Toggle light / dark theme

Turns out, they’re great navigators with some clever strategies for flight.

* The world-first study unlocked a century-old mystery of what insects are up to during migration * The current study followed radio-tagged insects in a light aircraft * It revealed that the hawkmoths are excellent navigators.

Insects are some of the most common migrating animals on Earth-a fact that is often forgotten. Insect migrants such as monarch butterflies, locusts, mosquitoes, and bees, far outnumber ‘popular’ migrants such as birds and mammals. Yet their migration is the least understood form of long-range animal movement.

Now, in a fascinating world-first study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) and the University of Konstanz radio-tracked migrating hawkmoths for up to 80 kilometers—the longest distance that any insect has been continuously monitored in the wild. Their results revealed that the world’s smallest flying migrants are excellent navigators and can maintain perfectly straight flight paths even in unfavorable wind conditions.

Full Story:

China produced an average of 407,181 scientific publications annually, overtaking the US’s 293,434 journal articles, says research.


China has overcome the US to take the top spot globally for “high impact” studies and volume of scientific research, according to a report published by Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTP).

China currently publishes the most scholarly papers each year, followed by the US and Germany, reported The Guardian.

“China is one of the top countries in the world in terms of both the quantity and quality of scientific papers,” Shinichi Kuroki of the Japan Science and Technology Agency told Nikkei Asia.

The new concrete made of tyres will be eco-friendly and cheaper. Engineers from RMIT succeeded in producing concrete from materials such as gravel, tyre, rubber, and crushed rock. It is believed that this innovation will be cheaper and eco-friendly. The team is now looking into reinforcing the concrete to see how it can work in structural elements. A group of researchers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), has succeeded in replacing the classic method of making concrete, which is made of gravel and crushed rock, with rubber from discarded tyres that are suitable for building codes.

According to the press release that has been published by the university, new greener and lighter concrete also promises to reduce manufacturing and transportation costs significantly. Small amounts of rubber particles from tyres are already used to replace these concrete aggregates. However, the previous process of replacing all concrete with aggregates had not been successful.

The study published in the Resources, Conservation & Recycling journal showed the tyres’ manufacturing process.

Lead author and Ph.D. researcher from RMIT University’s School of Engineering, Mohammad Momeen Ul Islam, stated that this work was revolutionary because it showed what could be done with recycled rubber pieces.

Full Story:

The machine functions in curved spaces defying the laws of Earth.

The robot recreates the same environment found around black holes. It does so by moving in a curved space. It could one day allow us to further study black holes.

There is one constant on Earth and that is that when humans, animals, and machines move, they always push against something, whether it’s the ground, air, or water. This fact consists of the law of conservation momentum and was up to now undisputed.

Curved spaces provide new principles However, new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology has come along to showcase the opposite — when bodies exist in curved spaces, they can move without pushing against something. The new study was led by Zeb Rocklin, assistant professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech, and it saw the engineering of “a robot confined to a spherical surface with unprecedented levels of isolation from its environment, so that these curvature-induced effects would predominate,” according to a statement by the institution published on Monday.

Full Story:

Asteroid Bennu was in the news recently for an astonishing discovery. NASA scientists revealed that the asteroid has a surface that appears similar to plastic balls. The discovery dates back to October 2020, when NASA successfully collected a sample from the asteroid.

During the sampling event, the sampling head of the OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft had sunk by 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) into the surface of the asteroid. The space agency found that Bennu’s exterior is made of loosely packed particles that are haphazardly packed together. The spacecraft would have sunk right into the asteroid if it hadn’t fired its thruster to back away after collecting dust and rocks.

The Ukraine army had a few satellite images to share.

A Russian airbase in Crimea was recently attacked Russia initially downplayed the attack It has now been revealed that at least 7 aircraft were destroyed, and significant damage to the base also inflicted.

Recently released satellite photographs show as many as 7 warplanes were destroyed at a Russian airfield in Crimea on Tuesday. While the precise details of the operation remain unknown, Ukraine’s air force shared a triumphant picture of the downed aircraft on July 11th, 2022, on its Twitter account.

Russia has insisted that the damage was accidental and that nothing substantial was lost, but photography from several sources refutes this. At least three structures at the Saki naval airbase in Crimea, the peninsula Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014, looked to have been damaged, in addition to the aircraft.