Inspired by the fist-like club of a mantis shrimp, researchers have developed a design structure for composite materials that is more impact resistant and tougher than the standard used in airplanes.

The peacock mantis shrimp, or stomatopod, is a 4- to 6-inch-long rainbow-colored crustacean with a fist-like club that accelerates underwater faster than a 22-caliber bullet. Researchers, led by Kisailus, an associate professor of chemical engineering, are interested in the club because it can strike prey thousands of times without breaking.

Canadians may seem polite to outsiders, that maple leaf on a backpack says pacificism all over the world, but they are apparently quite hard on their kids.

A
Canadian Medical Association Journal articles says that almost one-third of adults in Canada have experienced sexual abuse, child abuse or been exposed to intimate partner violence, such as parental, step-parental or guardian violence in their home. Child abuse has been linked to mental disorders and suicidal ideation (thoughts) or suicide attempts.

Last month, scientists announced the first hard evidence for cosmic inflation, the process by which the infant universe swelled from microscopic to cosmic size in an instant.

While this almost unimaginably fast expansion was theorized more than three decades ago, there had been no evidence. Then researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration announced the first direct evidence for cosmic inflation and the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time, described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang."

"Not tonight, dear, I have a headache." Generally speaking, that line is attributed to the wife in a couple, implying that women's sexual desire is more affected by pain than men's.

Now, researchers from McGill University and Concordia University in Montreal have investigated, possibly for the first time in any species, the direct impact of pain on sexual behaviour in mice. Their study, published in the April 23 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, found that pain from inflammation greatly reduced sexual motivation in female mice in heat -- but had no such effect on male mice.

Researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch and the Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network have identified a link between stillbirth and either restricted or excessive fetal growth. Findings from the study are online in the April 22 issue of PLOS Medicine.

Using a new approach developed by the network to estimate gestational age in stillborn babies, Dr. Radek Bukowski, lead researcher and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UTMB, and his colleagues evaluated 663 stillbirths and 1932 live births that occurred over a two-and-a-half year period at 59 hospitals in five U.S. regions.

Researchers report that they have discovered a new genus and species of electric knifefish in several tributaries of the Negro River in the Amazonia State of Brazil.

Professor Cristina Cox Fernandes at UMass Amherst, with Adília Nogueira and José Antônio Alves-Gomes of INPA, describe the new bluntnose knifefish in the current issue of the journal Proceedings of the Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and detail the new genus and species' anatomy, range, relationship to other fish, salient features of its skeleton, coloration, electric organs and patterns of electric organ discharge (EOD).

True to their name, these fish produce electric discharges in distinct pulses that can be detected by some other fish.