The pick of the news in science
Busy making a bee line
Bumblebees can work out how to fly the shortest route between flowers, even if they discover the flowers in a different order. That's the finding of a study at Queen Mary and Royal Holloway, University of London, published online this week in The American Naturalist.
The researchers analysed bee flight movements in an array of four artificial flowers, adding flowers sequentially and monitoring how the insects optimised their flight distances.
“There is a common perception that smaller brains constrain animals to be simple reflex machines,” said study co-author Dr Mathieu Lihoreau in a release. “But our work with bees shows advanced cognitive capacities with very limited neuron numbers.”
Elephants are good news for frogs
If you’ve ever seen a landscape that has been trampled by elephants, you’ll know how vastly they can change a terrain.
But a study in the African Journal of Ecologythis month suggests that the news isn't all bad: at least for frogs.
The research in Tanzania monitored amphibian and reptile species in areas that had been damaged to varying degrees by elephants and also an elephant exclusion zone. The researchers, from Georgia Southern University, found that species’ richness increased in areas of heavy damage, and commented particularly how the amphibians took up the niches: “Frogs were more abundant in areas of high damage; in contrast, toads were found the least in high damage areas.”
"It's a momentous development in the history of space activity"
A tweet from Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson on the dedication last week of a nearly two-mile long runway at the purpose-built, commercial Spaceport America in New Mexico