Category: Animals
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The last white rhino…
Rhino embryos made in lab to save nearly extinct subspecies. The development is an early step toward the much more distant goal of resurrecting the northern white rhinoceros, whose last male died this year. (1) Being the last of your kind. A sad moment. A lonely moment. Those eyes. Full of lust for life. In…
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Instability… Randomness… Out of design…
A study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University has brought science one step closer to a molecular-level understanding of how patterns form in living tissue. The researchers engineered bacteria that, when incubated and grown, exhibited stochastic Turing patterns: a…
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Plants “deciding”. Death and Life.
Animals facing competition have been shown to optimally choose between different behaviors, including confrontation, avoidance and tolerance, depending on the competitive ability of their opponents relative to their own. For example, if their competitors are bigger or stronger, animals are expected to “give up the fight” and choose avoidance or tolerance over confrontation. Similar responses…
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Copying nature. For what?
Sunlight reflected by solar cells is lost as unused energy. The wings of the butterfly Pachliopta aristolochiae are drilled by nanostructures (nanoholes) that help absorbing light over a wide spectrum far better than smooth surfaces. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now succeeded in transferring these nanostructures to solar cells and, thus, enhancing…
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Clever raccoon. Wise humans?
A raccoon managed to solve an intelligence problem by bypassing it. In a study, the researchers set up a cylinder with a floating marshmallow too low for the raccoons to grab. For the training session, the team balanced some stones on the rim of the tube. When the raccoons knocked them in, it showed how…
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