Science Illustrated

Beetle buffet: demolition team cuts prey into pieces Red wood ants feed mainly on honeydew from aphids. But they also need proteins and, like many ants, they do not shy away from a meal that is many times larger than themselves. In groups, using sheer numbers, the red wood ants can take down much larger insects – such as this blue ground beetle. In this photograph an ant demolition team has started to cut the beetle into small pieces so it can pass through the entrance to the anthill. The image was among the winners in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.…

Titanic twin: digital scans reveal liner in new detail The Titanic lies in its watery grave some 3.8km deep, the world’s most famous shipwreck after hitting an iceberg in 1912. Now an extensive and cutting-edge undersea scanning project has created a high-res digital 3D twin of the ship, accurate down to a millimetre. Prior to this, researchers could see only small pieces of the ship, “like using a flashlight in the night”. The 3D twin features in a National Geographic film, ‘Titanic: The Digital Resurrection’, premiering 11 April, and streaming from 12 April on Disney+.…

CLIMATE It has been named the ‘Doomsday Glacier’, because its melting could cause sea level rises of more than half a metre, as well as potentially triggering melting of other glaciers. So the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is under close scrutiny by scientists. Over the past six years an International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) of experts has been investigating using a variety of methods – from underwater drones to aircraft. The researchers have now published a initial conclusion, and the outlook is grim. “The results suggest that the Thwaites Glacier and much of the West Antarctic ice sheet may be lost by the 23rd century,” the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) scientists say in a press release. The researchers warn that although the glacier is up to 2km-thick in places, the…

Warm water eats into the ice 1 The outer edges of many glaciers in West Antarctica consist of floating ice shelves connected to an underwater reef. As warm water travels beneath the ice, icebergs ‘calve’ off the ocean side of the ice shelf. Meltwater lubricates the glacier 2 Warm air melts snow and ice on the surface of the glacier. The water travels through cracks and cavities to the bedrock under the ice cap, where it acts as a lubricant that makes the glacier slide more easily towards the sea. Rising seas levels force the glacier backwards 3 Rising sea levels cause ice shelf ‘buoyancy’. If an ice shelf loses its grip on the reef, it could pop up like an inflatable toy released from underwater, leaving nothing to prevent…

NATURE In 1936, a Tasmanian tiger by the name of Benjamin died in Tasmania’s Hobart Zoo. Benjamin was the last surviving specimen of the species Thylacinus cynocephalus (“dog-headed pouched one”), which was hunted to extinction by settlers, primarily to protect the island’s livestock. But now, the striped creature may be brought back to life. Researchers from the University of Melbourne and the company Colossal Biosciences have successfully reconstructed the animal’s genome, which could pave the way for cloning via a surrogate. The key to their success was a thylacine head that has been preserved in ethanol for 108 years. This preserved the DNA and RNA that scientists have used to reconstruct 99.9% of the species’ genome, with only 45 gaps remaining in the DNA sequence of some 3 billion base pairs…

MARINE TECHNOLOGY The incident in June 2023 triggered a global news story and a week-long search by the US Coast Guard and private operators. ‘Titan’, a privatelyoperated submarine with five passengers, was supposed to take wealthy ‘tourists’ to the historic wreck of the iconic ‘Titanic’ some 3800m below sea level. But contact with the submarine was lost; it ‘disappeared’. It quickly became apparent that Titan had imploded under the pressure of the deep ocean, and that the passengers could not have survived. Some wreckage was identified on the ocean floor, and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a recording from an acoustic recorder 900 miles from where Titan met its end, believed to be the sound of the submarine’s implosion. A hearing into the details and causes of the…