Enlarge / Fire ants form a protrusion from an ant raft. (credit: Vernerey Research Group/CU Boulder) Fire ants are a textbook example of collective behavior, capable of behaving as individuals, and also banding together to form floating rafts in response to flooding. Now a pair of mechanical engineers from the University of Colorado, Boulder, have […]
Enlarge / Northwestern University scientists have developed the first mechanical simulation of a rat whisker inside its follicle, to better understand how that sensory input is communicated to the brain. (credit: Niccirf/Getty Images) Rats, cats, and many other mammals have whiskers, which they typically use to sense their surrounding environment, akin to the sense of […]
Expand / Proteins quickly form complex constructions that had proven tough to forecast. (charge: Argonne National Lab) Now, DeepMind declared it had apparently solved one of Science’s exceptional difficulties: the series of amino acids within a protein folds into a three-dimensional form that allows their intricate functions. It is a computational challenge which has resisted […]