California, Davis, discovered that redwood trees have two types of leaves, and those leaves have completely different jobs… Together, these functionally distinct leaves allow the world’s tallest trees to thrive in both wet and dry parts of their range in California, without […]

A single protein can reverse the developmental clock on adult brain cells called astrocytes, morphing them into stem-like cells that produce neurons and other cell types, UT Southwestern researchers report in a new study. The findings might someday lead to a way to regenerate brain tissue after disease or injury.

Centimetre-scale fliers must contend with the high power requirements of flapping flight. Insects have elastic elements in their thoraxes which may reduce the inertial costs of their flapping wings. Matching wingbeat frequency to a mechanical resonance can be energetically favourable, but also poses control challenges. Many insects use frequency modulation on […]

This beautiful shrub is native to Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. It is one of the best-known poisonous plants from ancient Egypt to the Middle Ages up until now. It is the ancient Egyptians they were responsible for promoting its use as a powerful narcotic.

The toxins responsible for its […]

An international team of scientists has developed an innovative opal-like material inspired by butterfly wings and peacock feathers. Graphene’s reaction to such conditions include changing color from green to blue when stretched and turning transparent when heated. Regularly interspersing a tiny amount of the “wonder-material” graphene throughout their polymer-based opals unlocked […]

Researchers from the Natural History Museum have “worked alongside a group of materials scientists to investigate the properties of the pollen wall, including its smoothness, flexibility and chemical makeup. These were then compared between modern and fossilised pollen.

The researchers found that the pollen walls contained a significant amount of calcium, […]

“Distributed search problems are ubiquitous in Artificial Life (ALife). Many distributed search problems require identifying a rare and previously unseen event and producing a rapid response. This challenge amounts to finding and removing an unknown needle in a very large haystack. Traditional computational search models are unlikely to find, nonetheless, appropriately […]