No one knows how homing pigeons do it, but now a team of Swiss and South African scientists have discovered that the bird's navigation is affected by disturbances in gravity, suggesting that they navigate using a gravity ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 12, 2014
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1985 was one of the worst years in living memory for the flamingo population of the Camargue, France. Over a 15 day period in January, temperatures plummeted, the lagoons, ponds and salt pans where the birds feed froze and ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 15, 2014
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Becoming invisible is probably the ultimate form of camouflage: you don't just blend in, the background shows through you. And this strategy is not as uncommon as you might think. Kathryn Feller, from the University of Maryland ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 17, 2014
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Anyone who has seen the movies of Neil Armstrong's first bounding steps on the moon couldn't fail to be intrigued by his unusual walking style. But, contrary to popular belief, the astronaut's peculiar walk was not the result ...
Space Exploration
Sep 17, 2014
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Sam Ridgway has spent most of his life learning about dolphins and whales. Over his five-decade career he has asked these cetaceans various questions, including how deep they can dive and how depth affects their hearing. ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 13, 2014
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Highly manoeuvrable and built like torpedoes, minke whales are the most common whales in Antarctic waters, yet the animals could be living on a knife edge as their sea-ice homes dwindle rapidly. 'Sea ice in the area around ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 13, 2014
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Have you ever tried running without swinging your arms? It's not easy. Each step jars and it feels like hard work: but is it? Christopher Arellano, from Brown University, USA, says, 'We know from the literature that arm swinging ...
Other
Jul 18, 2014
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Life in the forest canopy is precarious: lose your footing and you could rule yourself out of the evolutionary arms race. Yet this hazard has not deterred many tropical ants from making their homes amongst the branches. In ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 11, 2014
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Female insects have one goal in life: to find the best place to lay their eggs. For fig wasps, that is the developing fruit of the luscious fig plant. However, when one particular parasitic fig wasp (Apocryta westwoodi grandi) ...
Plants & Animals
May 28, 2014
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People have thought for decades that the rough skin of sharks may give them a swimming boost and now scientists from Harvard University have made the first ever realistic simulated shark skin. They also measured that the ...
Plants & Animals
May 14, 2014
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