Stingless Bees’ Zippy Landing Benefits Traffic Congestion

Ig Nobel Prize-winning scientists who discovered that dung beetles use the Milky Way to navigate have now learned (together with some colleagues) how certain bees probably manage to tamp down traffic congestion. Their study is: “Accelerated Landing in a Stingless Bee and Its Unexpected Benefits for Traffic Congestion,” Pierre Tichit, Isabel Alves-dos-Santos, Marie Dacke and […]

Marcus Byrne tells of the dung beetles and the Milky Way

Marcus Byrne tells about the dung-beetles-and-the-Milky-Way research that led to an Ig Nobel Prize for him and his colleagues, in this University of the Witwatersrand video: That Ig Nobel Prize was awarded, in 2013, jointly in the fields of biology and astronomy, to Marie Dacke [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA], Emily Baird [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA, GERMANY], Marcus Byrne [SOUTH AFRICA, UK], […]

Dung beetle Milky Way Ig Nobel winners implicate the sun

The Scientist magazine reports: Dung beetles (Scarabaeus lamarcki) scurry around cow pastures collecting little balls of poop from steaming heaps of excrement and quickly roll those balls to their nests, where they bury them for a future meal. (See a video of this behavior.) According to new research published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the beetles’ […]