The diabolical ironclad beetle can withstand enormous forces, protecting it from predators — and potentially providing scientists with new designs for materials.
Why it matters: Details of the beetle's architecture reported by researchers this week could lead to improved ways to join together materials like plastics and metals that are key for constructing airplanes and buildings but can break unpredictably.
In our old age, humans tend to invest in fewer but more positive relationships. A new study of wild chimpanzees finds they seem to do the same.
The big picture: Prioritizing relationships as we age is thought to be tied to our unique awareness of our mortality, but the new findings suggest "social selectivity can emerge in the absence of complex future-oriented cognition," the authors write today in the journal Science.
It's still the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, but history, biology and the knowledge gained from our first nine months with COVID-19 point to how the pandemic might end.
The big picture: Pandemics don't last forever. But when they end, it usually isn't because a virus disappearsor is eliminated. Instead, they can settle into a population, becoming a constant background presence that occasionally flares up in local outbreaks.
Environmental and climatic change in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago drove human beings to adopt more sophisticated tools and broaden their trade networks, according to a new study.
Why it matters: Human beings possess no more important trait than our adaptability, which has enabled us to thrive in nearly every corner of the globe. With environmental and other changes coming at us swiftly, we'll need that adaptability even more in the future.
Bioscience research is undergoing a wave of automation and digitization, turning a manual, laborious practice into a true industry.
Why it matters: Biotechnology promises to revolutionize everything from medicine to energy, but for that to happen, the field needs to move out of the traditional lab and into something resembling a foundry. The growth of robotics and cloud-based remote research can help make that happen.
