If some dinosaurs had wings and flapped them would that frighten insects into fleeing? This study tried to tease out a likely answer, by making and using a dino-like robot. The video shows some of what happened. The study is: “Escape behaviors in prey and the evolution of pennaceous plumage in dinosaurs,” Jinseok Park, Minyoung […]
Would you like to be able to move your ears at will? There’s a good chance you already can (using a 25 million-year-old neural circuit). Dr Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson [pictured] was the first to formally document the so-called oculoauricular phenomenon in his 1908 paper ‘A note on an associated movement of the eyes and […]
No machine can be 100% efficient – and Hummingbirds (Selasphorus calliope) are no exception. As a result, when they flap their wings (typically at around 50Hz) they generate considerable quantities of heat. To find out how much, investigators at the Department of Biology, George Fox University, OR, and the Division of Biological Sciences, University of […]
Elephants are big, and they get hot. Especially in Africa. Thus, from the elephant’s point of view, there’s sometimes an urgent necessity to dissipate excess heat. Some investigators have suggested that flapping their large ears (strictly, their ‘pinnae’) could provide a significant heat-loss mechanism. (e.g. Buss, I. O., and Estes, J. A., 1971, ‘The Functional […]
