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Wildlife
Really brief
Ash Samuelson visited 20 hives distance to sources of nectar
Why city life trumps every two weeks to record waggle was around 490 metres for city
rural living for bees dances. The hives had glass colonies, but 740 metres for those
panels, allowing the dances to in farmland (Journal of Applied
OLEG BRESLAVTSEV/GETTY IMAGES

A STUDY of the waggle dances be filmed without disturbing Ecology, doi.org/gzrd).

of honeybees shows that those the bees. Ten of the hives were The findings suggest that the
in central London don’t have to in farmland around London and availability of food, rather than
fly as far to find food as bees in 10 were in the centre of the city. less pesticides or diseases, is the
farmland outside the city. The waggle dances of the key reason why honeybees do
“We knew that big cities were bees reveal the direction and better in cities than farmland, says
good for bees, but our study is rough distance of the best nectar Leadbeater. Parks and gardens
contributing to showing why,” sources found by foraging workers. provide more diverse, plentiful
Massaging muscle says Elli Leadbeater at Royal Overall, Leadbeater, Samuelson and reliable resources than farms.
might boost repair Holloway, University of London. and their colleague Roger Schürch Gardeners usually aim to have
“There is more forage available.” at Virginia Tech decoded nearly flowers throughout spring and
Massaging injured muscles In the summer of 2017, 3000 waggle dances. summer, and water plants during
may boost healing, a study Leadbeater and her colleague This showed that the median dry periods, says Leadbeater. MLP
in mice suggests. Injured
mice that were massaged Palaeontology Technology
healed faster than those
that weren’t. Samples from
the injury site hint massage Robot can walk,
clears immune cells that fly and skateboard
interfere with tissue repair
(Science Translational A TWO-LEGGED robot inspired
Medicine, DOI: 10.1126/ by birds can walk, skateboard, fly
scitranslmed.abe8868). and negotiate a slackline, which
is like a loose tightrope. It has the
Rivers on Mars potential to become a new tool to
carried huge rocks monitor infrastructure in hard-to-
reach environments.
An ancient lake that once The robot, named LEONARDO
sat in Jezero crater on Mars by its creators at the California
flooded billions of years Institute of Technology (Caltech)
SPIEKMAN ET AL.

ago, transporting boulders and Northeastern University in

up to 1.5 metres wide. The
rocks were photographed
by NASA’s Perseverance
rover. The floods also
deposited mud that
might contain signs of life
(Science, DOI: 10.1126/
science.abl4051).
Ancient tardigrade
preserved in amber
Microscopic tardigrades are
the only animals known to
have survived the vacuum
of space – but they don’t
fossilise well. A specimen
discovered in 16-million-
year-old amber from the
Dominican Republic is just
the third example of a
tardigrade fossil ever found
(Proceedings of the Royal
Society B, doi.org/gzqk).
Chief of the dinosaurs was
once a chicken-sized predator
FOSSILS of a small meat-eating
dinosaur discovered in a quarry near
Cardiff offer the earliest evidence in
the UK of theropods, a very diverse
group of dinosaurs that includes
T. rex, Velociraptor and all birds.
This animal, named Pendraig
milnerae, lived between 200 and
215 million years ago in the Late
Triassic Epoch. It was unearthed
in a quarry called Pant-y-ffynnon
north-west of Cardiff in the 1950s,
but the fossil was lost for decades
in the collections at the Natural
History Museum in London.
When P. milnerae was alive, the
region surrounding Cardiff was
probably made up of a series of
small tropical islands. It would
probably have been one of the main
predators on its island, which is why
Stephan Spiekman at the Natural
History Museum and his colleagues
thought the name Pendraig –
meaning “chief dragon” in 14th
century Welsh – was suitable.
The species name milnerae was
chosen to honour Angela Milner,
a late palaeontologist who worked
at the Natural History Museum
for more than 30 years and who
rediscovered the specimen in
a drawer containing crocodile
rather than dinosaur material
(Royal Society Open Science,
doi.org/gzqx). Krista Charles
Boston, is a human-like machine
with knee, hip and ankle joints,
but rotor blades for arms that
give it upward thrust.
LEONARDO is 75 centimetres
tall, weighs 2.6 kilograms and
walks at up to 20cm per second
(Science Robotics, DOI: 10.1126/
scirobotics.abf8136). It is “the
first robot to achieve seamless
integration of walking and flying
without human intervention”,
says Soon-Jo Chung at Caltech,
one of the research team.
“Walking robots can struggle
with uneven terrain, wheeled
robots don’t like debris, flying
robots are normally stationary
on the ground,” says Jonathan
Aitken at the University of
Sheffield, UK. “The ability to mix
these locomotion techniques
makes the development of this
robot a curious and exciting
prospect.” Chris Stokel-Walker

16 October 2021 | New Scientist | 25