80beats

It’s the end of an era. No, not the 80s, those will never die. Instead today we say goodbye to the venerable 80beats news blog. Over the last five years 80beats has brought you more than 4,000 news stories. We’ve written about dead fish flying in wind tunnels, why ancient Romans are partially to blame [...]

Cicadas don’t use antibacterial wing sanitizer, so how do these insects keep their wings free of bacteria? Hint: it’s structural. The wings of the Clanger cicada kill certain bacteria by ripping their cell membranes. A pattern of pillar-like nanostructures on the wings’ surface put pressure on the bacterial cell membrane, causing it to stretch and eventually tear. In a study [...]

The extent of Arctic sea ice has been diminishing since the late 1970s due to climate change, and this decline is predicted to continue in the coming decades. The prospect of open water in these previously icy areas has sparked a lot of speculation about ships being able to navigate between the Pacific and Atlantic [...]

When air flows around the wing of an airplane, it creates vortices of swirling air. When that wing accelerates suddenly, two vortices form and circle in opposite directions. Sometimes these circles link with one another to create knots. Knots occur in nature and physicists have theorized for the last hundred years that they could be [...]

  This morning’s launch of SpaceX’s third Dragon capsule has the twittersphere all a-flutter. Falcon 9′s blastoff from Cape Canaveral initially appeared to be a success.     Just after the Falcon 9 rocket launched around 10:10 AM EST, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was tweeting its praises.   Falcon 9 delivered Dragon to its target orbit. [...]