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
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
If shooting arrows from a crossbow into cubes of ballistics gelatin doesn't sound like biological science to you, you've got a lot to learn from University of Illinois animal biology professor Philip Anderson, who did just ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 22, 2016
0
163
Have a close-up look at DNA; you'll see it wiggles in the oddest way. Put more scientifically, a piece of DNA's movements are often counterintuitive to those of objects in our everyday grasp. Take a rod of rubber, for example. ...
General Physics
Apr 20, 2016
0
183
For many people, it's the source of a nagging—and painful—injury, but for Carolyn Eng, the IT band is an intriguing mystery, one she may be close to solving.
Other
Aug 27, 2015
0
271
Hummingbirds live life at incomprehensible speeds. Their flight acrobatics are amazing, maneuvering more like insects than birds as they flit around, flying upside down and even backwards. They're a blur as they race between ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 19, 2015
0
74
(Phys.org) —A small, secretive creature with unlikely qualifications for defying gravity may hold the answer to an entirely new way of getting off the ground.
Plants & Animals
Jan 22, 2014
1
0
(Phys.org) —An interdisciplinary team of University of Pennsylvania researchers has already developed a technique for controlling liquid crystals by means of physical templates and elastic energy, rather than the electromagnetic ...
Condensed Matter
Nov 7, 2013
0
0
