TopNews

Before a ground wasp leaves its home for a hunt, it goes into the air and undergoes a peculiar aerodynamic exercise. It loops in arcs around the nest and slowly gains height and distance prior to flying away. Now, scientists have recorded footage of this swirly trip from the insect's viewpoint.

Solitary wasps and other insects perform ‘learning flights’ at the time of leaving their nests, and make back to back loops around the nest site. And their comeback flights apparently mimic the patterns followed at the time of these ‘learning’ loop-de-loops.

Though scientists have discovered that such specialized departure flights help the wasps to familiarize themselves so that they could find the way back home after foraging, it wasn’t clear so far that how exactly they do so.

On Tuesday, an international group of asteroid experts assembled to talk about the future of asteroid research and avoidance, getting all set for the second annual Asteroid Day.

A huge meteorite or comet exploded over the distant Russian countryside, destructing 770 square miles of forest on June 30, 1908. In observance of the same, June 30 is now called Asteroid Day, part of a campaign to make more and more people aware regarding the dangers of an asteroid strike on our planet.

Seasonal visitors in thousands of numbers have been seen across the Jupiter Inlet in Palm Beach County. However, they aren’t the two-legged variety that belong to northern states and call South Florida home for few months in the year.

This time, local scientists have reported massive aggregation of blacktip sharks, some of which have been only a few yards from shore. A professor of biological sciences at Florida Atlantic University, Stephen Kajiura has spent a lot of time researching over them.

However, they aren’t apparently congregating north of Jupiter Inlet or along the Treasure Coast. Gabriella Ferraro, Martin County spokeswoman said that there weren’t any shark sightings at Martin public beaches, and no beaches were shut because of sharks.

Rutgers University botanist Lena Struwe claims to have found a new plant species locked in ancient amber. The delicate flowers are believed to have fallen to the floor of a muggy and tropical forest more than 15 million years ago.

Instead of getting withered away, the flowers were trapped in sticky globs of tree resin and toughened into amber with time. These were then carried to what is now a Caribbean mountain range.

It was in last April last year that Struwe had heard of all this when she opened an email mentioning about the delicate petals trapped in golden splendor. She came to the conclusion that the fragile flowers trapped in amber were new after reviewing scores of known species at the historic collection at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.

About a century ago, everyone’s favorite theoretical physicist Albert Einstein predicted the presence of gravitational waves. In his theory of general relativity, Einstein provided clues on indirect evidence for their existence.

On September 14, 2015, the Livingston, Louisiana-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), proved that the science legend was right about ripples in the curvature of spacetime which propagate as waves. It was the first time when gravitational waves were detected directly. Now, the science community is hopeful that Einstein’s 100-year-old Einstein's general theory of relativity will revolutionize the field of observational astrophysics.

We all know that earth is the only habitable planet in the observable universe, but it’s not the only thing that makes our home planet unique. It has more than 5,000 known minerals, and out of them, roughly 2,500 are the rarest minerals in terms of both abundance and location.

Rare minerals like cobaltominite, edoylerite and abelsonite make the blue planet unique. These may be present far from our reach, protected in caves or vanish in the first rainfall, as per researchers of a new study on earth’s minerals.