Samuel Ellis, a biologist from the University of York, will tag 1,000 hairy wood ants with radio receivers to find out how they communicate and travel. The multiyear project, which begins this summer in Derbyshire, U.K., will be one of the largest radio-tagging experiments of insects in the wild.

Is it difficult to catch a hairy ​wood ant?
No, says Ellis. The one-centimeter-long ants are easy to spot-they move on self-cleared roads-and are not very fast. He picks up an ant by the legs with his bare fingers. "They're quite obliging," he says. "They grab on with their teeth."

How does he get a radio tag onto a squirming ant?
First, he dabs glue onto the ant's back with a matchstick. He then uses a second matchstick to maneuver the receiver into place. He puts each ant into solitary confinement in a plastic box for about an hour until the glue dries.

Does the tag weigh the ant down?
No. The receivers are lightweight and only one millimeter by one millimeter. Considering that ants can carry up to twice their body weight without any notable change in behavior, there's not much cause for concern here.

How will he find the tagged ants later on?
He'll wave a handheld radio scanner over the ant trails and nests to locate, and then map, the ants' whereabouts.

1. SHOVEL

The SnoBoss gives shovelers more leverage to dig under heavy drifts. Grabbing both of the shovel's vertical steel handles, users push the scooper ahead of them like a plow. The shovel's 26-inch high-density polyethylene head supports more than 30 pounds of snow. Ames True Temper SnoBoss$35

2. ICE SCRAPER

The Blizzerator makes clearing snow or ice off cars easier and more comfortable. The scraper's designer, a chiropractor, angled both the brush and the scraper head to 15 degrees, so that users don't have to stretch across curved windshields or reach overhead to clean roofs. Blizzerator$20-$25

3. SNOWBLOWER

The Compact Track 24 can clear a driveway faster than any other snowblower of its size. Engineers modified the 208-cc engine so that it propels the 200-pound thrower forward 18 percent faster than prior models. Tanklike treads make it easier for users to push the blower over steep or gravelly terrain. Ariens Compact Track 24 Sno-Thro$1,299

4. ROCK SALT

When melted snow runs into porous cement and freezes, the water expands, cracking driveways and sidewalks. Morton's Safe-T- Plus rock salt locks out moisture. The mixture includes a small amount of hydroxyl ethyl cellulose powder, which forms a nonslip, water-blocking gel on the ground when wet. Morton Safe-T-Plus$8 (12-pound jug)

Okay, so let's say you're a sparrow, right? And you're just hanging out on a tree branch like normal, minding your own business, singing a little song, when all of a sudden your neighbor comes over, and he starts singing too. Which is fine, right? Except, get this: the guy isn't just singing any old tune, he's singing the exact same song you're singing. Obviously, the guy knows he's making things uncomfortable, there's no question about that. But is he just trying to ruffle your feathers a little, maybe impress some ladybirds with his boldness and wit before flying away, or are you actually going to have to fight this guy?

To investigate whether this "song-matching" behavior is a sign of sincere aggression, or just the kind of sophomoric posturing it appears to be, researchers at the University of Washington set up a stuffed sparrow and some wireless speakers inside the territories of 48 song sparrows in Discovery Park, Seattle. When the speakers began playing--they always played a tune in the resident sparrow's own repertoire--the birds arrived swiftly to scare off their (secretly) taxidermied intruder.

Intimidation tactics varied, but the sparrows who employed the song-matching strategy were much more likely to resort to violence than those who didn't. Of the 17 song-matchers, 15--or almost 90%--attacked the motionless model, while only about half of the non-matchers ended up staging an attack. Song-matchers were also more likely to engage in other aggressive behaviors, such as wing-flapping.

We tend to think of the two sexes as a dichotomy. The most important question asked of new parents is "Boy or girl?" But as any tomboy could tell you, that doesn't always mean much. A new review of 13 past studies that showed significant differences has found that many of those differences are far less pronounced than the earlier studies implied.

The "Big Five" personality traits of psychology -- openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism -- do not categorically vary between men and women. Contrary to stereotypes, women were not found to be significantly more intimate in their relationships, and science inclination did not overwhelmingly favor men. And masculinity and femininity, the study found, "are not all-or-nothing traits...they are truly a continuum."

