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Categories: Mathematics: Puzzles, Offbeat: Earth and Climate

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A fossil arthropod entombed in 100-million-year-old Burmese amber has been identified as a new genus and species of froghopper, known today as an insect with prodigious leaping ability in adulthood following a nymphal stage spent covered in a frothy fluid.

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They're well known for their industrious work, but now a species of ant on Kangaroo Island is also showing that it is skilled at 'playing dead', a behavior that researchers believe is a recorded world first.

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Fungal networks interconnecting trees in a forest is a key factor that determines the nature of forests and their response to climate change. These networks have also been viewed as a means for trees to help their offspring and other tree-friends, according to the increasingly popular 'mother-tree hypothesis'. An international group of researchers re-examined the evidence for and against this hypothesis in a new study.

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Large numbers can only be factorized with a great deal of computational effort. Physicists are now providing a blueprint for a new type of quantum computer to solve the factorization problem, which is a cornerstone of modern cryptography.

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Scientists have observed a star swallowing a planet for the first time. Earth will meet a similar fate in 5 billion years.

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The first building blocks of life on Earth may have formed thanks to eruptions from our Sun, a new study finds. A series of chemical experiments show how solar particles, colliding with gases in Earth's early atmosphere, can form amino acids and carboxylic acids, the basic building blocks of proteins and organic life.

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Greenlandic ice is teeming with life, both on the surface and underneath. There are microscopic organisms that until recently science had no idea existed. There is even evidence to suggest that the tiny creatures color the ice and make it melt faster.

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The way our senses adjust while playing high-intensity virtual reality games plays a critical role in understanding why some people experience severe cybersickness and others don't.

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Researchers have discovered that the electrical fields and activity that exist through a cell's membrane also exist within and around another type of cellular structure called biological condensates. Like oil droplets floating in water, these structures exist because of differences in density. Their foundational discovery could change the way researchers think about biological chemistry. It could also provide a clue as to how the first life on Earth harnessed the energy needed to arise.

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Certain types of fungi can communicate with each other via electrical signals. But much remains unknown about how and when they do so. A group of researchers recently headed to the forest to measure the electrical signals of Laccaria bicolor mushrooms, finding that their electrical signals increased following rainfall.

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Scientists found parallels between the neural circuitry that guides locomotion in sea slugs and in more complex animals like mammals.

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Roboticists have developed a jellyfish-inspired underwater robot with which they hope one day to collect waste from the bottom of the ocean. The almost noise-free prototype can trap objects underneath its body without physical contact, thereby enabling safe interactions in delicate environments such as coral reefs. Jellyfish-Bot could become an important tool for environmental remediation.

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A new Griffith University study has found that humpback whales will use sandy, shallow bay areas to 'roll' around in sandy substrates to remove dead skin cells on their return journeys south to cooler waters. Using data and footage collected from the tags, whales were observed performing full and side rolls in up to 49m water depth on the sea floor that was lined with fine sand or rubble.

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The high seas have been colonized by a surprising number of coastal marine invertebrate species, which can now survive and reproduce in the open ocean, contributing strongly to the floating community composition. Researchers found coastal species, representing diverse taxonomic groups and life history traits, in the eastern North Pacific Subtropical Gyre on over 70 percent of the plastic debris they examined. Further, the debris carried more coastal species than open ocean species.

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For more than half a century, the Tully monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium), an enigmatic animal that lived about 300 million years ago, has confounded paleontologists, with its strange anatomy making it difficult to classify. Recently, a group of researchers proposed a hypothesis that Tullimonstrum was a vertebrate similar to cyclostomes (jawless fish like lamprey and hagfish). If it was, then the Tully monster would potentially fill a gap in the evolutionary history of early vertebrates. Studies so far have both supported and rejected this hypothesis. Now, using 3D imaging technology, a team in Japan believes it has found the answer after uncovering detailed characteristics of the Tully monster which strongly suggest that it was not a vertebrate. However, its exact classification and what type of invertebrate it was is still to be decided.

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Can humans endure long-term living in deep space? The answer is a lukewarm maybe, according to a new theory describing the complexity of maintaining gravity and oxygen, obtaining water, developing agriculture and handling waste far from Earth.

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A lightning strike in New Port Richey, Florida, led to a chemical reaction creating a new material that is transitional between space minerals and minerals found on Earth. High-energy events, such as lightning, can cause unique chemical reactions. In this instance, the result is a new material -- one that is transitional between space minerals and minerals found on Earth.

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Researchers discovered that males of the yellow crazy ant have maternal and paternal genomes in different cells of their body and are thus chimeras.

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Oceanographers discovered warm, chemically distinct liquid shooting up from the seafloor about 50 miles off Newport. They named the unique underwater spring 'Pythia's Oasis.' Observations suggest the spring is sourced from water 2.5 miles beneath the seafloor at the plate boundary, regulating stress on the offshore subduction zone fault.

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A new study identifies the influence of climate change in the greater number of home runs in major league baseball in recent years. The researchers found that more than 500 home runs since 2010 can be attributed to warmer, thinner air caused by global warming, and that rising temperatures could account for 10% or more of home runs by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. The researchers examined how the average number of home runs per year could rise for each major league ballpark with every 1-degree Celsius increase in the global average temperature.