Shark skin has long been known to improve the fish's swimming performance by reducing drag, but now George Lauder and Johannes Oeffner from Harvard University show that in addition, the skin generates thrust, giving the fish ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 9, 2012
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A honey bee becomes a royal queen or a common worker as a result of the food she receives as a larva. While it has been well established that royal jelly is the diet that makes bees queens, the molecular path from food to ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 10, 2011
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Many meat-eating animals have unique ways of hunting down a meal using their senses. To find a tasty treat, bats use echolocation, snakes rely on infrared vision, and owls take advantage of the concave feathers ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 1, 2011
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The carbon dioxide we exhale and the odors our skins emanate serve as crucial cues to female mosquitoes on the hunt for human hosts to bite and spread diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever.
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 30, 2011
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Gripping tightly to a tree trunk, at first sight a colugo might be mistaken for a lemur. However, when this animal leaps it launches into a graceful glide, spreading wide the enormous membrane that spans its legs and tail ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 28, 2011
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Why don't you ever see baby pigeons? For the same reason you don't see many chicks: they can't fly. It can take months for their partially developed wings and flight muscles to become airworthy, and by then the youngsters ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 23, 2011
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The shimmery feathers of a male mallard might have a showy quality that appeals to prospective mates, but the water resistance and self-cleaning capabilities of iridescent feathers pale in comparison to those of noniridescent ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 17, 2011
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Water spiders spend their entire lives under water, only venturing to the surface to replenish their diving bell air supply. Yet no one knew how long the spiders could remain submerged until Roger Seymour and Stefan Hetz ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 9, 2011
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Biomechanics researchers Timothy Higham of Clemson University and Andrew Clark of the College of Charleston conclude that moving quickly in a forward, firm-footed stance across a slippery surface is less likely to lead to ...
Other
Mar 24, 2011
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Pigeons rely mainly on their olfactory sense when they navigate. Young pigeons learn to recognize environmental odours carried by the winds into the loft and to use these odours to find their way home from ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 3, 2011
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