There’s something about watching big, awkwardly-shaped insectstaking off that doesn’t get old. In this video from Ant Lab, we see giant stick insects spreading their wings and taking off. It’s interesting to note that they seem to be wing-first in their take-off; it doesn’t look like they’re doing much, if anything to propel themselves upward with their legs. Instead, it’s the wings flinging air that gets them up. Check out the flex during the full wingstroke! (Video and image credit: Ant Lab/A. Smith)
Snails have a mucus for every occasion. The grove snail/lemon snail makes five different varieties: one for lubricating its motion, one for adhering to surfaces, one to seal it in its shell for winter, and two to protect against predators. A new study looks at how those different types of mucus differ.
The basic building blocks of a snail’s mucus don’t vary much. It’s mostly water, spiked with proteins and carbohydrates that give it its complex properties. For the grove snail, collogen VI acts as the main structural component and amorphous calcium carbonate gets added in varying amounts during secretion. By tuning the amount of protein and added calcium, the snails tweak their mucus’ viscoelasticity for each purpose. (Image credit: Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces; research credit: M. Gabler et al.; via Ars Technica)
Thirteen years ago, I made a prediction that work on how to avoid urinal splashback would win an Ig Nobel Prize. Today, I am, at last, vindicated. Randy Hurd, Zhao Pan, Tadd Truscott, and Kaveeshan Thurairajah shared the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for their work designing a splash-free urinal.
The culmination of this decade-plus of research are two urinal designs, the Cornucopia (“Cornucopeea”) and the Nautilus (“Nauti-Loo”). Both designs minimize splash, in part, through their geometry. As you may have noticed when rinsing dishes, having a stream of droplets hit a surface at a high impact angle creates lots of splash. But at a low impact angle, very little splash occurs. The team took this observation and created designs that minimized impact angle no matter where a user aimed.
How splashback varies with impact angle. High and medium impact angles (left and middle, respectively) generate a lot of splashing from a stream of impacting droplets. In contrast, below a critical impact angle, the splashing is negligible (right).
Naturally, they tested the two new designs, alongside two existing urinal designs, finding that the new urinals reduced splashing by as much as 95% across a range of flow rates and user heights. Although the Cornucopia was the least splashy urinal, the team gave the Nautilus an overall edge because its design is easier to clean and works for children, adults, and wheelchair users.
Considering the estimated 1 million liters of urine contemporary urinals splash across U.S. restrooms daily, the Nautilus could save significant labor and cleaning costs, if implemented. (Image credits: urinals and experiment – K. Thurairajah et al., poster – R. Hurd et al.; research credit: K. Thurairajah et al. and R. Hurd et al.)
P.S. – As indicated, I’ve followed this work for a long time. In addition to this post, we did a webcast (10 years ago, yikes!) that touched on the topic. But my most in-depth coverage of the story is still to appear in print; you’ll get to enjoy the whole tale–stretching all the way back to 2012–in a chapter of my forthcoming book. More on that soon! In the meantime, please enjoy this gem of a scientific poster from the project’s early days in 2013:
One of the best research posters of all time, designed to look like it’s been written on a tiled bathroom wall. The text reads, “Confessions of a Sitzpinkler. Though Sitzpinklers, men who sit to urinate, are held in low-esteem within the male community, they have reasonable scientific justification for their actions. Due to the Plateau-Rayleigh instability, a simulated average male urine stream breaks into droplets approximately 15-20 cm after emerging from the urethra. For a typical male and toilet, the opening of the urethra is 13 cm or less above the surface of the water when sitting. The urine stream does not fully transition into droplets before it enters the water as shown in the image on the left. This stream-surface interaction causes bubble entrainment and limited splashing. The resulting satellite droplets lack the necessary momentum to rise above the rim of a typical toilet, not to mention that they toilet bowl is covered when sitting.
In contrast, the average male urinates from a standing height of 64 cm above the water surface with the urine stream breaking into droplets 44-49 cm above the water surface. In the image on the right, the rapid procession of droplets impacts the surface violently, creating splash curtains, deep cavities and jets. These dynamic events collectively contribute to the emission of relatively high-momentum satellite droplets, capable of traversing beyond the rim of a typical toilet bowl.
