Medicine & TechnologyLethal fungus named Pseudogymnoascus Destructans is causing mass deaths in the bats of Texas. Scientists found this fungus can cause white nose disease which leads the bats to death. this disease was first found in 2006, since then it's been spreading at the speed of 100 miles per year.
Sitting in traffic on the 210 Interstate Freeway can be quite a pain when you’re on your way to Los Angeles. In fact, in the stop and go traffic you may find yourself going a “little batty”—and you’d never guess just how right you are. When you’re behind the wheel, abiding by the rules of the road, you may just be revealing a bit more of your bat side than usual as a new study published this week in the journal PLOS Computational Biology reveals that humans aren't the only ones who follow “traffic rules” in nature.
The future of transformer-like technology is here, with a new bat-like robot that can crawl around on all fours, as well as fly away. The DALER, otherwise known as the Deployable Air-Land Exploration Robot, is officially here, and it shares a stunning resemblance to its inspiration—the vampire bat.
Ever wonder how you could lose your way on the freeway, and still find your destination without Google Maps or MapQuest as an aid? Or how a dog with an attention span of only mere minutes can recall the path least travelled, and find its way home, in spite of the baffling sounds and smells around it? Well as it so happens, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel believe that new research reveals that mammals have developed an internal compass that guides our way. And it’s not just dogs and humans that have evolved the nifty trick deep within the brain.
News early this morning broke courtesy of a study in the journal Nature, where researchers finally discovered how brains intrinsically can navigate the body, by using what they call a “3-D neural compass”. The study conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel investigated the Egyptian fruit bat and revealed a toroidal shaped grouping of neural cells within the brain that helped the bats differentiate their orientation and the place in a 3-dimensional field.
As species that primarily navigate with their ears and not their eyes, bats are fairly amazing creatures. Their abilities to track predators, prey and hear sounds far beyond what humans can hear, makes these echolocators quite impressive specimens. But new research reveals that their sonar signals may have an additional function as well -- to jam up competitors, and steal their prey.