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Parasitic butterflies fool ants with smell

A beautiful butterfly is able to fool ants into rearing its young by masking them with the ants’ own smell, say researchers.

Caterpillars of the alcon blue butterfly have developed an outer coat that tricks ants into believing the young are its own, duping the ants into carrying the larvae back to their colonies to care for.

But what is more, the ant seems to “recognise” that it is being duped and one population appears to be engaging in an evolutionary arms race with the butterfly, says the team led by David Nash at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Scientists Invent a Hot-Emitter Transistor for Future High Performance, Low-Power, Multifunctional Devices

Transistors, the building blocks of integrated circuits, face growing challenges as their size decreases. Developing transistors that use novel operating principles has become crucial to enhancing circuit performance.

Hot carrier transistors, which utilize the excess kinetic energy of carriers, have the potential to improve the speed and functionality of transistors. However, their performance has been limited by how hot carriers have traditionally been generated.

A team of researchers led by Prof. Liu Chi, Prof. Sun Dongming, and Prof. CHeng Huiming from the Institute of Metal Research (IMR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has proposed a novel hot carrier generation mechanism called stimulated emission of heated carriers (SEHC).

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