In some work headed by Macquarie Uni, a new species of spider was discovered in Northern Queensland (With a really cool hunting strategy). See this spider (dubbed the ballista spider) hunts green ants, the really angry, territorial green ants with a nasty venomous bite. In order to hunt these ants safely, the...

Rating: 🟩 Type: Fiction

Turns out you can bend things using lasers. The process relies on two key characteristics of most solids, (especially metal and glass) Things expand when they heat up Things get soft and bends when they are hot enough So the process is simple* get the whole thing hot enough that it is soft and bendy (we can use a...

My favourite thing about owning a 3D printer is the very specific tools which I would never pay for. Take a guess what this is for: It is a key for popping out portafilters from the group head on my espresso machine Oridinarily I can do this with a teaspoon. The only problem is later I use that teaspoon for stirring...

Another cool scientist profile dropped on Nature earlier, and I wanted to share it here. Billie Goolsby uses robots built by Tony Chen to eavesdrop on the conversations between Frogs and Tadpoles. How cool is that! Essentially, it turns out that one of the key components of parent-offspring in these frogs is how...

Rating: 🟩 Type: Fiction

I spotted a remarkably simple demonstration of optical diffraction the other night, from looking across at the far away lights on the otherside of the train tracks from a balcony. I noticed they looked quite different dependng on whether the flyscreen was open, or closed. Take a look: Open Closed See those beautiful...

Rating: ⭐ Type: Fiction

I was reccomended a couple of white papers by a collegue (Thanks Ben Pope!) and I wanted to share them here. Being opinion white-papers they are both quite readable. Is machine learning good or bad for the natural sciences? Hogg and Villar make some very compelling arguments here about position of ML in the...

Image Credit: The Daily Texan LINK: The Conversation

Rating: 🟧 Type: Non-Fiction

Rating: 🟩 Type: Non-Fiction