It is an eerie, foreboding, reverberating tune, enough to send a tingle down your spine reut.rs/32cASfQ
From communication to construction, spiderwebs may offer an orchestra of information, says Markus Buehler, engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been using artificial intelligence to study them
🕷️ Buehler and his team of researchers created 3D models of spiderwebs when the arachnids were doing different things - such as construction, repair, hunting and feeding
They then listened for patterns in the spider signals and recreated the sounds using computers and mathematical algorithms.
'Spiders utilize vibrations as a way to communicate with the environment, with other spiders,' Buehler says
Buehler hopes his team’s work could enable humans to understand the language of a spider and one day communicate with them.
There are more than 47,000 species of spiders, and all spin silk webs to provide housing and catch food
Scientists say the silk from a spiderweb is five times stronger than steel.
The living structure of a spiderweb could lead to innovations in construction, maintenance and repair, Buehler says.
Researchers unveiled the first calculation of the total Tyrannosaurus rex population during the estimated 2.4 million years that this fearsome species inhabited western North America during the twilight of the age of dinosaurs reut.rs/3gjcAJs 1/5
Their analysis put the total number of T. rex individuals that ever existed at about 2.5 billion, including approximately 20,000 adults alive at any one time 2/5
They considered factors including the size of its geographic range, its body mass, growth pattern, age at sexual maturity, life expectancy, duration of a single generation and the total time that Tyrannosaurus rex existed before extinction 66 million years ago 3/5
A third of COVID-19 survivors in a study of more than 230,000 mostly American patients were diagnosed with a brain or psychiatric disorder within six months, suggesting the pandemic could lead to a wave of mental and neurological problems, scientists said reut.rs/2Q69eON
Researchers who conducted the analysis said it was not clear how the virus was linked to psychiatric conditions such as anxiety and depression, but that these were the most common diagnoses among 14 disorders they looked at
Post-COVID cases of stroke, dementia and other neurological disorders were rarer, the researchers said, but were still significant, especially in those who had severe COVID-19
Malaysia said it sent 267 containers of illegal plastic waste back to their countries of origin since 2019 and is in the process of returning 81 more reut.rs/31T5XVK 1/4
Malaysia became the destination of choice for the world’s plastic waste after China banned imports in 2018, but is struggling to fend off a deluge of generally unlicensed, unrecyclable garbage 2/4
New U.N. rules on the trade of hazardous waste under the Basel Convention came into force on Jan. 1, intended to discourage the production of hard-to-recycle plastics and to prevent rich countries dumping trash in the developing world 3/4
‘One of the main questions I get asked is "Is it real?"’ says Ole Bielfeldt, 20, from Cologne, Germany.
Like many people, he turned to video app TikTok to keep himself entertained during the pandemic. With no expectations, he posted a video and woke up to 7 million views 1/6
As @macrofying, Bielfeldt's photography videos zoom into ordinary, inanimate objects, revealing what we can’t see through the naked eye 2/6
‘I started the TikTok channel about a year ago, so it’s not that old. I’ve always been interested in photography and especially the different perspectives you could create.’ He decided to post one of his videos on the app - and reached 400,000 views in just a couple of hours 3/6
Health authorities in Denmark, Norway and Iceland suspended the use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine shots following reports of the formation of blood clots in some people who had been vaccinated reut.rs/38vNL8u 1/5
Austria earlier stopped using a batch of AstraZeneca shots while investigating a death from coagulation disorders and an illness from a pulmonary embolism 2/5
The European medicine regulator EMA said the vaccine’s benefits outweighed its risks and could continue to be administered. Europe is struggling to speed up a vaccine rollout after delivery delays from Pfizer and AstraZeneca 3/5
As @NASAPersevere explores the surface of Mars, scientists hunting for signs of ancient life on the distant planet are using data gathered on a mission much closer to home - at a lake in southwest Turkey reut.rs/2O7fNAn
.@NASA says the minerals and rock deposits at Salda are the nearest match on earth to those around the Jezero Crater where the spacecraft landed and which is believed to have once been flooded with water
Information gathered from Lake Salda may help the scientists as they search for fossilized traces of microbial life preserved in sediment thought to have been deposited around the delta and the long-vanished lake it once fed