Ants may use the corners of their nest as 'toilets,' according to a new study.
Little research has been done on ant sanitary behavior, so the authors of this study conducted an experiment to determine whether distinct brown patches they observed forming in ants' nests were feces. They fed ants, living in white plaster nests, food dyed with either red or blue food coloring and observed the nests for the colorful feces.
A 3-D scan of the newly discovered Ruby Seadragon.
While researching the two known species of seadragons as part of an effort to understand and protect the exotic and delicate fish, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego made a startling discovery: A third species of seadragon.
A study that assessed the impact of urban land use on the initiation of thunderstorms from 1997 to 2013 in the humid subtropical region of the southeast United States found that isolated convective initiation events occur more often over the urban area of Atlanta compared with its surrounding rural counterparts.
The findings confirm that human-induced changes in land cover in tropical environments lead to more thunderstorm initiation events.
Nicotine's primary metabolite supports learning and memory by amplifying the action of a primary chemical messenger involved in both, researchers report.
"This is the first hint of what the mechanism of the metabolite cotinine might be," said Dr. Alvin V. Terry, Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University and corresponding author of the study in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
Nicotine isn't healthy for people, but such naturally occurring chemicals found in flowers of tobacco and other plants could be just the right prescription for ailing bees, according to a Dartmouth College-led study.
Why is caring for young shared unequally between the sexes in so many animal species? Research from the University of Bristol, UK suggests that small initial differences which predispose one sex to care more are exaggerated once the ability to care evolves. As a result, one sex evolves attributes - such as mammary glands in female mammals or increased brain size in some fish - that enhance the ability to care, and so this sex does most or all of the care.
Measurements at BESSY II have shown how spin filters forming within magnetic sandwiches influence tunnel magnetoresistance - results that can help in designing spintronic components. In doing so, the teams enhanced our understanding of processes that are important for future TMR data storage devices and other spintronic components.
Researchers from the Ramón Llull University (Spain) have created a system capable of geolocating videos by comparing their audiovisual content with a worldwide multimedia database. In the future this could help to find people who have gone missing after posting images on social networks, or even to recognise locations of terrorist executions.
Scientists report that chemicals that are not controlled by a United Nations treaty designed to protect the Ozone Layer are contributing to ozone depletion. In the new study, the scientists also report the atmospheric abundance of one of these 'very short-lived substances' (VSLS) is growing rapidly.
Pioneering techniques that use satellites to monitor ocean acidification are set to revolutionise the way that marine biologists and climate scientists study the ocean. This new approach, that will be published on the 17 February 2015 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, offers offers remote monitoring of large swathes of inaccessible ocean from satellites that orbit the Earth some 700 km above our heads.
A team of archaeologists and other researchers hope that an ancient graveyard in Italy can yield clues about the deadly bacterium that causes cholera.
Scientists are teaming up to use satellite data to target deadly parasites to help predict patterns of parasitic diseases such as malaria, worms and hydatids. Project leader Professor Archie Clements, from The Australian National University, said the research could help authorities in developing countries fight parasitic diseases.
The "Hockey Stick" graph, a simple plot representing temperature over time, led to the center of the larger debate on climate change, and skewed the trajectory of at least one researcher, according to Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State.
"The "Hockey Stick" graph became a central icon in the climate wars," Mann told attendees today last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "The graph took on a life of its own."
Scientists have revealed how coral-dwelling microalgae harvest nutrients from the surrounding seawater and shuttle them out to their coral hosts, sustaining a fragile ecosystem that is under threat.
The United States added about 7.6 million acres of forests between 1990 and 2010, which is a great environmental gain, but the real question is how the United States achieved that milestone, said Darla Munroe, associate professor of geography at The Ohio State University.
"Reforestation in the United States may have come at the expense of some other country's forest," Munroe said. "There isn't any environmental gain for the world if we are saving trees here by simply getting trees for our paper products from some other place."