Over hundreds of millions of years of evolution,water-repellant skin has enabledtiny insects, called springtails,to breathe through their skinwithout suffocating in damp soil flooded by rainwater. More recently, such natural engineering has inspired a new approach to cooling new generations of miniaturized electronic devices.
Source: ieee.org
The mystery behind how birds navigate might finally be solved: it’s not the iron in their beaks providing a magnetic compass, but a newly discovered protein in their eyes that lets them ‘see’ Earth’s magnetic fields. These findings come courtesy of two new papers – one studying robins, the other zebra finches. The fancy eye protein is called Cry4, and it’s part of a class of proteins called cryptochromes – photoreceptors sensitive to blue light, found in both plants and animals.
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The deposit, found within Japan’s exclusive economic zone waters, contains more than 16 million tons of the elements needed to build high-tech products ranging from mobile phones to electric vehicles, according to the study, released Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports.
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