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Yesterday, we saw hundreds of skittering spiders and one very adorable bat. Today is Sunday, which we all know is just Bizarro Saturday, so we'll naturally be observing several hundred of these buggers losing their guano. More »
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Remember Lil' Drac the motherless baby bat who was nursed back to health? Well, the folks at Bat World Sanctuary have sent io9 an update of his progress, and the little guy turned out alright. Watch above as he takes flight and discovers the joys of solid food. More »
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If you're eating pancakes right now, don't even bother pouring on the syrup. This is the sweetest thing you'll see all day, nay, all week. This is the tale of Lil' Drac, an orphaned short-tailed fruit bat who was raised by the folks at Bat World Sanctuary. Here's his biography: More »
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Bats are everywhere, and they eat everything from fruit to blood. What keeps these small, furry fliers winning the natural selection game? A group of researchers tried to answer this question by studying the evolution of a particularly diverse group of bats. They discovered that the success of bats is all about body modification. More »
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Bats rely on their hearing more than any other mammal. After all, bats navigate the night sky by hearing the results of their echolocation, their natural sonar system. Turns out that's just the beginning of what makes bat-hearing amazing. More »
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Reminiscent, in a general way, of the film Snakes on a Plane, here are two recent (or fairly recent) instances of scary (if you find them scary) animals interacting with humans inside a machine. More »
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We already know that herbivorous bats can be attracted to certain plants by the sounds of their leaves. But what about the blood-sucking variety? How do they find food? They have to be able to precisely target large veins near the surface of the skin. It turns they use a method that's very similar to the way we taste spicy food. More »
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In Borneo, carnivorous pitcher plants and 4-centimeter-long bats have teamed up for what's possibly nature's most heavy-metal-album-cover-friendly mutualistic relationship. The bats take shelter in the pitcher plants, and the plants feast on the bats' nitrogen-rich guano in turn. More »
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Scientists know how bats use echolocation to find insects, but how do they detect bodies of water? To find out the answer to this question, German researchers filmed a bunch of Bulgarian bats going bonkers in an enclosed room. More »
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Peru's health ministry has dispatched emergency medical teams to the Amazon rainforest to stanch an outbreak of rabid vampire bats. So far 500+ people have been attacked by the bats, and four have been killed. More »
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Dylan Evans, a psychologist at University College Cork in Ireland, has been saddled with a two-year period of intensive monitoring and counselling after discussing a scientific paper with a colleague. The paper? "Fellatio in fruit bats prolongs copulation time". More »
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Outside of humans and a few other primates, oral sex is a rare phenomenon. But researchers have found male fruit bats do enjoy a little oral stimulation, and that the reasons females offer it go beyond simple pleasure. More »
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We may not all have pointy ears and sharp teeth, but Spanish scientists are convinced that inside every human lurks the best bat-power: echolocation, or navigating by sound. And they're determined to show us all how to unlock it! More »
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Mice and bats like this one share a genetic ancestor, and now they may become one species again. Yesterday, scientists announced they'd engineered mice with proto-bat wings. Researchers added bat genes to the mouse genome, and the results were "mice with abnormally long forelimbs." Those long limbs are the first evolutionary step towards wings. More importantly, towards mice with wings. Or people. More »
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Pitch Black, starring Vin Diesel, is a slow boil that gets awesome at the end. For the first hour and a half, our heroes are trapped on a mysterious planet that has like 5,000 suns, and then all the suns are eclipsed and it's permanent night. It takes a while to get to scenes like this one, where the foppish antique dealer ignites his own booze breath and discovers he's surrounded by spiky bat creatures. Then we watch the creatures dismember him and fight over his corpse, thanks to Diesel's altered night vision. Two more bizarre Pitch clips, after the jump. More »
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