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- The maker of the Swiss army knife, with its red or blue shell and multiple tools, has bowed to what an English judge last week called the “plague of knife crime” by designing a version without a blade. In response to an increasing number of countries imposing bans or restrictions on carrying knives, Victorinox, the Swiss firm that produces the pocket tools, is in the early stages of developing the first bladeless version of its product. “We’re concerned about the increasing regulation of knives due to the violence in the world,” said Carl Elsener, the fourth-generation CEO of the family-run company. Victorinox produces about 10m of the pocket tools each year. There are about 400 different types to choose from, including one that boasts 73 functions. However, until now they have always had at least one blade.
- Two women have sprayed the words “MeToo” on a 19th-century painting of a woman’s vulva by French artist Gustave Courbet in a stunt by a performance artist, a museum and the artist said. “The Origin of the World”, a nude painted from 1866, was protected by a “glass pane” and the police were on site to assess the damage, the Centre Pompidou in the north-eastern city of Metz told AFP on Monday.
- An old sunken town in the Philippines has reappeared after intense heatwaves and droughts partially dried up a major dam. Remnants of Pantabangan in Nueva Ecija region, located in the middle of the dam’s reservoir, emerge on rare occasions when the water levels are extremely low. The town is said to have been nearly 300 years old when it was submerged in the 1970s to build the reservoir. This time, the town has been exposed for the longest duration since the dam was constructed, Marlon Paladin, an engineer with the state agency that operates the country’s dams, told AFP news agency. The settlement has been seen just six times since the reservoir was built.
- National Park Service will reintroduce bears to Washington’s North Cascades and won’t remove horses from North Dakota park. In North Dakota, the National Parks Service (NPS) has dropped a plan that would have seen about 200 wild horses, descended from those belonging to Native American tribes who fought the 1876 Great Sioux war, rounded up and removed from Theodore Roosevelt national park.
- Hammer-headed bats are named after the males’ oversized boxy heads, which evolved to amplify and project the honking sounds they produce to impress females during courtship displays. These “megabats” are the largest in continental Africa. Hammer-headed bats are named after the males’ oddly elongated, boxy heads, which contain a large resonating chamber that amplifies their calls. This bizarre head is the product of the bats’ unusual mating system.
- Just a few decades ago, even most biologists would have readily agreed that culture is a quintessentially human feature. Sure, they already knew there were dialects in birdsong, and good evidence that many birds largely learned these regional songs by copying other birds. They knew that some enterprising European songbirds called tits had learned how to open milk bottles by watching one another. Scientists had even reported that the practice of washing sweet potatoes in seawater had spread among the members of a Japanese colony of macaque monkeys. In recent decades, however, scientists have learned that culture plays a much more pervasive role in the lives of nonhuman animals than anyone had imagined.
- The concept of “culture”, understood as a set of concepts learned and transmitted to one’s peers, belongs not only to the human species, but also to many other animal species. Animals not only can deepen and refine their knowledge beyond the basic behaviors dictated by instinct, but they are also able to spread this knowledge within the communities of which they are part. A classic example concerns the Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata): a group of this species that populated (and still populates) the island of Kōjima in Japan got into the habit, in the early 1950s, of accepting food offered by men, especially sweet potatoes. This confidence came above all from the conditions of close proximity between these animals and humans on the small area of the island, just 30 hectares. The discovery that changed the behavior of a large part of the community was made by a young female of sixteen months of age, called Imo, who was the first to take the habit of carrying the potato into the water of a stream to clean it of sand. This behavior spread widely in the colony, and within a few years it became a habit of a large part of the group. This activity also became refined over the years: Imo herself, in fact, discovered that by washing the potato in sea water rather than fresh water, it took on an evidently more pleasant flavor for primates.
- A new study provides some theoretical underpinning to warp drives, suggesting that the superfast propulsion tech may not forever elude humanity. “Star Trek” devotees are familiar with warp drives. These hypothetical engines manipulate the fabric of space-time itself, compressing the stuff in front of a spaceship and expanding it behind. This creates a “warp bubble” that allows a craft to travel at incredible velocities — in some imaginings, many times faster than the speed of light. In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a groundbreaking paper that laid out how a real-life warp drive could work. This exciting development came with a major caveat, however: The proposed “Alcubierre drive” required negative energy, an exotic substance that may or may not exist or, perhaps, the harnessing of dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be causing the universe’s accelerated expansion.
- Venus is often called “Earth’s twin” because both planets are around the same size and density; they are also both rocky planets located in the inner region of the solar system. Yet, in many crucial ways, Venus couldn’t be less like Earth. While our planet is teeming with life, Venus, the second planet from the sun, is a virtual hell. It’s the hottest planet in the solar system (even hotter than Mercury, which is closest to the sun), and has temperatures of around 880 degrees Fahrenheit (471 degrees Celsius). That’s hot enough to melt lead. Plus, Venus has quite fearsome surface pressures. Importantly, Venus also lacks a key element for life that’s abundant here on Earth: Water. This is despite the planet being within the so-called “Goldilocks Zone” of the sun, in reference to the region around our star that is neither too hot nor too cold to allow liquid water to exist — and it’s also despite the fact scientists know Venus probably used to have water.
- The idea to store a biorepository — a biobank that stores samples of biological material cooled to temperatures low enough it is essentially suspended in time — inside permanently shadowed craters on the moon, whose frigid temperatures scientists say would be suitable to preserve such a facility for hundreds of years. The samples, coral genetic material in this case, would be returned to Earth on-demand and reseeded in our oceans to restore living reefs. “There’s no place on Earth cold enough,” Mary Hagedorn, a senior research scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, told Space.com. That includes the coldest regions on our planet — the north and south poles.
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