News — Science

In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a radical technology that would allow faster than light travel: the warp drive, a hypothetical way to skirt around the universe’s ultimate speed limit by bending the fabric of reality. It was an intriguing idea – even NASA has been researching it at the Eagleworks laboratory – but Alcubierre’s proposal contained problems that seemed insurmountable. Now, a recent paper by US-based physicists Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire has resolved many of those issues and generated a lot of buzz. But while Bobrick and Martire have managed to substantially demystify warp technology, their work actually suggests…...

s At least two species of sacoglossan sea slugs are capable of severing their own heads from their bodies and then growing an entirely new body, including a heart and other internal organs. The authors of a new study published in the journal Current Biology postulate that the secret to the decapitated slugs' survival might lie in the algae that makes up the majority of their diet. It's a type of self-amputation known in biological circles as "autotomy," and many species exhibit some form of the phenomenon, most notably lizards and salamanders, which shed their tails (caudal autotomy) to evade predators...