Better Late Than Never!

Contamination-seeking drones - IBM Patent 9447448.

Stay back and let the drones do the dirty work. Patent 9447448 makes cognitive drones able to inspect and decontaminate places so humans don’t have to. The drones’ on-board AI system can collect and analyze samples, so it can identify and clean up any bacteria or outbreak. Meanwhile you get to hang back, safely out of harm’s way.

This is just one of the record-breaking 8,000+ patents IBM received this year. Explore the latest IBM patents. →

Good news today: the fastest horizontal flyer in the animal kingdom is now a bat.

Free-tailed bats have now been clocked flying horizontally at over 160 kilometers per hour (that’s nearly 100 mph!), toppling the previous record-holder, the swift. The record for speed of diving is still held by the peregrine falcon but we’re coming for you next, feathers.

Source

One of my favorite things about biology is that there are so many diagrams like this that look like shitposts if you remove any and all context from them

For more posts like these, go to @mypsychology​

i think the coolest thing would be to see a new color

Close-Up of the First Mechanical Gear Ever Found in Nature

The biological form of a mechanical gear was observed in nature for the first time in juvenile planthoppers (Genus: Issus), a common insect that can be found in gardens across Europe.

The insect has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronize the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump. The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent.

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A reminder that NASA isn’t the only space agency

I have seen many “Space achievements 2015” articles and posts leaving international accomplisments completely out, so here are some of them: 

1. A new type of basaltic rock on the moon was found by Chinese robotic lander.

China National Space Administration’s Chang’e-3 landed on the Moon on 14 December 2013, becoming the first spacecraft to soft-land since the Soviet Union‘s Luna 24 in 1976.

2. On February 11, the European Space Agency, ESA, successfully launched on a suborbital trajectory and recovered an experimental wingless glider, IXV.

It became the first true “lifting body” vehicle, which reached a near-orbital speed and then returned back to Earth without any help from wings.

3. On December 9, Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft succeeded entering orbit of Venus.

Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency’s Akatsuki is the first spacecraft to explore Venus since the ESA’s Venus Express reached the end of its mission in 2014.

4.  ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft detected oxygen ‘leaking’ from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the first time these molecules have been seen around a comet.

Rosetta spacecraft, the first to drop a lander (named Philae) on a comet, entered orbit around 67P in 2014 and continues to orbit the body. On June 13, European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, received signals from the Philae lander after months of silence.

5.  The Canadian Space Agency has provided NASA with a laser mapping system that will scan an asteroid that could potentially hit the Earth in about 200 years

6. The high-resolution stereo camera on ESA’s Mars Express captured this sweeping view from the planet’s south polar ice cap and across its cratered highlands and beyond.

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New York City Has Genetically Distinct ‘Uptown’ and ‘Downtown’ Rats

A graduate student sequenced rats all over Manhattan, and discovered how the city affects their genetic diversity.

whoa-o-o-o-o-oh-oh

WHOA-O-O-O-O-OH-OH

UPTOWN RAT

I saw this and thought of @fleamontpotter.