The secret of the archer fish’s powerful spits has been discovered, and it isn’t powerful muscles. The fish that shoots bugs out of the air uses physics, a paper in PLoS ONE declared. By letting physics amplify the momentum in the drop shot out of the water, the fish achieves six times the wallop its […]
Skycrapers of the future may shine in brilliant butterfly colors. Optical biosensors may be made from spider webs. These are just a few of the engineering marvels coming from biomimetics—the imitation of nature.
Fifteen years after cosmologists proposed the existence of dark energy, they have learned nothing about it. In “Cosmology: Out of the Darkness,” Matthew Chalmers discussed the current thinking of Brian Schmidt, who shared the Nobel prize in 2011 for discovering cosmic acceleration (actually, an inference based on light from supernovae; see 9/30/2012). “Fifteen years after […]
Apollo ended 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong is dead, but lunar geologists are still using the moon rocks they brought home to construct a story of the moon's "evolution".