ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

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• The debut of a robotic stingray, powered by light-activated rat cells
• Surprising planet with three suns discovered
• Robot helps study how first land animals moved 360 million years ago
• Like humans, lowly cockroach uses a GPS to get around, scientists find
• Why architects should let the microbes in
• The secret to an Oesia life: Prehistoric worm built tube-like 'houses' on sea floor

The debut of a robotic stingray, powered by light-activated rat cells Posted: 07 Jul 2016 12:10 PM PDT Researchers have created a robotic mimic of a stingray that's powered and guided by light-sensitive rat heart cells. The work exhibits a new method for building bio-inspired robots by means of tissue engineering.

Surprising planet with three suns discovered Posted: 07 Jul 2016 12:10 PM PDT A team of astronomers have used the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope to image the first planet ever found in a wide orbit inside a triple-star system. The orbit of such a planet had been expected to be unstable, probably resulting in the planet being quickly ejected from the system. But somehow this one survives. This unexpected observation suggests that such systems may actually be more common than previously thought.

Robot helps study how first land animals moved 360 million years ago Posted: 07 Jul 2016 12:09 PM PDT When early terrestrial animals began moving about on mud and sand 360 million years ago, the powerful tails they used as fish may have been more important than scientists previously realized. That's one conclusion from a new study of African mudskipper fish and a robot modeled on the animal.

Like humans, lowly cockroach uses a GPS to get around, scientists find Posted: 07 Jul 2016 10:11 AM PDT Rats, men and cockroaches appear to have a similar GPS in their heads that allows them to navigate new surroundings, researchers have discovered.

Why architects should let the microbes in Posted: 07 Jul 2016 10:11 AM PDT Architectural design is often concerned with energy efficiency or aesthetics, not microbial exposure. But, in a new article environmental engineers make a case for assessing the benefits of having these unseen organisms in our homes. Maybe, they say, instead of pushing all of them out, we should let the right ones in.

The secret to an Oesia life: Prehistoric worm built tube-like 'houses' on sea floor Posted: 07 Jul 2016 05:31 AM PDT The fossilised remnants of tube-like 'dwellings' which housed a primitive type of prehistoric sea worm on the ocean floor have been identified in a new study. According to researchers, the long, perforated tubes may have looked like narrow chimneys reaching up from the sea bed, and were made by a creature called Oesia, which lived a solitary existence inside them about 500 million years ago.

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