All hail the Brazilian free-tailed bat, which has just claimed a new flight speed record for all mammal-kind.

According to researchers at Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, bats of the species weighing less than half an ounce each were recently recorded flying at speeds exceeding 99 miles per hour, making it the fastest horizontal flyer on Earth.

“Initially, we could hardly believe our data,” said researcher Kamran Safi, “but they were correct.”

In addition to smoking the common swift (the next fastest horizontal flyer at around 68 miles per hour) the insect-loving echolocators shattered the previous highest bat-speed. In the 1950s, researchers estimated the same species to exceed speeds of 59 miles per hour, an observation that hasn’t been replicated until now. From New Atlas:

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute attached radio transmitters to the backs of Brazilian free-tailed bats. Using a mobile receiver aboard a small aircraft to localize the signal, the team tracked the flight paths of the animals and measured their speed through the air.

[…]

After consulting local weather data, the team has ruled out the possibility that tailwinds had a part to play. It says that where birds were assumed to fly more efficiently and faster than bats, its findings suggest a re-think might be in order of how we view the flight ability of the two creatures.

When it comes to vertical flight, however, birds still have the upper hand: In 1999, a peregrine falcon named “Frightful” was recorded dive-bombing at 242 miles per hour.

[New Atlas]

Scientists in the UK have developed a USB stick that can quickly and accurately measure the amount of HIV is in a patient’s blood.

The medical device was created by scientists at Imperial College London and tech firm DNA Electronics, and all it needs is a simple drop of blood to measure HIV-1 levels. It then creates an electrical signal that’s fed into a computer, laptop, or handheld device. The disposable test could be used by HIV patients to monitor their own treatment and help patients in remote regions of the world, where more standard HIV tests are inaccessible.

Published in the journal Scientific Reports, results show that the USB stick is highly accurate, and it can produce a result in under 30 minutes. Current tests to detect the amount of HIV in the blood can take as much as three days, requiring patients to send blood samples to a lab. In the latest research, the USB stick tested 991 blood samples with 95 percent accuracy, with an average time to produce a new result just shy of 21 minutes.

When blood is placed onto a spot on the USB stick, it senses the HIV-1 virus through a change in acidity levels. A mobile phone chip in the USB stick converts this information into an electrical signal, and the stick then feeds the result to an app on a handheld device or computer.

The technology is still in its early stages, but it could allow patients to regularly monitor their virus levels similar to the way people with diabetes check their blood sugar levels. The current treatment for HIV reduces virus levels to practically zero, but in some cases, the anti-retroviral medication stops working, typically due to the HIV virus developing a resistance to the drugs. The new USB stick can detect the rise in HIV levels, and flag a potential problem with a patient’s meds or therapy.

“[Monitoring] viral load is crucial to the success of HIV treatment,” noted study lead author Graham Cooke in a statement. “At the moment, testing often requires costly and complex equipment that can take a couple of days to produce a result. We have taken the job done by this equipment, which is the size of a large photocopier, and shrunk it down to a USB chip.”

The team is now investigating the possibility of using the device to test for other viruses, such as hepatitis.

[Scientific Reports]

ESO

Astronomers have used a powerful mountaintop observatory to
record three of the most detailed photos yet of infant alien
solar systems forming planets.

The scientists were even able to see “intriguing” shadows cast by
clouds of gas and dust in one of the images.

The photos could help pop more pieces into the longstanding
puzzle of how
Earth came to exist.

Ask an astronomer how planets form, and she’ll say parts of a
giant wheel of gas and dust around a newborn star, called a
protoplanetary disk, somehow collapse into blobs. Each blob
snowballs, clearing lanes in the disk as it grows bigger and
bigger until you have a new planet. Cooking time: A few million
years.

But the
details are still mysterious. For example: What starts the
party? How do planets end up spinning? And what causes a rocky
planet to form as opposed to a gas giant?

“[A]stronomers don’t know exactly how planets are formed,” Emma
Yu, an astronomer at the University of Texas in Austin, writes
at “Ask An Astronomer”.

So we continue to look to the stars for clues — and the
“unprecedented detail” in the new images, write the authors of

three
new
studies in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, may
bring them that much closer to the complicated truth.

The scientists used an instrument called SPHERE
on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) — an array of four different
telescopes run by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) — to
take the new images of infant solar systems and their
protoplanetary disks.

SPHERE made this possible because it blocks out the light of the
central star, allowing any dim protoplanetary disks to be seen.

Here’s one that looks top-down on the star system HD 135344B,
which is located some 450 light-years from Earth:

ESO, T. Stolker et
al.

Some of the arms are brighter than the others, which is strange —
they appeared to be shadows. And over several observations, the
shadows appeared to move.

Astronomers who
studied this image eventually realized that the nascent solar
system had twisted inner and outer disks, not just one flat disk,
and the moving material was causing the shadows, much like a bird
flying in front of a lighthouse’s lamp.

From there, they figured out what a cross-section of the system
looked like, including a “warp” zone between the disks (25 AU, or
astronomical units, is about the distance from the sun to
somewhere between Uranus and Neptune):

ESO/T.
Stolker et al./Astronomy & Astrophysics

Below is another new image of a new solar system from SPHERE.

This one is called RX J1615, and it’s a real baby at just 1.8
million years old (our solar system is about 4.6 billion years
old).

The SPHERE image shows the system from a glancing angle, which
allowed
another group of astronomers to figure out some of its
secrets from 600 light-years away:

ESO, J. de Boer et
al.

The photo is a first and revealed “a complex system of concentric
rings surrounding the young star, forming a shape resembling a
titanic version of the rings that encircle Saturn,” according to
an ESO press
release.

And below is yet another new image studied by
a third group of astronomers.

This star system, called HD 97048, is located about 500
light-years away. It has some unusual structures and gaps —
features that helped the team figure where its nascent planets
might be:

ESO, C. Ginski et
al.

“Through painstaking analysis, they found that the juvenile disc
around this star has also formed into concentric rings,”
according to the ESO’s release, and with highly unusual symmetry.

Alone, each new image is pretty incredible: These are baby solar
systems that may one day form Earth-like planets.

But together they provide a wealth of information that
astronomers may one day use to figure out how, exactly, we all
got here.