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Video: Bat’s tongue baffles researchers

by Hanae Armitage

Most nectar-feeding animals evolve special quirks (mainly of the tongue) that optimize their eating habits. 

But for the groove-tongued bat (Lonchophylla robusta), evolution has dealt a bit of a strange hand. Instead of lapping up or siphoning liquid as other mammals do, this bat hovers over its food source and dips its long, slender tongue into the nectar, keeping contact the entire time it drinks. 

Researchers filmed the bat with a high-speed video camera to try to decipher the special tongue mechanism, and watched as the fluid flowed upward along the bat’s tongue, against gravity, and into its mouth. 

Today, researchers report in Science Advances that the conveyor belt–like mechanism may actually allow these bats to feed more efficiently from certain types of flowers…

(read more: Science/AAAS)

50 Amazing Fact About the Moon

(Source)

When engineers are bored.

Taylor Swift “The Last Time” (Radio Edit – Premiere)

Submitted by @asapscience

Science is so amazing, but it’s being de-funded around the world. We hope to make a difference with this video:

Your sharing is greatly appreciated.

8 of the world’s most bizarre flowers:

1.) Swaddled Babies

2.) Flying Duck Orchid

3.) Hooker’s Lips Orchid

4.) Ballerina Orchid

5.) Monkey Orchid

6.) Naked Man Orchid

7.) Laughing Bumblebee Orchid

8.) White Egret Orchid

First materials woven at atomic and molecular levels: Weaving a new story for COFS and MOFs

An international collaboration led by Berkeley Lab scientists has woven the first 3-D covalent organic frameworks (COFs) from helical organic threads. The woven COFs display significant advantages in structural flexibility, resiliency and reversibility over previous COFs.

There are many different ways to make nanomaterials but weaving, the oldest and most enduring method of making fabrics, has not been one of them – until now. An international collaboration led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, has woven the first three-dimensional covalent organic frameworks (COFs) from helical organic threads. The woven COFs display significant advantages in structural flexibility, resiliency and reversibility over previous COFs – materials that are highly prized for their potential to capture and store carbon dioxide then convert it into valuable chemical products.

“We have taken the art of weaving into the atomic and molecular level, giving us a powerful new way of manipulating matter with incredible precision in order to achieve unique and valuable mechanical properties,” says Omar Yaghi, a chemist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley’s Chemistry Department, and is the co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute (Kavli-ENSI).

“Weaving in chemistry has been long sought after and is unknown in biology,” Yaghi says. “However, we have found a way of weaving organic threads that enables us to design and make complex two- and three-dimensional organic extended structures.”

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