On December 25th of 2015, a farmer named Jose Antonio Nievas found what he thought was no more than an unusual rock near a stream on his farm in a town located about twenty miles from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He found the object partly covered in mud and dug around it to find out what it was.
It turned out that the mysterious rock-like object wasn’t what he expected - and when he realized the significance of his discovery, he decided to get people from the scientific community involved. What he had dug up wasn’t a rock at all - it was an extremely rare type of fossil. After reviewing it, scientists agreed that the object was not a rock, a meteorite or dinosaur egg, but the shell of a glyptodon, a large, armored mammal that lived during the Pleistocene epoch, and were the ancestors of the modern-day armadillo. Glyptodons could weigh up to two tonnes, and probably coexisted with humans for about 4,000 years before going extinct.
Scientists describe workers trapped for years in "a hostile environment in total darkness."
For the past several years, a group of researchers has been observing a seemingly impossible wood ant colony living in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker in Templewo, Poland, near the German border. Completely isolated from the outside world, these members of the species Formica polyctena have created an ant society unlike anything we’ve seen before.
The Soviets built the bunker during the Cold War to store nuclear weapons, sinking it below ground and planting trees on top as camouflage. Eventually a massive colony of wood ants took up residence in the soil over the bunker. There was just one problem: the ants built their nest directly over a vertical ventilation pipe. When the metal covering on the pipe finally rusted away, it left a dangerous, open hole. Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall down the pipe and cannot climb back out. The survivors have nevertheless carried on for years underground, building a nest from soil and maintaining it in typical wood ant fashion. Except, of course, that this situation is far from normal.
Polish Academy of Sciences zoologist Wojciech Czechowski and his colleagues discovered the nest after a group of other zoologists found that bats were living in the bunker. Though it was technically not legal to go inside, the bat researchers figured out a way to squeeze into the small, confined space and observe the animals inside. Czechowski’s team followed suit when they heard that the place was swarming with ants. What they found, over two seasons of observation, was a group of almost a million worker ants whose lives are so strange that they hesitate to call them a “colony” in the observations they just published in The Journal of Hymenoptera.
Because conditions in the bunker are so harsh, constantly cold, and mostly barren, the ants seem to live in a state of near-starvation. They produce no queens, no males, and no offspring. The massive group tending the nest is entirely composed of non-reproductive female workers, supplemented every year by a new rain of unfortunate ants falling down the ventilation shaft.
Journal of Hymenoptera Research, 2016. DOI: 10.3897/jhr.51.9096
Stung by a tarantula hawk? The advice I give in speaking engagements is to lie down and scream. The pain is so debilitating and excruciating that the victim is at risk of further injury by tripping in a hole or over an object in the path and then falling onto a cactus or into a barbed-wire fence. Such is the sting pain that almost nobody can maintain normal coordination or cognitive control to prevent accidental injury. Screaming is satisfying and helps reduce attention to the pain of the sting.
Justin Schmidt. Yeah, you don’t want to be stung by one of them. (via sciencefriday)
Mars needs YOU! In the future, Mars will need all kinds of explorers, farmers, surveyors, teachers … but most of all YOU! Join us on the Journey to Mars as we explore with robots and send humans there one day.
Science and other Shit. @biologicallyred - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
