With poppy seed-sized brains, jumping spiders compute distances in a highly efficient manner. Their eyes contain multiple retinal layers, each focused at a different depth. By comparing differences in sharpness, they estimate distance. New camera mimics this strategy while consuming less energy than a nightlight. It could enable a new generation of battery-powered devices that need to gauge their surroundings, like wearable technologies, assistive devices, robots and drones.

Camera could enable ultra-low-energy wearables, robots and drones

Jaspreet Singh Randhawa, a Mississippi State assistant professor of physics, has received a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to support a $700,000 research project on the nuclear reactions that power stellar explosions and other extreme cosmic events.

The study showed that trees around a low-rise building can reduce the wind force on segments by as much as 50%.

New research published in Nature Sustainability and led by Notre Dame has explored how rice-fish coculturing — an intervention technique that introduces fish into the rice fields — could help reduce disease incidence and poverty along the northern Senegal River basin, a hot spot for schistosomiasis.

This study debunks a decades-old myth that tropical mountain flowers evolved to attract hummingbirds because high altitudes are too cold and wet for bees and finds that hummingbirds are simply much better at moving pollen. This is because hummingbirds just drink the nectar, while bees constantly groom themselves to save pollen as food for offspring—leaving less of it for the next flower. Over generations, flowers will change shapes, colors, and scents to favor hummingbirds over bees. These tiny adaptations can result in entirely new plant species without requiring any major climate or environmental changes.

UC San Diego engineers have created a tiny optical device that pairs with AI to spot and correct distorted light from a single image, a breakthrough that could sharpen imaging in fields from biology to manufacturing.

Arctic communities are increasingly exposed to dangerous weather events due to climate change and rely on accurate weather forecasts. However, conditions in the lower atmosphere remain poorly observed in the Arctic because monitoring systems are expensive and difficult to deploy. Now, researchers propose a new framework for on-demand atmospheric observations based on lightweight, low-cost profiling systems that can be operated by local communities whenever additional weather data are needed, helping improve forecasting and climate resilience.

Antipredator training can make animals born in captivity regain their fear of enemies, necessary to prepare them for release into the wild. But now, researchers in the US have found that an alternative method may be more efficient: training pregnant females instead, relying on maternal effects to transmit the learned fear to their offspring. They showed that daughters of the endangered Pacific pocket mouse showed more vigilance behaviors around live snakes if their mothers had undergone antipredator conditioning that taught them to associate these with an aversive but harmless stimulus. However, no such effect was found for male offspring. The mechanisms by which this maternal effect is passed on are still unclear, but could involve prenatal programming through stress hormones, or maternal postnatal care.

"Instead of studying all 8,000 kinds of neurons, we can instead understand how circuits work by studying these 200 modular elements that are wired together in various ways for different functions."