My Science School

The glow-in-the-dark mushroom Neonothopanus gardneri is one of the biggest and brightest of glowing fungi. The Brazilian forest fungi put on a light show to attract insects that will spread their spores, thereby helping the fungus colonize new habitats. The fungi’s glow follows a daily rhythm, lighting up only when it’s dark, presumably helping them to save energy.

The scientists said they are interested in identifying the genes responsible for the bioluminescence in fungi and exploring their interaction with the circadian clock that controls them. They are also using infrared cameras to watch the interaction between Neonothopanus gardneri and arthropods, especially larger ones, more closely.

“The findings are not only cool, they are also important in understanding how mushrooms are dispersed in the environment,” the scientists said.

“That’s key because fungi such as Neonothopanus gardneri play an important role in the forest ecosystem.”

 

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Box-patterned geckos have evolved a unique skin that actively repels water droplets. A network of tiny hairs cover the lizard’s dome shaped scales, trapping air and forcing water to bead up in droplets. As a result, droplets sometimes collide, and when that happens, changes in the surface area result in a release of kinetic energy that self-propels the droplets right off the lizard’s body. Scientists hypothesize that this ‘gekovescense’ developed as a method of self-cleaning and to prevent water-hungry microbes from feasting on a gecko’s skin.

The team identified not one but several mechanisms responsible for clearing gecko skin of water. Like a waterproof lotus leaf, the gecko skin’s structure encourages small dewdrops to aggregate together, preventing water from evenly distributing all over the surface. As more water comes together, the droplets grow. When the drops reach a large enough size, they begin to interact with forces such as wind and gravity, while being simultaneously repelled by the hydrophobic gecko spines. A water droplet measuring about 2 millimeters across, for example, would be feeling the repulsive power of about 100,000 skin spines. Eventually the external processes win, and the droplet is propelled off the skin. 

Geckos, it seems, may not only aid in bio-inspired adhesive design, but also in potential self-drying surfaces. Perhaps every window of the future will be embedded with its own synthetic gecko skin, banning condensation before it can even form. 

 

 

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The true purpose of eyelashes? Controlling airflow around the eye. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology measured lash length and eye width in 22 preserved mammals ranging in size from hedgehogs to giraffes. In all species, lash length was about one-third eye width, suggesting they had evolved to be a particular size relative to the eye. The researchers made artificial eyes, attaching synthetic lashes to small water-filled aluminium caps and monitoring the “eyes” water loss and particle deposition by 50%, as they trap a protective layer of air on top of the eye. Lashes that are too long no longer trap air and instead funnel airflow onto the eye, likely increasing evaporation and particle deposition.

 

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Carbon3D Inc. has developed a new 3D printing technology that uses light and oxygen to print objects at speeds 25 to 100 times faster than current technology. The technique was inspired by the film Terminator 2, in which the T-1000 robot rises from a pool of metallic liquid.

Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) enables objects to rise from a liquid media continuously, rather than using the layer-by-layer method that has defined the technology for decades. Beams of light are projected through an oxygen-permeable window into a liquid resin. Light and oxygen control the solidification of the resin, creating objects that can have sizes below 20 microns.

CLIP enables a very wide range of materials to be used to make 3D parts with novel properties, including elastomers, silicones, nylon-like materials, ceramics and biodegradable materials. Since it is facilitates 3D objects fabrication in minutes instead of hours or days, it would not be impossible within coming years to enable personalized coronary stents, dental implants or prosthetics to be printed on-demand in a medical setting.

 

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Bats can make ultra-fast decisions about how to attack their prey or even call off the attack. A bat is capable of adjusting its attack until it is approximately 100 milliseconds away from its prey.

Bats use echolocation for orientation. They emit ultrasonic sounds, which hit potential prey nearby, sending an echo back to the bat. From this echo the bat can define where the prey is and attack it. A new study has examined how hunting bats react when approaching their prey. The study concludes that bats are capable of gathering information from the environment and process it surprisingly fast in order to determine how to carry out the attack or maybe call it off.

"A bat is capable of adjusting its attack until it is approximately 100 milliseconds away from its prey," explains Signe Brinkløv, postdoc at the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark.

"It is surprising that they are so fast. Until now we thought that bats are deploying a kind of autopilot in the last phase of an attack limiting them to an unchangeable behavioral pattern."

