Praying mantises are well known for being skilled, formidable, and successful hunters. Now a new species discovered in Peru has added another intriguing weapon to their arsenal – impaling their prey on specially adapted barbs on their legs. According to researchers, this is a novel hunting strategy not seen before in mantids, or in fact any insect, and they hadn’t even been looking for it.

Dr Julio Rivera, an entomologist at Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola in Lima, first came across a male specimen of the mantis in 2000 when a colleague captured it in the Tingo María tropical rainforest region of Peru, and brought it to the lab. In the following years, more specimens turned up and were added to the collection at the University, and not long after Rivera returned to Peru in 2017, a local student donated three living juveniles – enough for Rivera to attempt a proper taxonomic description.

Physical features suggested the mantis was likely a new species, so the goal of rearing juveniles was to get them to maturity to study their genitals. “[E]ach species has a distinct genital shape, which helps to define the species,” Dr Rivera told IFLScience.

Watch a strange, sprouting mushroom reach out like an octopus … or the devil’s fingers.
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Time-lapse video shows an octopus-like fungus bursting from its “egg.” Fittingly known as the octopus stinkhorn, or devils’s fingers, this mushroom spends much of its time underground. When it’s time to reproduce, it emerges and starts to ooze a spore-filled slime that attracts flies. The flies carry the spores away, helping the strange mushroom to spread far and wide.

Read about the creepiest plants and fungi known to science.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/creepy-plants-fun…s-science/

This sprouting, octopus-like fungus is the stuff of nightmares | national geographic.

Conventional water electrolysis for the production of hydrogen faces technological challenges to improve the efficiency of the water-splitting reaction for the sluggish oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Noble metal-based ruthenium oxide (RuO₂) and iridium oxide (IrO₂) are used to enhance the oxygen generation rate. However, these noble metal catalysts are very expensive and show poor stability under long-term operation.

Amazing how much our world has changed since 1984 😱

Google Earth + UNILAD Adventure

Professor of theoretical epidemiology Sunetra Gupta has criticised the planned return to a Covid tier system in December.

Speaking with talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer, the Great Barrington Declaration co-author said it “still leaves the doors open to the enormous harms of lockdown”.

She added: “Lockdowns are a luxury of the affluent…the UK cannot afford it.”

It comes ahead of Boris Johnson setting out plans for a strengthened three-tier system of restrictions to replace England national lockdown and to pave the way for a limited relaxation at Christmas.

Your hand will give up before this pen does.

Six years after our initial report, Lesley Stahl visits surviving members of the 90+ Study and finds out what scientists have learned from following the study’s participants.