science

For many years, some thought the giant squid was simply a myth. The later half of the 20th century confirmed its existence though, through washed up remains and squid corpses. Now, the Discovery Channel is showing the first ever live footage of a Giant Squid in its natural habitat — but how in the world did they capture it?

A group of Harvard physicists have created a new type of lens, smaller and thinner than anything we've ever seen before. Rather than a curved piece of glass, this discovery is just 60 nanometers thick, and completely flat. In a paper published in Nano Letters, these lenses are explained. The researchers create them by taking an incredibly thin layer of silicon, and plating it with a nanometer-thick layer of gold.

Photographer Hock Ping Guek of Malaysia captured some shots of a lacewing in May of 2011, and uploaded the photos to his Flickr stream — what he didn't realize at the time was that he had found a completely new species of insect.

In an article published in this week's issue of Science, researchers have discovered that jumping spiders use a completely novel way of focusing and gauging distance for their attacks. Humans (and many animals) focus by adjusting the focal length of our eyes, and can tell the distance to objects through stereoscopic vision. Some animals that aren't as good at adjusting focal length shift their around to create binocular vision, a technique called motion parallax. But jumping spiders?