In latest gruesome nature news, scientists have discovered new details on a fungus that compels its cicada hosts to mate long after their genitals have gone and their bodies have turned into what one researcher colourfully describes as 'flying salt shakers of death'.

Millions of years ago, a few spiders abandoned the kind of round webs that the word “spiderweb” calls to mind and started to focus on a new strategy. Before, they would wait for prey to become ensnared in their webs and then walk out to retrieve it.

Can anyone suggest artists working with plant life or fungus, growing, breeding, cultivating?

Male beetles trying to mate with this decoy female get 4,000 fatal volts of electricity. An emerald ash borer hovers, checking out the female forms below him. He’s drawn by how light plays across their bodies. He picks one, approaches, initiates physical contact—and is zapped by 4,000 volts.

Scientists have already shown that termites build their mounds in a unique way involving "bio-cementation", a process where grains of soil are fused together into small balls with moisture, saliva and excretion.

Imagine constructing a building with no blueprints or architects, and no inkling of what the finished edifice should look like. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, and yet that’s what ants and termites do all the time—and the results speak for themselves.

Bee brain simulation used to pilot a drone Apr 14, Technology/Hi Tech & Innovation Full size image Credit: Green Brain Project The team of researchers working on the The Green Brain Project has advanced to the point of being able to use what they've created in mimicking a honeybee brain, to actua

In a fundamental sense, technology is deeply non-human. While we might apply a humanist logic to the function and workings of technological systems, and view technological objects as extensions of the human body and its capacity for adaptive prosthesis, the very purpose of technology is to be that which the human is not or to achieve that which the human could not otherwise do. As such, technology exists beyond the humanist understanding of the individual, the body, and the subject, particularly in contemporary network culture in which technology is in part transformed from concrete and material objects into molecular, adaptive, and often invisible systems. Much as with the animal world, technology seems to suggest a mode of communication and media beyond that of human language, a mode of being or becoming that exceeds our own.

Rain may seem a harmless nuisance to us humans, but for ants, it's a big deal. They can get trapped by just a single drop and risk drowning. Paradoxically, it's by mimicking liquids that ants manage to conquer them.

In the video above, Micah Streiff and his team from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta captured writhing groups of ants behaving just like liquids. Working as a group they can turn themselves into a "raft" as they seek dry land or travel down a surface following the same physical rules as a viscous liquid. Thankfully, they haven't been caught mimicking your morning coffee just yet.

"So here," says Hall, with suitable drama, "they are: the Ruxton Maggots." Were it not for the maggots, it is pretty safe to say the case of Dr Buck Ruxton, one of Britain's most celebrated prewar murders, would be all but forgotten. On 13 March 1936, the Bombay-born GP, admired and appreciated by all in his Lancaster practice, was sensationally found guilty of killing his common-law wife, Isabella Kerr, and their maidservant, Mary Jane Rogerson. Ruxton, born Buktyar Rustomji, had somehow become convinced that his extrovert companion was having an affair (no evidence was ever found that she was). In a fit of jealous rage, he leapt on her and strangled her with his bare hands. The unfortunate maid he suffocated immediately afterwards to prevent her revealing the crime.

A proposal to change the formal name of Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, has significant implications for research in the life sciences.. Even if you haven’t worked directly with Drosophila melanogaster in a biology course or a research laboratory, you’ve probably seen it first-hand. D. Melanogaster, the common fruit fly, can be seen near almost any trash can or bowl of fruit that has been sitting in sunlight too long. Most scientists refer to the species simply as Drosophila, even though technically there are about 1,450 species in the Drosophila genus.

The 2.5-millimeter-long insect rose to fame in the early 20th century after the biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan used it to show that genetic variations in all organisms are conveyed via the chromosomes contained in cells. Morgan’s work with Drosophila eventually earned him a Nobel Prize, and his student H. J. Muller followed suit. Today Drosophila remains a workhorse in biology labs around the world. The same qualities that