科学美国人60秒 SSS 2016-8-16

Sometimes a snout full of snot can be just what the doctor ordered. At least if youre a dolphin. Because a new study shows that a little bit of mucus helps these marine mammals generate the rapid-fire stream of clicks they emit and use for echolocati

科学美国人60秒 SSS 人类回声器原理类似蝙蝠回声

Human Echolocators Use Tricks Similar to Bats Many bats use a system similar to sonar to navigate in the dark. They send out high frequency sound, sometimes as clicks, and get information about their surroundings by the timing and quality of the soun

科学美国人60秒 SSS 先思后”言”

Right Whales Seem To Think Before They Speak As animals grow, the sounds they make change. But some sounds continue to change, even after an animal matures. That's true for humans, and now it turns out to be true for North Atlantic right whales, too.

科学美国人60秒 SSS 提高光合作用能使作物增加产量

Rev Up Photosynthesis To Boost Crop Yields 提高光合作用能使作物增加产量 Photosynthesis is surprisingly inefficient, only of the order of one to two percent. And one of the main culprits is an enzyme called RuBisCo. 光合作用效率低得

科学美国人60秒 SSS 数学会破解指关节开裂声音的奥秘

Math Cracks a Knuckle-Cracking Mystery Knuckles cracking. You may not mind the sound. You may despise it. Or you could study it. 指节开裂。你可能没有注意到它的声音。 你可能会鄙视它。 再或者你可以研究它。 Couple yea

科学美国人60秒 SSS 有着天才个性的乌鸦

Ravens Crow with Individual Flair There's a well-known conspiracy of ravensthat's what you call a group of ravensthat likes to hang out near a zoo in the Austrian Alps. Every day these ravens conspire to steal the food that's set out for the wild boa

科学美国人60秒 SSS 寒潮塑造蜥蜴幸存者

Cold Snap Shapes Lizard Survivors In January 2014, an epic cold wave swept across the southeasta snowpocalypse so severe that thousands of drivers in Atlanta abandoned their cars on icy highways and Interstates. 在2014年1月，一场被称为末日暴

科学美国人60秒 SSS 北极热浪与雪风暴有关

Arctic Heat Waves Linked to Snowpocalypse-Like Storms February was unusually hot in the arctic. Thawing out temperature: 35 degrees Fahrenheit.It made big news when it got to 35, I don't know if that's t-shirt weather yet, but 北极在二月时异常炎

科学美国人60秒 SSS 无人机的生物用途

Drones Could Help Biologists Tally Birds Ecologists crouching quietly amidst vegetation, using binoculars to tally birds in a roost, may soon be a charming relic of the past. Because a new study shows that, when it comes to getting an accurate avian

科学美国人60秒 SSS 多活多遭罪?!

Life Extension May Add Just Bad Time Living longer doesnt necessarily mean living better. Thats the lesson from the tiny roundworm called C. elegans, long a workhorse in basic biology lab work. The research is in the Proceedings of the National Acade

科学美国人60秒 SSS 唾液蛋白可能抑制肠道无序状态

Saliva Protein Might Inhibit Intestinal Anarchy 唾液蛋白可能抑制肠道无序状态 Every day, you produce one to two liters of spit. It kick-starts digestion and helps you swallow. And it helps prevent bacterial infection in your mouth. 每天，

科学美国人60秒 SSS 寻找天外之山

Searching the Heavens for Mountains In the last few decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets orbiting other stars. Now, scientists want to know what they look like. Do they have oceans? Atmospheres? Researchers have even searched

科学美国人60秒 SSS 萌宠猫咪

Psychologist Saho Takagi, a graduate student at Kyoto University in Japan, strolls into one of Japan's many cat cafes. These establishments allow customers to pay an hourly fee for the chance to cuddle some cats. They're popular in Japan because so m

科学美国人60秒 SSS 通过腐肉可洞察石化过程

Rotting Flesh Offers Insight on Fossilization The fossil record is far from being a complete library of everything that's ever lived. 化石记录不止是曾经存活生物的藏书阁. The vast, vast majority of everything that's ever lived has com

科学美国人60秒 SSS 蝙蝠回声定位

Just as humans understand the shape of oursurroundings by how light reflects off objects, batsuse reflections of sounds they produce insteadwhat's called echolocation. But despite theirexcellent sensing abilities, one type of obstaclevexes the animal

科学美国人60秒 SSS 小蝙蝠能学会不同的方言

Baby Bats Can Learn Different Dialects Bats are sophisticated communicators. And not just when theyre in vampire form. New research finds that Egyptian fruit bats actually have regional dialects, depending on the bat chatter that surrounds them as th

科学美国人60秒 SSS 动物也喜欢荧光棒

Populations of frogs, salamanders and other amphibians are declining around the worldeven in protected areas, like U.S. national parks. Ecologists needed a simple method to track the animals numbers. Now, researchers have found an effective way to ke

科学美国人60秒 SSS 生人难近

Small, tasty mammals like dwarf mongooses have one main goal: do not get eaten. So the animala type of weaselhas a surveillance system. While most of the group focuses on finding food, a handful of others watch for predators. They take turns so that

科学美国人60秒 SSS 水下的统治者到底是谁

Sharks Rule the Reef's Underwater Food Chain Predators like wolves affect their ecosystems by eating their prey. But a more subtle impact involves fear. Predators also terrify prey species. And when, for example, elk are hiding, they don't spend as m

科学美国人60秒 SSS 生存不易 互相搀扶

Human parents usually have one or sometimes two offspring at a time, and when babies get delivered we pour all our energy into childrearing. But other animals raise lots of babies at once. And the weaker individuals can be at a big disadvantage. If t