Although Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is known to have studied bird flight, few people realise that he was the first to document flight maneuvers, now called dynamic soaring. Birds use these maneuvers to extract energy from ...
Other
Oct 10, 2018
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13
The authors of a new article published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, "Plant-inspired pipettes", sought inspiration from the liverwort, a widely spread plant, for the creation of a bioinspired pipette. We asked ...
Engineering
May 7, 2018
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4
It's been 65 years since the paper "Molecular structure of nucleic acids," by James Watson and Francis Crick, was published in Nature. Or, more prosaically, the paper that first describes the structure of DNA as we know it ...
Biotechnology
Apr 26, 2018
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9
The stars have fascinated humankind throughout history, and we have developed ever more sophisticated means of interpreting them and using their positions to guide us (at least in a navigational, rather than an astrological ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 24, 2018
0
12
In recently published article from Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the relationship between brain size and behavioural ecology was found to be highly sensitive to small data changes, and widely championed hypotheses such ...
Evolution
Oct 18, 2017
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6
In 1832, the Royal Society moved from using committee minutes to written peer review reports for determining what was published in Philosophical Transactions. This was conveyed by Frederick Augustus, The Duke of Sussex in ...
Other
Sep 8, 2017
0
20
Remember the classic flocking scene from Jurassic Park? Alan and the kids are walking over a grassy plain. A flock of ostrich-like dinosaurs appear. Alan is amazed at how similar their movements are to a flock of birds, while ...
Archaeology
Jul 31, 2017
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19
A recent issue of Interface Focus examined the idea of convergent minds, which pertains to how distantly related species can think about problem solving in very similar ways. The special issue is a multi-disciplinary investigation ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 7, 2017
2
70
Biology Letters talks to Maya deVries, author of a recently published article that describes the feeding habits of stomatopod crustaceans with two kinds of highly specialized feeding appendages; those with elongated spear-like ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 26, 2017
0
2
Spiders build webs, shelters and egg sacs from fine tough silk fibers. To apply these fibers, they must be properly attached to substrates or other threads and must cope with loading in highly-variable directions.
Plants & Animals
Apr 13, 2017
0
4
