Brain Sprouts @lynette-tornatzky - Tumblr Blog

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Owl and Bat, Hōraku (Japan, active early to mid-19th century)

Japan, early to mid-19th century, Ebony with inlays

LACMA Collections

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Giant honeybees live in huge open nests. To protect themselves, they’ve developed a mesmerizing wave-like defense known as shimmering. When shimmering, the bees in a hive, beginning from a distinct spot, will flip over to expose their abdomens. Taken together, this creates large-scale patterns like those seen above.

Scientists have connected the behavior to the presence of wasps that prey on the bees. It seems that shimmering helps to repel the wasps without putting individual bees in danger. If shimmering doesn’t ward off the wasps, the bees can also use their flight muscles to heat the area around the intruder to a wasp-lethal temperature – or, individuals bees can sacrifice themselves by stinging the wasp. (Image credit: Beekeeping International, source; research credit: G. Kastberger et al.; via Gizmodo)

This post is part of our series on collective motion. Check out our previous posts about how crowds are like sand, the fluid properties of worms, and why a lack of randomness makes predicting group behaviors hard.

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Epoch, A Dizzying Visual Representation of Life on Earth Created Entirely From Images on Google Earth

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Happy birthday to astronomer Annie Jump Cannon! Did you know she could classify about three stars a minute? Born in 1863, she attended Wellesley College in 1880, studying physics and astronomy, and later worked with Edward C. Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory as a “computer.” Cannon was known for her skills in star classification—in fact, her simplified system for classifying stars according to their temperature was adopted as the universal standard in the early 1900s and is still used today. She classified more than 225,000 stars over her lifetime! Cannon was also the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, as well as the first women to be elected as an officer of the American Astronomical Society. Image: Smithsonian Institution