Stories by Macarena Carrizosa

The mysteries packed inside these invisible space objects stretch our concepts of space and time.

Sridhar Ravi was outdoors with his colleagues on a summer day in Germany when a group of bumblebees grabbed his attention.

As the bees made their way from flower to flower, they skillfully flew between obstacles, dodging branches and shrubs. These actions seemed to require a complex awareness of one's physical body in relation to one’s environment that had only been proven to exist in animals with large brains. 

To examine this, a team of researchers at Australia’s University of New South Wales, Canberra, led by Ravi, set up a hive of bumblebees inside their laboratory. The bees could come and go via a tunnel, which could be partially blocked with an adjustable barrier. Ravi and his team made the gap progressively smaller over time, and observed how the bees’ reactions changed.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found the bumblebees measured the gap by flying side-to-side to scan it. When the gap became narrower than their wingspan, the bees took a longer time to scan the opening. And then they did something remarkable: they turned their bodies to fly through sideways. Some of the bees’ bodies did bump the sides of the narrowed opening—but every one of the 400 recorded flights through the gap was a success.

“Over thousands of years nature has coded insects with some amazing attributes,” Ravi says. “Our challenge now is to see how we can take this and apply similar coding to future robotic systems, enhancing their performance in the natural world.”

A new system called PiVR creates working artificial environments for small animals such as zebra fish larvae and fruit flies. Developers say the system’s affordability could help expand research into animal behavior. 

A new budget-friendly virtual-reality system helps researchers study the brains of small animals

How does SARS-CoV-2 sneak into our body? What can our immune system do and how can the virus sometimes defeat it? How do the leading drug and vaccine candidates work? Will the virus plague us forever? Scientific American presents a conversation about these burning questions with Britt Glaunsinger, a virologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute who is a specialist in viral infection.

How massive can black holes become? How do astronomers typically observe them? How do they die? Scientific American presents a conversation about these mysterious cosmic phenomena with Yale University astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan.