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Tiny Robot Hand Uses Electrified Wires as Sensors and to Help Grip Tiny Objects
The new technology may one day be able to grasp microscopic objects such as human eggs.
A soft, miniature five-fingered robot hand could not only safely hold a
delicate snail egg just 3 millimeters wide -- difficult to grasp even
with tweezers -- but it also applied heat to help incubate the egg over
the course of a week, detected mechanical signals that revealed it was
hatching, and then monitored the newborn snail's heart rate, a new study
finds. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Ajou University
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Scientists Find Hints of a Hidden Mass Extinction 30 Million Years Ago
Up to 63% of African and Arabian mammal species may have vanished in a previously undetected die-off.
Nearly two-thirds of mammal species in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula
may have died off about 30 million years ago, a mass extinction that
escaped detection for decades until now, a new study finds. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Matt Borths, Duke University Lemur Center
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Microscopic Marvels: Flexing Tardigrades and the Snaking Filaments of a Moss Plant
Contenders in Nikon Small World in Motion video contest showcase wonders from the microscopic world. Microscopes,
focused on something as simple as a drop of pond water, can open a
portal to a new world filled with fantastic creatures. Since 2011, the
Nikon Small World in Motion video contest has highlighted movies that
reveal tiny marvels invisible to the unaided human eye. The winners of
this year's contest were announced last month. Inside
Science has selected the videos we found most visually appealing
and delved into the science of the fascinating phenomena they
show. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Nikon Small World in Motion video contest
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James Bond's Best Escapes Are From Infections
While martinis probably aren't more protective than good travel habits, researchers can't explain the superspy's luck. Despite
extensive travel and little to no regard for personal health, somehow
one of our most well-traveled icons of page and screen, James Bond, has
yet to find himself writhing on the floor of a hotel bathroom with food
poisoning. According to data assembled by a team of researchers, it's
only a matter of time before his luck catches up to him, because Bond is
downright reckless when it comes to travel safety. READ FULL ARTICLE.
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There's So Much More To Explain About How Bodies Sense Pain
The
medicine Nobel Prize recognized researchers studying how our bodies
sense temperature and touch. Pain is much more complicated. This year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine went to two scientists who discovered how
our sense of temperature and touch works. David Julius identified the
heat-sensing ion channel TRPV1, while Ardem Patapoutian found the
touch-sensitive Piezo channels. READ FULL ARTICLE.
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2 Share Chemistry Nobel Prize for Developing New Way to Make Organic Molecules
Researchers established a new kind of environmentally friendly and cost-effective catalyst.
The 2021 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to Benjamin List
from the Max-Planck-Institute für Kohlenforschung in Germany and David
MacMillan of Princeton University in New Jersey for "for the development
of asymmetric organocatalysis." READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media rights: Copyright American Institute of Physics
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Should Golf Require Shorter Clubs?
A
proposal intended to limit the length of drives by reducing the maximum
club length from 48 inches to 46 inches has drawn criticism from
professional players. Professional
golf has a problem: Players are driving the ball too far. Some
prominent professionals have protested loudly about a proposal for
mitigating the problem, made by and under study by the sport's
rule-makers, the United States Golf Association (USGA) and the United
Kingdom's equivalent, the R&A. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Jacob Lund/Shutterstock
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Choreographed Web-Building Routines Showcase Spiders' Architect Tendencies
What nature's most complex constructions can tell us about how the brain organizes behaviors. Like
any good architect, an orb-weaving spider builds its residence in
stages. Unlike human architects, however, they start without the final
plan in mind. It's a strategy that always works for them, almost as if
spiders are born knowing only the steps of a choreographed dance -- no
pattern is revealed until it's finished. Scientists have observed the
same structural progression in this construction process with many
spider species, though elements such as silk thickness and location vary
greatly. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Courtesy of Abel Corver
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Physics Nobel Recognizes the Science of Complex Systems
Two
scientists share the prize for modeling Earth's climate, while a third
is honored for discovering hidden patterns in the behavior of disordered
complex materials. The
2021 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three scientists who greatly
improved our ability to understand and predict the behavior of complex
systems. Half of the prize was jointly awarded to Syukuro Manabe from
Princeton University and Klaus Hasselmann from the Max Planck Institute
for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, "for the physical modelling of
Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global
warming." The other half went to Giorgio Parisi from Sapienza University
of Rome "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and
fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales." READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media rights: Copyright American Institute of Physics
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How Tree Rings Can Encode a Violin's Age and Place of Origin
Researchers compare tree rings from an instrument's body to other wood to estimate the instrument's age.