 

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China has finished building the world’s biggest radio telescope, which it will use to explore space and hunt for extraterrestrial life. The Five hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is the size of 30 soccer fields and has been hewn out of a mountain in the south-western province of Guizhou.

The telescope has been designed so that individual panels can be rearranged to focus on and track radio waves from specific objects of interest, which will give the dish much greater range and sensitivity than rival dishes.

O’Brien says FAST will enable more-detailed studies of pulsars: ultra-dense collapsed cores of exploding stars. “We may even find [more] pulsars outside our own galaxy,” he says. “It will also allow us to survey hydrogen in very distant galaxies, detect molecules in space, search for natural radio wave emissions from planets orbiting other stars and help in the search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.”

 

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A little asteroid has been tagging along in Earth’s orbit for at least a century – and it’ll probably follow along for at least a few hundred years more.

Scientists at the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii spotted the little asteroid known as 2016 HO3, in April. They estimate that the asteroid is only about 130-330 feet wide, making it a tiny speck in the vastness of space. Even at its closet point, 2016 HO3 is at least about 9 million miles away.

“The asteroid’s loops around Earth drift a little ahead or behind from year to year, but when they drift too far forward or backward, Earth’s gravity is just strong enough to reverse the drift and hold onto the asteroid so that it never wanders farther away than about 100 times the distance of the moon,” says NASA’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies. “The same effect also prevents the asteroid from approaching much closer than about 38 times the distance of the moon. In effect, this small asteroid is caught in a little dance with Earth.

 

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Researchers from Carnegie of Science have been monitoring the seismic activity of more than 50 volcanic explosions in active volcanoes since 2009. Leading up to an eruption, volcanoes threw out plenty of smoke, fire, and sputtering ground movement, as expected. But, in the moments right before an eruption, the volcanoes went suddenly and completely quiet and still.

Most eruptions had quiet periods of less than 30 minutes, and some had lulls lasting only a few minutes. The longest one measured 10 hours, but then it was also followed by the largest eruption that researchers noticed that the longest lull was also linked to the biggest explosion, they compared all explosion sizes to the length of the quiet periods and found a clear correlation – the shorter the lull, the smaller the explosion; the longer the lull, the bigger the explosion.

Researchers can use these long, ominous silences to predict how big of an explosion will occur, right before it happens.

 

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The giant fluorescent pink slug (Triboniophorus aff. graeffei) that only lives on an extinct volcano in Australia is under severe threat of global warming. The slug grows up to 8 inches long and lives in a small forest at Mount Kaputar’s peak where it has no predators. Millions of years ago, when Australia was part of a larger landmass known as Gondwana, the terrain was characterized by lush rainforests. A volcanic eruption 17 million years ago on Mount Kaputar kept a small, 10 sq.km. area lush and wet even as much of Australia turned to desert. The slugs spend most of their time buried beneath the leaf mould on which they feed, but come out in the hundreds by night or after a rain shower to snack on tree moss.

 

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A little asteroid has been tagging along in Earth’s orbit for at least a century – and it’ll probably follow along for at least a few hundred years more.

Scientists at the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii spotted the little asteroid known as 2016 HO3, in April. They estimate that the asteroid is only about 130-330 feet wide, making it a tiny speck in the vastness of space. Even at its closet point, 2016 HO3 is at least about 9 million miles away.

“The asteroid’s loops around Earth drift a little ahead or behind from year to year, but when they drift too far forward or backward, Earth’s gravity is just strong enough to reverse the drift and hold onto the asteroid so that it never wanders farther away than about 100 times the distance of the moon,” says NASA’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies. “The same effect also prevents the asteroid from approaching much closer than about 38 times the distance of the moon. In effect, this small asteroid is caught in a little dance with Earth.

 

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Some Asian Giant Honeybees work as synchronized “fanners” to keep certain areas of the hive cooler than others. The findings show that very social species can, when acting in unison, become a superorganism that functions like a single animal.

Asian giant honeybees (Apis dorsata) build their nests in the open which makes them prone to seasonal day/night temperature changes, and has them facing exposure to sun, wind and rain. To combat such problems, the singular comb is covered on both sides with multilayers of worker bees, termed the ‘bee curtain’. The inner bees within the curtain stretch their limbs against the comb, expanding the inner nest area where the queen and brood are. This expansion lowers the hive’s internal pressure and draws in cool fresh air. When the bees relax the curtain bugs the comb again, forcing warm, state air out.