"Sex is not nearly as confining a category as stereotypes and even some academic studies would have us believe," according to lead author Bobbi Carothers. The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was part of her doctoral dissertation in social psychology at University of Rochester.

Physically, men and women did fall into very distinct categories in categories like height and waist-to-hip ratio. But psychologically, not so much. Men and women consistently overlapped in attitudes and traits like empathy, fear of success and mate selection, indicating that sex differences are not categorical, but more a matter of degree.

Carothers and Harry Reis, a psychology professor, reanalyzed data from 13 studies that had shown significant differences in the sexes, as well as collecting their own data on psychological indicators. They used three different statistical procedures to look for evidence that certain attributes could reliably identify someone as male or female.

For 122 different characteristics, from empathy to sexuality to science inclination to extroversion, a statistical analysis of 13,301 individuals did not reveal any distinct differences between men and women.

Gender can be a predictor for stereotypic activities like scrapbooking or boxing, but men and women don't think about their relationships in "qualitatively different" ways, no matter what self-help books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus may claim.

While there are average differences between the sexes, they aren't consistent enough to accurately characterize the entire group. Just because a man or woman fits into one stereotype for their gender doesn't mean they will fit into another.

"The possession of traits associated with gender is not as simple as 'this or that'" the authors write.

The study was based on questionnaires, and the authors admit that the results may not encapsulate real-life actions completely, as people don't always self-report accurately. They leave the door open for research that establishes a gender through interpersonal behavior. But dividing men and women into neatly separated, simplistic categories could be harmful for heterosexual relationships, Reis says.

"When something goes wrong between partners, people often blame the other partner's gender immediately," he explains. "Having gender stereotypes hinders people from looking at their partner as an individual."

Being of the opposite sex isn't what makes it seem like your partner is from another planet. "It's not so much sex, but human character that causes difficulties," Reis says. It's not you, it's me.

Here's some food for thought: According to a new study by the CDC, the greatest number of foodborne illnesses in the U.S. are not caused by raw cookie dough or undercooked meat or questionable shellfish, but by leafy green vegetables.

Of the 9.6 million cases of food-borne illness reported each year, 51 percent are caused by contaminated plants; leafy greens alone contribute 23 percent of the total, more than any other commodity. All the meat and poultry commodities combined--beef, game, pork, and poultry--were responsible for 22 percent of illness, and dairy carried 17 percent.

Many of the contaminants lurking on leafy greens are noroviruses--the bugs that cause what most of us call the "stomach flu"--deposited by food handlers, according to a story in the New York Times.

But before you throw caution to the wind and sit down with a big bowl of raw cookie dough and your favorite chicken tartare, beware: tainted greens may make you sick, but poultry is still more likely to kill you.

Click to enter the gallery

Space Odyssey 2.0, a collaborative art installation opening this month in Belgium at art house Z33, asks some big questions about art and outer space: What is the role of science in art? How has the DIY movement changed our view of space travel? What if somebody went to the moon with a bunch of geese?

It's not the first time, of course, that space has inspired art. (The first sci-fi movie, A Trip To The Moon, came out in 1902, a long time before the actual Space Odyssey.) But space has assumed renewed urgency as a source of artistic inquiry in recent years, with the increasing privatization and popularization of space travel. We're seeing artists who make home-brew satellites: What else can artists do with science?

The international group of artists contributing to the project have different styles--some work in the abstract, others are inspired by sci-fi--but everything is captivating and more than a little weird. Brian McCutcheon sends astronauts shopping; Frederik De Wilde develops surreal images from real math; and Agnes Meyer-Brandis re-tells a 17th-century story about a man going to the moon, with geese in tow.

Stanley Kubrick would be proud.

[Z33]

The United States Postal Service will cease delivering mail on Saturday beginning in August, but will continue delivering packages. The cut will save the struggling carrier $2 billion a year.

That's a hefty chunk of change for the Postal Service, which lost $16 billion last year. Technology got us into this mess -- ah, the convenience of email and paperless billing -- and technology could help get us out of it. PostalVision 2020, a conference dedicated to figuring out the future of the post office, will host speakers like Google's "chief Internet evangelist," Vint Cerf, at its third iteration this April.

