Most ants dexterously grasp and snip their food with a pair of chopstick-like mandibles. But trap-jaw ants are also capable of crashing their jaws together at blisteringly fast speeds, striking victims in 0.77 μs. Yet, unleashing ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 22, 2022
1
71
The structure and functions of many physical networks, including the human brain, the vascular system and other biological networks, often depend on their three-dimensional and geometrical layout. Distinguishing between physical ...
Venus flytraps do it, trap-jaw ants do it, and now materials scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst can do it, too—they discovered a way of efficiently converting elastic energy in a spring to kinetic energy ...
General Physics
Sep 3, 2020
2
313
Viruses—small disease-causing parasites that can infect all types of life forms—have been well studied, but many mysteries linger. One such mystery is how a spherical virus circumvents energy barriers to form symmetric ...
Bio & Medicine
Mar 9, 2020
0
55
Diamond is prized by scientists and jewelers alike, largely for a range of extraordinary properties including exceptional hardness. Now a team of Australian scientists has discovered diamond can be bent and deformed, at the ...
Nanophysics
Feb 5, 2020
0
502
While many scientific achievements come from long years of careful planning, once in a while researchers stumble onto something completely unexpected. "At the beginning, we were looking to create a particular effect," says ...
Materials Science
Dec 18, 2019
0
679
Just when you thought spiders couldn't get any more terrifying.
Plants & Animals
May 13, 2019
1
376
Bioinspired materials are designed and engineered to mimic the biological functions of nature; however fast actuation is an important but challenging task to recreate in the lab. In a recent study, Wenxin Fan and co-workers ...
Researchers in Singapore can now explain what gives the mantis shrimp, a marine crustacean that hunts by battering its prey with its club-like appendages, the most powerful punch in the animal kingdom. In a paper publishing ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 18, 2018
0
91
Although land animals can move in many different ways, most terrestrial creatures use legs to crawl, scuttle, walk and run about. Leg-propelled animals such as mammals, insects, spiders or centipedes, feature a wealth of ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 7, 2018
0
3
