For many animals, living with others has obvious benefits. Social animals can hunt in packs, gain safety in numbers or even learn from each other. In some cases, they can even solve problems more quickly as a group than as individuals. That's even true for the humble house sparrow - Andras Liker and Veronika Bokony from the University of Pannonia, Hungary, found that groups of 6 sparrows are much faster at opening a tricky bird feeder than pairs of birds.
After ruling out several possible explanations, the duo put the speedy work of the bigger flock down to their greater odds of including…
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Some of you who've been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant "void" in the Universe.
What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our local group which looks like this,
and a larger example is the Virgo cluster, which is about 1,000 times as massive as our local group, and looks like this:
Well, a void is the opposite of a cluster, where you have a large volume of space that's simply empty of galaxies and matter. This press release…