ScienceDaily: Quirky - November 06, 2024
Top quirky research news
One of the fastest-spinning stars in the Universe
New research in our Milky Way has revealed a neutron star that rotates around its axis at an extremely high speed. It spins 716 times per second, making it one of the fastest-spinning objects ever observed.
Image: NASA images/Shutterstock.com
Explaining science through dance
Explaining a theoretical science concept to high school students requires a new way of thinking altogether, which is precisely what researchers did when they orchestrated a dance with high school students at Orange Glen High School in Escondido as a way to explain topological insulators.
Deaf male mosquitoes don't mate
Romance is a complex affair in humans. There's personality, appearance, seduction, all manner of physical and social cues. Mosquitoes are much more blunt. Mating occurs for a few seconds in midair. And all it takes to woo a male is the sound of a female's wingbeats. Imagine researchers' surprise when a single change completely killed the mosquitoes' libidos.
The secrets of baseball's magic mud
The unique properties of baseball's famed 'magic' mud, which MLB equipment managers applied to every ball in the World Series, have never been scientifically quantified -- until now. Researchers now reveal what makes the magic mud so special.
Evolutionary biologists report they have analyzed a fossil of an extinct giant meat-eating bird -- which they say could be the largest known member of its kind -- providing new information about animal life in northern South America millions of years ago.
Dance of electrons measured in the glow from exploding neutron-stars
The temperature of elementary particles has been observed in the radioactive glow following the collision of two neutron stars and the birth of a black hole. This has, for the first time, made it possible to measure the microscopic, physical properties in these cosmic events. Simultaneously, it reveals how snapshot observations made in an instant represents an object stretched out across time.
Astronomers discover the fastest-feeding black hole in the early universe
Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang that is consuming matter at a phenomenal rate -- over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole's 'feast' could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early Universe.
Revolutionary high-speed 3D bioprinter hailed a game changer for drug discovery
Biomedical engineers have invented a 3D printing system, or bioprinter, capable of fabricating structures that closely mimic the diverse tissues in the human body, from soft brain tissue to harder materials like cartilage and bone.
NASA's Hubble, Webb probe surprisingly smooth disk around Vega
Teams of astronomers used the combined power of NASA's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to revisit the legendary Vega disk.
Echolocating bats use an acoustic cognitive map for navigation
Echolocating bats have been found to possess an acoustic cognitive map of their home range, enabling them to navigate over kilometer-scale distances using echolocation alone.
New methods for whale tracking and rendezvous using autonomous robots
Today, a research team has proposed a new reinforcement learning framework with autonomous drones to find sperm whales and predict where they will surface.
New ESO image captures a dark wolf in the sky
For Halloween, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) reveals a spooktacular image of a dark nebula that creates the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colourful cosmic backdrop. Fittingly nicknamed the Dark Wolf Nebula, it was captured in a 283-million-pixel image by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Why elephants never forget but fleas have, well, the attention span of a flea
Researchers have developed a model to calculate how quickly or slowly an organism should ideally learn in its surroundings. An organism's ideal learning rate depends on the pace of environmental change and its life cycle, they say.
Researchers develop artificial plants that purify indoor air, generate electricity
Scientists are repurposing their research about bacteria-powered biobatteries into a new idea for artificial plants that can feed off carbon dioxide, give off oxygen and even generate a little power.
It's not to be. Universe too short for Shakespeare typing monkeys
It would take far longer than the lifespan of our universe for a typing monkey to randomly produce Shakespeare, a new study reveals.
Alcohol consumption among non-human animals may not be as rare as previously thought, say ecologists
Anecdotes abound of wildlife behaving 'drunk' after eating fermented fruits, but despite this, nonhuman consumption of ethanol has been assumed to be rare and accidental. Ecologists now challenge this assumption. They argue that since ethanol is naturally present in nearly every ecosystem, it is likely consumed on a regular basis by most fruit- and nectar-eating animals.
Energy-making chloroplasts from algae have been inserted into hamster cells, enabling the cells to photosynthesize light, according to new research in Japan. It was previously thought that combining chloroplasts (chlorophyll containing structures in the cells of plants and algae) with animal cells was not possible, and that the chloroplasts would not survive or function. However, results showed that photosynthetic action continued for at least two days. This technique could be useful for artificial tissue engineering. Tissues can struggle to grow due to a lack of oxygen, but adding chloroplast-infused cells could enable oxygen and energy to be supplied through light exposure and photosynthesis.
Into the great wide open: How steppe pastoralist groups formed and transformed over time
With the 'time-traveling ability' of archaeogenetic studies it has become possible to shed light onto the dynamic past of human populations world-wide. Integrated with archaeological and anthropological data, it has been shown that fundamental changes in lifestyle, culture, technical know-how and social systems were often linked to the movement and interaction of people.
Bones from Tudor Mary Rose shipwreck suggest handedness might affect collarbone chemistry
A new study of human skeletal remains from the wreck of the 16th century English warship Mary Rose suggests that whether a person is right- versus left-handed may influence how their clavicle bone chemistry changes as they age.
A rudimentary quantum network link between Dutch cities
Researchers have demonstrated a network connection between quantum processors over metropolitan distances. Their result marks a key advance from early research networks in the lab towards a future quantum internet. The team developed fully independently operating nodes and integrated these with deployed optical internet fiber, enabling a 25-km quantum link.
Sinuses prevented prehistoric crocodile relatives from deep diving
Paleobiologists have found that the sinuses of ocean dwelling relatives of modern-day crocodiles prevented them from evolving into deep divers like whales and dolphins.