Knowing which way is up or down is important for all living things. For plants, which grow roots into the soil and flowers above ground, getting this polarization wrong would cause a whole host of problems. In plants, polarization ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 4, 2018
0
30
When a pathogen enters their colony, ants change their behavior to avoid the outbreak of disease. In this way, they protect the queen, brood and young workers from becoming ill. These results, from a study carried out in ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 22, 2018
0
353
Indirect reciprocity is a model of how humans act when their reputation is at stake, and which social norms people use to evaluate the actions of others. Researchers seek to know which social norms lead to cooperation in ...
Social Sciences
Nov 12, 2018
0
151
Ants are tidy—when they move into a new nest box, they spend the first days cleaning it thoroughly, just like humans moving into a new home. Many ants produce highly acidic chemicals from specialized glands in their body. ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 10, 2018
0
3
Snapdragons are tall, charming plants, and flower in a range of bright colors. In Spain, where snapdragons grow wild, these flower colors show a remarkable pattern: When driving up a road from Barcelona to the Pyrenees, snapdragons ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 8, 2018
0
93
Just a few Shigella bacteria are enough to make anyone develop gastroenteritis, while illness from cholera requires ingestion of thousands to millions of Vibrio cholerae bacteria. Why does the disease-causing dosage differ ...
Cell & Microbiology
Oct 1, 2018
0
542
It was long thought that DNA, together with the genes encoded in it, determined genetic destiny. But equally important is coordinating when genes are turned on and off. In fact, the regulation of gene expression defines life ...
Evolution
Sep 11, 2018
1
15
The method of fabricating objects via silicone molding has a long tradition. Until now, however, creating molds for casting complex objects required a lot of experience and involved manual work, which made the process expensive ...
Engineering
Aug 21, 2018
0
8
Most of the objects we see are colored by pigments, but using pigments has disadvantages: such colors can fade, industrial pigments are often toxic, and certain color effects are impossible to achieve. The natural world, ...
Engineering
Aug 17, 2018
0
9
Most of the plastic objects we see are created using injection molding, but designing such molds is a difficult task, usually requiring experts. Now, computer scientists from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria ...
Software
Aug 17, 2018
0
6