A stringed instrument holds many clues about when and where it might
have been made. The wear on the body, the opacity of the wood and the
type of varnish used, for example, can all hint at its origin. In recent
decades, a technique called dendrochronology, which dates an instrument
using the tree rings on its body, has gained popularity. READ FULL ARTICLE.
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Elephants Will Cooperate to Get Food -- If There's Enough to Share
A new paper examines how elephants work together to solve a task and when cooperation breaks down. Cooperation
lies at the beating heart of most societies. For Asian elephants in a
recent study, a bit of teamwork helped them access delicious bananas. A
new study examines elephants' ability to work together for a reward and
the circumstances that limit their capacity for cooperation. READ FULL ARTICLE.
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The Earth's Equatorial Bulge Shapes the Planet's Physics
Meteorologists, oceanographers and snipers have to account for this deformation. Earth
might look like a sphere, but it's actually an "oblate spheroid" -- the
planet is slightly squished, making the circumference of the equator
bigger than the circumference through the poles. Clouds, ocean currents,
and long-range missiles all would behave differently if Earth were
perfectly spherical. READ FULL ARTICLE.
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Evidence Shows Humans May Have Introduced Now-Extinct Wolf to the Falkland Islands
Fox-like dog described by first Europeans to visit the remote islands was an ecological anomaly. An
unknown population of humans that left few traces on the landscape of
the Falkland Islands may have brought large fox-like dogs still present
when Europeans first visited the archipelago in the late 17th
century. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Kit Hamley
Media rights: Please
cite the owner of the material when publishing. This material may be
freely used by reporters as part of news coverage, with proper
attribution. This material may not be modified or altered.
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How Rat Poison Helps Chemists Win Nobel Prizes
Strychnine
is so difficult to make in a lab that chemists, including Nobel
winners, have long competed to synthesize it more efficiently. Strychnine
is a substance commonly deployed to keep rodents away from your
kitchen. But a whole line of Nobel Prize winners -- this year's included --
care little about strychnine's use as rat poison. They are more focused
on the strychnine molecule's complex structure. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Composite of images from Shutterstock made by Abigail Malate, Staff Illustrator (Plant and the molecule).
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Space-Based Research May Help Settle Scientific Puzzle About the Lifetime of a Neutron
Scientists need to pin down the lifetime to better understand fundamental physics questions, like how the universe evolved. Scientists
have been trying to measure the lifetime of a neutron outside an atomic
nucleus for decades, and for the last 15 years, two types of laboratory
experiments have provided different answers. In a new study,
researchers for the second time have measured the neutron lifetime in a
setting far outside the lab -- space. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: NASA/Ames
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A Lobster's Age Doesn't Show, But DNA Could Give Hints
Examining small molecules that attach to DNA strands can help build a sense of a lobster's age.
Lobsters can live a surprisingly long time, but it’s actually pretty
difficult to tell how old they are at any given moment. As they grow,
they molt and develop new hardened exoskeletons every few years. This
means the telltale physical signs of aging don’t accumulate in any
meaningful way. Size is most often used to approximate a lobster’s age,
but this method is “particularly difficult, because individuals have
very different growth rates,” said Martin Taylor, a molecular ecologist
at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media rights: Lobster image courtesy University of East Anglia, Background is public domain by Krystian Tambur
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How Apples Get Their Shape
Physicists
say a universal theory that describes everything from light reflecting
in tea cups to black holes can explain why apples have a dip at the top.
Next time you’re about to bite into an apple, slice it open first and
inspect its cross-section. If you look in the right spot, you’ll observe
that the stem cavity -- where the surface dips down to meet the stem --
is so sharply sloped it nearly becomes a vertical line. Here the
curvature, the local change in slope, is what mathematicians would call
“singular.” Singularities show up in a large range of physical systems,
from light reflecting in tea cups to black holes that warp
space-time. READ FULL ARTICLE.
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New Device Purifies Water with Static Electricity
The self-powered machine kills dangerous bacteria with an electric field. Static
electricity leapt from powering party tricks to batteries a mere decade
ago, when scientists learned to repurpose the process behind doorknob
shocks for deployable electricity. Recent advances in the technology may
ultimately improve access to clean water, though not without some
upgrades. READ FULL ARTICLE.
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