At Last, We Understand What Turns Fruit Flies On
We’ve been breeding the fly Drosophila melanogaster in the lab for decades, but until now we didn’t know which chemical made them start to mate.
While the bread and butter of Gizmodo UK is in the bits and bytes of technology, we have a lot of fun in the off-topic areas, with many of the stories being filed in the WTF category. Bookmark this page for the sillier stories, from ridiculous examples of body-art, to... sausages made of skittles?
We’ve been breeding the fly Drosophila melanogaster in the lab for decades, but until now we didn’t know which chemical made them start to mate.
The Guinness World Records says that Catalina Alexandru Duru just pulled off the farthest flight ever travelled on a real life hoverboard: 905 feet and 2 inches.
A 16-year-old wanted to find the most effective way to hide blood after splattering it everywhere. So she put a few drops of cow’s blood on several pieces of cotton cloth and used three kinds of cleaner to wash the cloths.
A little appreciation for the world's tide gauges.
The potentially humanity-saving resource is being bogged down in petty political squabbles.
Wouldn't you like to know!?
Biorocks might be the prettiest forms of environmental remediation you’ll ever see. Part art, part science, these artificial, electrified structures are slowly helping coral recover from environmental devastation.
Earlier this month we discovered that Ceres’ pair of mysterious bright spots were, in fact, not two—they were many, many more. Now, we’ve got the closest look yet of the spots thanks to NASA’s Dawn mission. Read More >>
It’s amazing what scientists can recreate in a lab, including plasma many times hotter than the centre of our own sun. In the middle of the photo above you can see a little star, white hot plasma produced by a 200-trillion watt laser. Read More >>
Engineers looked to the horseshoe bat to steer the design of their latest sonar gadgetry.
New study discovers that our human-flesh-eating ancestors didn't have a bland palette.
Carbon-dating shows that these important artefacts were made before homo genus even existed.
Apart from the fact that most of them scrawl illegibly.
QR codes are being slapped on everything these days. That could soon include your sex cells.
While increasingly advanced electronic telemetry tags can tell us a lot about animal behaviour, there’s just no substitute for seeing it on video. Here's an example, from when researchers strapped a camera to a shark. Read More >>
If you haven’t ever had one, imagine someone threading a tube up through your urethra into your bladder and ... yes, yes they hurt. Mercifully, scientists are working out how to make the process less painful.
