A new lightweight fabric is 3D-printed from nylon plastic polymers comprises hollow octahedrons (eight equal triangular faces) that interlock with each other.

While soft, the fabric can be wrapped within a flexible plastic envelope and vacuum-packed, which makes it rigid - 25 times stiffer or harder to bend. This ‘wearable structured fabrics’ could be optimized to harden automatically, or tuned manually when needed. Modern chain mail, anyone? That LARP weekend just got a lot more fun to watch.

Urban people may believe nature is balanced and peaceful and pristine but biologists know that nature really just wants to suck the nutrients from your dead corpse.

Insects have more nature to worry about, in the form of the delicate stalk and pretty white flowers of Triantha occidentalis, the first new carnivorous plant to be identified by botanists in 20 years. It is notable for the unusual way it traps prey with sticky hairs on its flowering stem.



Triantha occidentalis in a bog at Cypress Provincial Park, British Columbia, Canada. Credit: Danilo Lima

Nearly 30 years ago, scientists agreed that for clinical trial results to be valid for both sexes, they needed more women.

Yet women seem to be a lot less likely to sign up for clinical trials for cardiovascular disease. The authors of a new paper outline the issue as to why:

Differential Care – Low rates of referral to cardiologists and specialty programs for more aggressive care might lead to fewer women being treated by specialists recruiting for clinical trials.

A fearsome beast soared above the ancient, vast inland sea once that once covered covering much of outback Queensland. This newly found pterosaur, named Thapunngaka shawi, was discovered in Wanamara Country, near Richmond in North West Queensland.

It's the stuff of nightmares, with a spear-like mouth containing 40 giant teeth and a wingspan around 20 feet.

We may imagine it to be like a big bird or a bat but that is not so, according to University of Queensland doctoral student Tim Richards: "Pterosaurs were a successful and diverse group of reptiles – the very first back-boned animals to take a stab at powered flight.”

Light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come out, so we shouldn’t be able to see anything behind one, but if a black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself, then according to Einstein's theory of general relativity direct observation of light from behind a black hole should be possible.

Now it has happened. 

Material falling into a supermassive black hole powers the brightest continuous sources of light in the universe, and as it does so, forms a corona around the black hole. This light – which is X-ray light – can be analyzed to map and characterize a black hole.

Smartphones tout 'dark mode' as an energy-saving feature, because darker-colored pixels use less power than lighter-colored pixels.

It's mostly an intellectual placebo, finds a new study, because of the way most people use their phones on a daily basis. The study looked at six of the most-downloaded apps on Google Play: Google Maps, Google News, Google Phone, Google Calendar, YouTube and Calculator. The researchers analyzed how dark mode affects 60 seconds of activity within each of these apps on the Pixel 2, Moto Z3, Pixel 4 and Pixel 5.