May 2010 Archives

Bank notes could one day be made as beautiful as butterfly wings using technology borrowed from nature.

British scientists have found a way to mimic the vivid iridescent colours of tropical butterflies, created by light bouncing off microscopic wing structures.

One application of the research could be the creation of hard-to-forge and visually striking bank notes and credit cards.

An armoured dinosaur with 4ft horns - the longest known among the extinct reptiles - has been unearthed in Mexico.

The 72 million-year-old rhino-sized plant-eater Coahuilaceratops magnacuerna was an ancestor of the famous three-horned Triceratops.

Like other horned dinosaurs, or ceratopsids, it had a large bony plate behind its head which would have acted as a shield.

Coahuilaceratops' most notable feature are the two enormous horns that jut out from above its eyes.

My, you're a grumpy looking fella! This is a front view of a red imported fire ant head taken by an electronic microscope.

Click on the pic to embiggen.

Bored at work? Counting down the hours to the weekend?

Then Weird Science can help (as long as the boss doesn't spot ya!).

Weird Science Friday Links give you a nudge towards stuff you'll hopefully find more diverting than the stack of papers in front of you!

Great moment in science: birds are dinosaurs!

Wordnik: All the words.

History of ice on Earth.

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

Fifteen futuristic weapons that will certainly make a mess.

Weird Science Hero Carl Sagan talks about the perils of global warming...

A new type of giant flying reptile with a wingspan of six metres and which lived in the Sahara 95 million years ago has been discovered.

The pterosaur, which had a lance-shaped lower jaw making it look like a huge heron, was found by a team of scientists from University College Dublin, the University of Portsmouth and Universite Hassan II in Casablanca.

According to the findings, the scientists believe the newly identified pterosaur to be the earliest example of its kind.

Tiny transmitters glued to the backs of tropical bees have allowed scientists to track the exotic insects as they fly for miles in search of rare flowers.

Some of the iridescent blue-green orchid bees were found to buzz tirelessly for surprisingly long distances. One even crossed the shipping lanes of the Panama Canal, a journey of at least five kilometres.

The study has given researchers new insights into the role of bees in tropical forest ecosystems.

A 500 million-year-old cephalopod fossil shows that modern squids and octopuses have a much older ancestry than was previously thought.

Nectocaris pteryx was two to five centimetres long and resembled a cuttlefish with two long grasping tentacles.

Previously the only known fossil specimen of the creature, described in 1976, defied classification.

NASA's STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) witnessed a comet plunging into the Sun

Astronomers think this now-deceased comet was a Kreutz sungrazer. This is a group of comets that are the remnants of a single large comet that broke up, and periodically they graze too close for comfort and make death dives into opur local fiery ball of gas..

Also, check out this footage from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. It's pretty amazing!

Strangely hypnotic...