Sitzpinklers around the world should rest easy knowing that the hygienic benefits of sitting during urination far outweigh the negative social implications.”
Sperm whales like to nap under the water and away from the waves. They seem to do this in a vertical, head-up orientation. That makes sense, given that their enormous heads, which take up a third of their bodies, are full of oil, wax, and air–all buoyant materials. What’s less obvious is how the whales maintain their depth while sleeping. Why don’t they just bob right up to the surface with all that buoyancy?
In a recent study, scientists attached devices to the whales that recorded their orientation, depth, and the sound of any bubbles the whale released. The team found that, over the course of a typical nap, whales let out 11 or so bubble bursts. This behavior appears to help them regulate their buoyancy so that they can maintain depth while they snooze. (Image credit: S. Granzotto; research credit: N. Freymond et al.; via Ars Technica)
Like fighter pilots of old, male dragonflies engage in aerial combat where each tries to outmaneuver the other to keep a sight on their rival’s tail. A recent study observed this combat in the field and uncovered some surprising similarities to dogfighting. Like pilots, dragonflies used spiraling turns and other high-g moves to gain an advantageous position behind the other. In human combat, that position favors the forward-facing weapons of the pilot in back; for dragonflies, it keeps their rival in the part of their vision that best detects movement.
Interestingly, the team found that–even in the midst of combat–dragonflies spent at least a third of their time gliding. It’s unclear whether they glide to conserve energy or because it’s easier to track a rival when gliding.
The authors dig into the control rules needed for dragonflies to execute these chases and found that even relatively simple control schemes–constrained by the dragonfly’s physical limits–result in complex flight contests. (Image and research credit: S. Fabian et al.; via Ars Technica)
Reef-building coral polyps constantly stir the water around them with dense carpets of microscopic hair-like cilia. The beating of the cilia helps polyps feed while also pushing away sediment and debris. Their stirring increases nutrient and gas exchange with seawater, too. A new study combines experimental measurements with a simple mathematical model to recreate the three-dimensional flows corals make. The model’s efficiency means it should be useful for future studies of how corals and other cilia-covered systems interact with bacteria or other active particles. (Image and research credit: S. Selvan et al.; via APS)
Snoring and sleep apnea–a condition where aeroelastic flutter obstructs the airway and stops breathing during sleep–often go hand-in-hand. But diagnosing sleep apnea involves an expensive and time-consuming screening in which the patient has to sleep while monitored by various sensors. To make the process easier, researchers are developing a screening method based only on audio recording.
They started with a pre-trained audio model designed for speech recognition and stripped back computationally-expensive layers that weren’t relevant to snoring. Then they trained the new model using labeled audio data taken from standard clinical testing for sleep apnea. That means the model was told which audio recordings corresponded to “normal” snoring and which showed signs of sleep apnea. From there, the model was able to correctly identify apnea-related audio from fresh recordings just under 74% of the time. While that accuracy isn’t high enough to use the tool for diagnosis, it could help patients pre-screen for sleep apnea at home to decide whether the more invasive testing is warranted. (Image credit: L. Cline; research credit: H. Li et al.; via Physics World)
Walter, a young African penguin at the New York Aquarium, loves soap bubbles. In fairness to Walter, so do most people I’ve met. There’s just something that feels a bit magical about these ephemeral rainbow spheres that pop at a (dry) touch.
Amphibians like toads are often indicator species for their ecosystem because they are vulnerable to changes on both land and water. In this short film, videographer Maxwel Hohn follows the migration of western toad tadpoles in British Columbia, showing their daily underwater journey from deep waters, where they can hide, to warmer, shallow waters, where they eat. Over the days and weeks of their early life, millions of tadpoles make the journey, their bodies morphing as they do. Eventually, they will hop away as toadlets. (Video and image credit: M. Hohn et al.)
Though we rarely notice their movement in the moment, plants, and especially their flowers, are frequently on the move. Here, retired engineer Jay McClellan captures a thymeleaf speedwell flower as it opens, then pushes a stamen toward its pistil, thereby pollinating itself. Like much of the motion executed by plants, these movements come from pumping water between different cells, swelling and shrinking them as needed to execute the overall motion. (Video and image credit: J. McClellan; via Colossal)