Here's a few tech ideas we've seen recently that we politely propose the agency could chew over.

1. Turn Letters Into PDFs
Back in 2010, Finland announced it would start a pilot program to convert snail-mail letters into PDFs to be viewed online. As of August 2012, their electronic inbox NetPosti had 400,000 users. Earth Class Mail, a U.S. company, also processes your mail and packages and sends you images of what's arrived. Other services will process an email, PDF or Word document for you and send it via regular mail.

2. Move Mailboxes Online
In late October, Australia Post launched a state-sponsored email inbox where they can receive government communication as well as some bills. The free service is expected to save money by reducing paper mail. It hit some technical blips after its launch, but is now accepting registrations again. Digital Post Australia, a private company, is also working on a digital mailbox expected to launch this year. The Israel Postal Company launched iPost, a secure electronic inbox, in 2010.

In January, the Guardian reported that the Postal Service was working with UPS to create MyPost, a digital portal where people could see all the packages en route to them and all the previous packages they had received.

3. Make Sure Packages Get Delivered The First Time
UPS lets alerts customers of when their package will arrive through their My Choice program and smartphone app, using text, email or voicemail. You can reroute or reschedule your package delivery so that it gets successfully delivered the first time to your home or a UPS location. For 40 dollars a year, you can authorize the package to be left with a neighbor or get a confirmed two-hour delivery window. The USPS mobile app lets you track packages, but doesn't make getting them delivered any easier.

4. Dump Stamps For Digital
Germany, Denmark and Sweden have all played with the idea of digital stamps, where a user can text a pre-set number and receive a code to write on their envelope in place of a physical stamp. The post office saves on the cost of printing adhesive paper stamps. The Red Cross used a similar texting platform to raise $5 million in the relief effort after the 2010 Haitian earthquake.

5. Think Outside The Mail
David Williams, the inspector general for the USPS, has said he envisions a Post Office-certified email inbox that could be used as a kind of cloud server, "a kind of federal safe-deposit box for sensitive personal information," he told the Guardian. It could potentially store passwords, medical records and photographs.

An even more radical idea comes from Michael J. Ravnitzky, a chief counsel at the Postal Regulatory Commission. He has suggested using the massive delivery network of the post office as a data-collecting machine. Sensors on delivery trucks could monitor air pollution, report cellular or WiFi dead zones or detect chemical or natural gas leaks.

Cambridge researchers took pairs of mated jaybirds and put them in adjoining compartments, so that the male could see what the female was doing through a window. They then fed the female a meal of delicious larvae of one particular kind -- either all waxmoth larvae or all mealworm larvae, while her partner looked on.

The bird couple was then reunited, and the male took up its usual role of feeding snacks to the female. The male, given a choice of the two different types of larvae, chose to feed his lady the type that she hadn't just been eating a lot of, since female jays enjoy a bit of variety in their worms.

If the male hadn't been watching the female, he fed her whichever larva he felt like; and likewise if he was feeding himself, his choice was not affected by what his partner had been eating.

According to the researchers, who work in the Comparative Cognition lab at Cambridge University, the fact that the male chose to give the female what she was likely to appreciate most suggests that he has the cognitive ability to intuit her psychological state from watching her.

Lead researcher Ljerka Ostojic said, "A comparison might be a man giving his wife chocolates. The giving and receiving of chocolates is an important 'pair-bonding' ritual -- but, a man that makes sure he gives his wife the chocolates she currently really wants will improve his bond with her much more effectively -- getting in the good books, and proving himself a better life partner."

NB: This Valentine's Day, give your sweetheart the larvae he or she really wants.

[Cambridge University]

What do you get when you cross a Predator drone and a hummingbird? For those times when a Predator is just too big for a backpack, some British troops can now deploy a new palm-sized drone equipped with a camera.

The 4-inch drone, called the Black Hornet Nano Unmanned Air Vehicle made by Norway-based Prox Dynamics, flies silently for up to 25 minutes and zips around at speeds up to 22 miles per hour. Although the inventor, Peter Muren started out designing those little R/C toy copters, don't expect to pick these up at Toys 'R Us -- each one cost $125,000.

