Sounding more like a science fictional creature than a real-life animal, these amazing critters imitate the stars in the sky in order to catch meals.

Disorienting through astronomical imitation, these predators have evolved to use nighttime navigational strategies of other species to their advantage. Many animals, like moths, use starlight and moonlight to find their way and fly straight.

“That works fine when the moon and stars are real,” said Dave Merritt, a biologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, “but when the source is close they end up spiraling into it.'” Many of these worms are found in caves where other species would only go by accident.

Decoys are common among deep-sea fish, where any light might indicate direction, but less common on the surface where so many competing sources of illumination are present.

In this case, “with their glowing lures in place, the worms drop threadlike snares, thin filaments of silk secreted from their mouths and dotted with balls of mucous, to trap confused flyers. Besides being extra-sticky, those mucous balls lend the strands the appearance of mardi gras beads, which magnify the worms’ spectral light like chandeliers.

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Cosmological myths, legends and superstitions of of our ancient ancestors were often tied to astronomical phenomena, and now researchers have found a truly stunning tool they used to make observations of these celestial happenings.

In the absence of modern magnifying glasses and reflective mirrors, the structure discovered in Portugal employed a lower-tech approach: a narrow passage filtered out extraneous light, helping people see stars at times when they would be hard to spot in the open sky.

Part of a prehistoric tomb complex called the Seven-Stone Antas, the astronomical observation device is thought to have been used to view Aldebaran, a red giant in the constellation of Taurus. This star becomes visible in the early morning s of spring, just before sunrise, but would be hard to see outside of a narrow window without a device to block out unwanted night. In turn, its passage was presumably used to mark a change of seasons from spring to summer.

More from the scientists behind the discovery and their next steps: “The team’s idea is to investigate how a simple aperture, for example an opening or doorway, affects the observation of slightly fainter stars. They focus this study on passage graves, which are a type of megalithic tomb composed of a chamber of large interlocking stones and a long narrow entrance. These spaces are thought to have been sacred, and the sites may have been used for rites of passage, where the initiate would spend the night inside the tomb, with no natural light apart from that shining down the narrow entrance lined with the remains of the tribe’s ancestors.”

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Optimized solar panels can only take energy capture so far, which is one of the reasons this company is trying to take power-harvesting airborne with a fleet of solar-gathering balloons. A solar sky form, says NextPV, could even move with the sun, producing clean energy around the clock (not by moving against the planet’s rotation, but perhaps someday – more below).

The technologies in use for weather balloons and other similar aerial endeavors is already partially in place, but the means of moving the balloons and transmitting energy back down to Earth are still being researched and developed. The current plan is to turn sunlight to electricity and produce hydrogen for use as above-the-ground fuel cells, engaging in the conversion processes at night. The group has teamed up with academics and researchers to solve the next steps of the problem, and optimize the system for efficiency and practicality.

“Anywhere above the planet, there are very few clouds at an altitude of 6 km (3.7 miles)—and none at all at 20 km (12.4 miles),” says Jean-François Guillemoles. “At those heights, the light comes directly from the Sun, as there are no shadows and hardly any diffusion by the atmosphere. As the sky loses its blue color, direct illumination becomes more intense: the concentration of solar energy results in more effective conversion, and hence higher yields.”

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If you have ever seen ambulances, police cars or fire trucks stuck in rush hour traffic, you may already sense that the future of emergency response in cities is definitely destined to fly the friendly skies.

A vision of argodesign, this particular solution is compact, fast and contains the bare minimum needed to help save the estimated 1,000 lives lost per year to slow response times – specifically: a single emergency medical technician.

About the size of a car, this quadcopter can land in a single lane of a highway, bypassing traffic and not requiring and sort of special area for quick arrivals or departures from accident scenes.

The aerial ambulance could either be self-piloted (driverless) or the EMT could double as the driver, which they generally do already on roads.

Upon landing, the propeller sections fold upward to reduce the footprint of the flying vehicle. Meanwhile, a gurney and ramp unfold from one side for quick access to potential patients nearby.

The post Drone Ambulance: Fast Urban Quadcopter Flies with 1 EMT first appeared on Gajitz.

Using sections of the International Space Station as stationary points, this incredible photo shoot turns both outer space and our own planet into a series of surreal and otherworldly landscapes.

Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit relayed some information about photographic techniques used to achieve the images: “My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.”

The results are nothing short of stunning – the Earth’s surface becomes streaked with color and light, punctuated by what appear to be blotches of lightning or blurred cityscapes, but overall looking more linear like (Jupiter or) some other celestial body.

Naturally, only pieces of the ISS itself look static in each shot, creating a stark contrast between a fixed foreground and spiraling set of backgrounds (though, in reality, the station itself is also rotating – it is all relative). Armatures of the station end up open to interpretation, in some cases looking like the needle on a record player hovering above a spinning disk.

The post Star Trails in Space: Timelapse Photos Shot from the ISS first appeared on Gajitz.