The bee superorganism is perhaps most impressive when the nest is under attack. In a flash, the bee curtain opens up in preparation for the mass release of flying ‘guards’.

 

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Between 1969 and 1972, Apollo astronauts placed seismometers on the moon. Data collected from them shows that the moon experiences moonquakes, the result of steady shifting of material in the moon’s interior. In the 9170s, a 5.5-magnitude moonquake shook the lunar surface at full force for more than 10 minutes. There are four classifications of moonquakes: deep, thermal, meteoroid impact and shallow. Moonquakes are less common than earthquakes and, other than shallow moonquakes, are weaker than earthquakes.

When the tectonic plates rumble and an earthquake occurs, the huge amount of energy spreads out through the mineral-rich crust of the earth, which has largely been infiltrated by water in the stone. In effect, this makes the material slightly more compressible, and able to absorb energy and seismic waves, diminishing the power and slowing the shaking. Even so, they can still be scary – and unexpected!

On the moon, things are very different, as the entire ball is hardened, rigid and dry. When a tremor rocks the surface of the moon, it resonates powerfully, without anywhere to naturally dissipate. It isn’t uncommon for a moonquake to last for ten minutes or more, and for smaller trembling to continue for hours afterwards.

 

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When you sleep in unfamiliar surroundings, only half your brain gets a good night’s rest. “The left side seems to be more awake than the right side,” says Yuka Sasaki, associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences, Brown University.

The finding helps explain why people tend to feel tired after sleeping in a new place. And it suggests people have something in common with birds and sea mammals, which frequently put half their brain to sleep, referred to as unihemispheric sleep.

One stage of deep slumber is known as slow-wave sleep. In this stage, a group of nerve cells in the left side of the brain showed less sleep-related activity than the same group on the right side. That suggests the left side of the brain was a lighter sleeper. This imbalance disappeared by the second right.

Both the right and the left sides of the brain have a “default mode network”, a collection of nerve cells that are active when the brain isn’t focused on doing anything special. Researchers found that the default mode network in the left side of the brain reacted faster to quiet sounds on the first night of sleep. And a sleeper’s response times were faster on the first night than on the second.

This alertness makes sense, says Jerome Siegel, who studies sleep at the University of California. “Sleep is only adaptive if it doesn’t produce risks that outweigh its benefits,” he says. And safe sleep often means keeping an eye on the environment.

 

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A team of engineers from the Technical University of Munich recently achieved the Guinness World Record for the most efficient electric vehicle. TUfast Eco Team’s TUfast eLi14 officially showed an average energy use of 1232 km/kWh, which would theoretically allow the car to cover 10,956 kms on energy equivalent to 1 litre of gas.

Chen, an electrical and computer engineering student, pointed out that while hydrogen fuel cell systems are notoriously finicky, electric battery technology is tried, true and predictable, so the team was able to focus almost exclusively on perfecting the vehicle’s aerodynamics over the past year. By improving aerodynamic performance by 39 percent, the team was able to capture the new world record.

 

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A nocturnal spider native to the Erg Chebbi Desert in Morocco has an acrobatic solution to escape danger. Cebrennus rechenbergi, one of the ten most fascinating species in 2015, can cartwheel! It belongs to the Sparassidae family of spiders that are synonymous with speed and often known as huntsmen, Nicknamed “flicflac” by Dr Peter Jager of Senckenberg Research Institute, who identified the spider, it performs acrobatic flips in the air which resemble cartwheels. It can jump 6.6 feet per second, enabling it to move two times faster than it can when simply walking.

The Moroccan flic-flac spider is nocturnal and is known to feed on moths before sunrise. It spends the hot desert days in its cool burrow in the sand protected from the sun and predators. The spider creates its dwelling with its pedipalps (feelers) and bristles, forming long, vertical tubes out of sand and silk. Using a series of rapid, acrobatic flic-flac movements of its legs similar to those used by gymnasts, the spider is able to actively propel itself off the ground, allowing it to move both down and uphill, even at a 40 percent incline. This behavior is different than other huntsman spiders, such as Carparachne aureoflava from the Namib Desert, which uses passive cartwheeling as a form of locomotion. The flic-flac spider can reach speeds of up to 2 m/s using forward or back flips to evade threats.

 

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