After years of development, these Black Hornets withstand wind gusts and have been used to scope out snipers and sneak looks around obstructions to keep troops safe. A soldier can control the Black Hornet from up to half a mile away. Another navigation option uses GPS coordinates so the drone can plot a pre-planned route. It's even got a "hover and stare" mode.

No word on when Prox Dynamics will equip the drone with munitions so it can take out enemy pigeons.

There's a great little post on XKCD examining the speeds of data delivery--especially useful given today's confirmation that Saturday USPS delivery is shutting down. It's long been the case that if you need to send someone a lot of data--like, a few hundred gigabytes--it's faster to just FedEx the hard drive. But internet throughput is growing steadily, whereas FedEx's delivery capabilities have a distinct cap--so when will the internet truly be faster than FedEx? Read the post here.

In the search for stars that can support Earth-like planets, red dwarfs in our galactic neighborhood may lead the way to discovery. Recent research reveals red dwarf stars might host more habitable planets in close orbits than previously thought--just as long as its exoplanets huddle in close enough for light (but not so close that molten lava blankets the surface).

Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics took a second look at planetary data from NASA's Kepler telescope because NASA had overestimated the size and temperature of red dwarf stars. Courtney Dressing, a Harvard astronomer, adjusted the data and started looking for planets similar in size and temperature to Earth. Based on her calculations, 6 percent of the 75 billion red dwarf stars studied could have an Earth-like planet, which may not sound like a lot but it's the first time scientists could pin an actual number on these kind of exoplanets.

Why is this important? Because red dwarfs swarm the Milky Way galaxy, particularly around our solar system (they make up roughly 75 percent of stars in the Milky Way). That means, statistically, the closest Earth-like planets may be as few as 13 light years away. Unlike the recently discovered exoplanet in the Alpha Centauri system, these planets could potentially support life.

Not that a red dwarf star would make for terribly hospitable places, unless other conditions intervened. With a smaller star, planets orbit closer, and when they orbit closely, they stop spinning. That means one side of the planet could be perpetual day, while the other side is perpetual night. Nearby planets could help unlock the gravitational pull, while winds might distribute heat across the surface of a habitable planet. Ultraviolet flares could also pummel the surface of the planet if the atmosphere isn't thick enough, or the ocean deep enough. And unlike our sun, red dwarfs don't shine nearly as much in the visual spectrum. But Dressing told PopSci that the close orbit could mean more star shine for the exoplanet, increasing the habitability.

Still, the search is on, and Dressing has some targets in view that could be added to the short list of best places to live in the universe. Next, Dressing will hone in on three planet candidates, roughly 300 to 600 light years away, just outside our neighborhood.

A persistent mystery for art historians and especially students of 20th century art might seem small at first: what kind of paint did Picasso use? But in fact it's a very big shift--Picasso was thought to have been one of the first painters to switch from traditional oil paints to common house paint, which is quick-drying and smooth and allows for a very different style (it doesn't show brush-marks, for example). Now, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratory teamed up and used hard x-ray nanoprobes to analyze Picasso's paint at the molecular level.

And it turns out that, yep, Picasso did in fact use house paint. This couldn't have really been done before now; experiments with both optical and electron microscopes were unable to detect the difference, since they aren't capable of really delving deeply into the layers of paint. Read the full story here.

NASA scientists in Poker Flats, Alaska, have been waiting since Saturday for the right weather conditions to launch a sounding rocket into the green aurora-lit skies, where it will fly to an altitude of 500 miles and capture data and imagery from within and above the northern lights.

The team's primary mission is to learn about how the heat from the aurora slingshots oxygen atoms away from Earth's upper atmosphere and into space.

The aurora itself is a result of electrons flowing in the opposite direction, from the outermost atmosphere toward Earth's surface. Ions are always traveling along the planet's magnetic field lines, but sometimes, traffic along the lines suddenly spikes, and inbound electrons come streaming toward Earth and collide with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere, and those atoms get momentarily excited and release photons of red or green light to calm back down.

