ScienceDaily: Quirky - November 29, 2023
Top quirky research news
How shifting climates may have shaped early elephants' trunks
Researchers have provided new insights into how ancestral elephants developed their dextrous trunks. A study of the evolution of longirostrine gomphotheres, an ancestor of the modern day elephant, suggests moving into open-land grazing helped develop their coiling and grasping trunks.
Oriol Querol/shutterstock.com
The national park of Koli in eastern Finland is home to a famous, 34-metre-long crevice cave known as Pirunkirkko, or Devil's Church in English. A new study investigates the acoustics of the Devil's Church and explores whether the acoustic properties of the cave could explain the beliefs associated with it, and why it was chosen as a place for activities and rituals involving sound.
Alien haze, cooked in a lab, clears view to distant water worlds
Scientists have simulated conditions that allow hazy skies to form in water-rich exoplanets, a crucial step in determining how haziness muddles important telescope observations for the search of habitable worlds beyond the solar system.
Wave devouring propulsion: A revolutionary green technology for maritime sustainability
A new form of wave devouring propulsion (WDP) could power ships and help to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the maritime industry.
'Strange metal' is strangely quiet in noise experiment
Experiments have provided the first direct evidence that electricity seems to flow through 'strange metals' in an unusual liquid-like form.
Telescope Array detects second highest-energy cosmic ray ever
In 1991, an experiment detected the highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed. Later dubbed the Oh-My-God particle, the cosmic ray’s energy shocked astrophysicists. Nothing in our galaxy had the power to produce it, and the particle had more energy than was theoretically possible for cosmic rays traveling to Earth from other galaxies. Simply put, the particle should not exist. On May 27, 2021, the Telescope Array experiment detected the second-highest extreme-energy cosmic ray. The newly dubbed Amaterasu particle deepens the mystery of the origin, propagation and particle physics of rare, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
Hybrid transistors set stage for integration of biology and microelectronics
Researchers create transistors combining silicon with biological silk, using common microprocessor manufacturing methods. The silk protein can be easily modified with other chemical and biological molecules to change its properties, leading to circuits that respond to biology and the environment.
This sea worm's posterior body part swims away, and now scientists know how
A research team shows how the expression of developmental genes in the Japanese green syllid worms, Megasyllis nipponica, helps form their swimming reproductive unit called stolon.
First experimental evidence of hopfions in crystals opens up new dimension for future technology
Hopfions, magnetic spin structures predicted decades ago, have become a hot and challenging research topic in recent years. New findings open up new fields in experimental physics: identifying other crystals in which hopfions are stable, studying how hopfions interact with electric and spin currents, hopfion dynamics, and more.