Thư Viện

Collecting Ant Specimens

Collecting ants can be as simple as picking up stray ones and placing them in a glass jar, or as complicated as completing an exhaustive survey of all species present in an area and estimating their relative abundances. The exact method used will depend on the final purpose of the collections...
Sep 28,2017

Striking back at lightning with lazers

Seldom is the weather more dramatic than when thunderstorms strike. Their electrical fury inflicts death or serious injury on around 500 people each year in the United States alone...
Sep 28,2017

The nature of genius

There has always been ari interest in geniuses and prodigies. The word ‘genius’, from the Latin gens (= family) and the term ‘genius’, meaning ‘begetter’, comes from the early Roman cult of a divinity as the head of the family...
Sep 28,2017

A chronicle of timekeeping

Our conception of time depends on the way we measure it. According to archaeological evidence, at least 5,000 years ago, and long before the advent of the Roman Empire, the Babylonians began to measure time, introducing calendars to co-ordinate communal activities, to plan the shipment of goods and,..
Sep 28,2017

Biological control of pests

The continuous and reckless use of synthetic chemicals for the control of pests which pose a threat to agricultural crops and human health is proving to be counter-productive. Apart from engendering widespread ecological disorders , pesticides have contributed to the emergence of a new breed of ch..
Sep 28,2017

Why pagodas don't fall down?

In a land swept by typhoons and shaken by earthquakes, how have Japan's tallest and seemingly flimsiest old buildings - 500 or so wooden pagodas - remained standing for centuries? Records show that only two have collapsed during the past 1400 years ...
Sep 28,2017

Pulling strings to build pyramids

No one knows exactly how the pyramids were built. Marcus Chown reckons the answer could be 'hanging in the air'. The pyramids of Egypt were built more than three thousand years ago, and no one knows how...
Sep 28,2017

Let's go bats

Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark. They hunt at night, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid obstacles...
Sep 28,2017

Ant intelligence

When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence...
Sep 28,2017

Endless harvest

More than two hundred years ago, Russian explorers and fur hunters landed on the Aleutian Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the North Pacific, and learned of a land mass that lay farther to the north. The islands’ native inhabitants called this land mass Aleyska, the ‘Great Land’; today, we k..
Sep 27,2017