During its fifteen-minute flight, NASA's VISIONS (short for "VISualizing Ion Outflow via Neutral atom imaging during a Substorm")rocket will travel through all this auroral action and then fly above it, to an altitude of about 500 miles, where the auroral wind is generated. The scientists hope to discover how the aurora supplies enough energy to kick up the auroral wind, and to get a sense of how big the stream of outbound oxygen atoms is.

Since sounding rockets have no guidance system, the VISIONS team has to wait for the right weather--coinciding, of course, with an auroral event--to launch. Hopefully, those conditions will arrive before the launch window closes on February 17. The team is sending mission updates and photos throughout the wait:

Wu-chun Feng, an associate professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, is the creator of Green Destiny, a supercomputer so efficient it basically ran on a couple of blow dryers' worth of power. He also made a list for ranking the efficiency of supercomputers, called the Green 500, then turned around and topped the list in 2011 with another computer: HokieSpeed. The next logical step would be to keep making incredilbly efficient computers, but instead, Feng is doing something slightly different: making robot drone-bugs.

The Air Force wants someone who can help make more efficient micro-air vehicles, or MAVs, tiny robots that can act do reconnaissance, and they're giving Feng $3.5 million over three years for the career adjustment. Researchers have made 10-centimeter 'bots already, and one scientist got down to 3 centimeters by using a wire to feed it power. Just today, in fact, we saw a pretty teeny drone. But they're still a little too clunky to be used widely.

Feng and his team will try to fix that by using software to model airflow over the wings of MAVs, hopefully teaching them how best to stabilize the super-small machines in flight. It's not clear yet exactly how this is going to happen, but I guess that's why Feng's getting three years (with an optional two-year, $2.5-million extension) to work that out.

[Slashdot]

A bad boss doesn't just harm the employees he torments directly. He damages non-targeted workers, too, according to new research in the Journal of Social Psychology.

Hostile behavior toward subordinates -- like being rude, ridiculing or publicly criticizing a worker or employing that middle-school favorite, the silent treatment -- negatively affects the work environment. The impact is felt among those who aren't the intended victims of abuse, the research shows.

The researchers surveyed 233 full-time employees, including teachers, lawyers, government workers, receptionists and electricians. Subjects answered questions about bullying bosses, vicarious abuse, job frustration and more.

The study found that when an employee observes hostile treatment, reads about it in an email or hears rumors about it, he experiences so-called second-hand abuse--that is, the abuse affects him just as it does the target of the bullying. Victims of both first and second-hand abuse are more likely to abuse their coworkers, be more frustrated with their jobs, and perceive a lack of organizational support at work, the research shows. And when a worker experiences both personal abuse and vicarious abuse, the negative effects are heightened.

Bullying has a long-lasting impact on employees, according to the researchers, in part because it's likely to go on for longer than full-blown violence or aggression in the workplace, which are often stopped quickly.

"Although the effects of abusive supervision may not be as physically harmful as other types of dysfunctional behavior, such as workplace violence or aggression, the actions are likely to leave longer-lasting wounds, in part, because abusive supervision can continue for a long time," explains Paul Harvey, one of the paper's authors.

When employees experiences vicarious abuse it detracts from their relationship with the organization as a whole, because they see that the company as allowing such negative treatment to exist.

If Mothra saw this contraption there'd be some Japanese scientists on the lam. But since she's distracted, scientists strapped hapless male silkmoths into an drivable exoskeleton and lured the specter of nightmares through a maze with female moth love juice as the prize.

We know moths fly and navigate well, but it turns out they're fleet of foot too. The moth exoskeleton is a glorified trackball, that is controlled by the legs of the moth running on a styrofoam ball. But it's a ride equipped with air conditioning -- dual fans blow towards the silkmoth antennae. Just to torture the moth some more, researchers partially jacked up the steering to make it a little harder. And then even with an additional wind thrown in the mix, the moths quickly navigated to the pheromone. Here's the silkmoth in action:

This isn't the first time scientists have employed animal senses for fun (ahem) I mean science. Recall the mouse that played Quake.

Besides having a ton of fun at the expense of the fuzzy fliers, the University of Tokyo researchers designed the experiment to learn more about how to design robots that could sense odors besides the very important moth pheromones. This could be useful in applications like locating hazardous leaks or noxious fumes not detectable by human noses. Maybe moths aren't so bad after all.