Looking around at the natural world, have you ever wondered why some groups of organisms contain huge numbers of species while others are seemingly barren? Take insects as an example, animals which evolved around 480 million years ago. There are perhaps 6 million species living in all manner of environments, and occupying an incredible diversity of niches. Have you ever wondered why some groups of organisms contain huge numbers of species while others are seemingly barren? Plants have had a species production rate more than twice that of animals, while complex organisms (multicellular eukaryotes) have produced new species at a rate almost 10 times that of simpler one (protists and prokaryotes). Sex seems to have been a major catalyst for increasing the rate at which new species formed, perhaps explaining its success as an evolutionary strategy.

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it's a little strange how I've ended up now--someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler's equation. It's hard to believe I've flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering. One day, one of my students asked me how I did it--how I changed my brain. I wanted to answer Hell--with lots of difficulty! In fact, I didn't start studying remedial math until I left the Army at age 26. If there were a textbook example of the potential for adult neural plasticity, I'd be Exhibit A. Learning math and then science as an adult gave me passage into the empowering world of engineering.

How do you improve on a design as classic as the round wall clock? Glance Clock founder and CEO Anton Zriaschev has conjured up a delightful timepiece that blends elements of analog and digital design and promises to make you more productive by helping you avoid distractions and--surprisingly enough--the compulsion to keep an eye on the clock so you don't miss important events and appointments. TechHive only covers the occasional crowdfunding project (the Glance Clock's Indiegogo campaign starts today). To catch our interest, the project has to be particularly interesting, and the startup must be able to provide a working prototype. Zriaschev has only a handful of those, so he made the three-hour trek from the San Francisco Bay Area to my home (and TechHive's de facto test lab) to show me his invention.

BEIJING – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe earned unusual praise from Chinese netizens Wednesday -- but for the quality of his calligraphy, rather than his diplomacy. Beijing and Tokyo are at loggerheads over disputed islands and wartime history, and Abe has raised hackles with his criticism of his neighbor's assertiveness in the South China Sea. But the Japanese leader was lauded after he purportedly left a hand-written note in Chinese thanking a cleaner at the hotel he stayed in for the G-20 summit in Hangzhou last week. It gave Abe's name, title and the date, adding: "Thanks." It was posted on China's Twitter-like Weibo last week by a journalist who founded what is said to be Japan's largest Chinese-language news website, and had been reposted more than 700 times by Wednesday.

Timothy Amukele, an assistant professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, and systems engineer Jeff Street are trying to figure out how to use drones to deliver blood samples. Timothy Amukele, an assistant professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, and systems engineer Jeff Street are trying to figure out how to use drones to deliver blood samples. Three years ago, Geoff Baird bought a drone. A Seattle dad and hobby plane enthusiast, Baird used the 2.5-pound quadcopter to photograph the Hawaiian coastline and film his son's soccer and baseball games. But his big hope is that drones will soon fly tubes of blood and other specimens to Harborview Medical Center, where he works as a clinical pathologist running the hospital's chemistry and toxicology labs.

From launching a yearlong anti-ISIS airstrike campaign in Syria to conducting naval exercises in the South China Sea this week, Russia's military might is showing no signs of slowing after its global expo promoting the country's brand new weapons of war concluded Sunday. The International Military-Technical Forum, an event held this past week near Moscow called "Army-2016," featured more than 11,000 pieces of modern military hardware to show "the maximum range of the export potential of Russian high-tech military products, represented in the form of natural samples on static display and in action on land, water and in the sky," the official website says. Some of the items on display included bombs, air defense systems and unmanned vehicles for both the air and ground that Sputnik News called robots. Below are photos and video of 10 key state-of-the-art weapons of war Russia had on display. The horwitzer armored truck that is also known as the "Phlox" comes with a powerful cannon mounted on top that has the ability to shoot with precision targets that are more than 6 miles away.

Apple may be rethinking its strategy on self-driving cars. The firm has never publicly announced its automotive plans, but it has long been rumoured that it is working on an autonomous vehicle of its own. Now the focus appears to have shifted to creating the software for an autonomous vehicle, opening the door to the possibility of partnering with other car companies. Earlier this year, a concept video revealed ideas for a futuristic-looking Apple car, with a wide dashboard display and smart capabilities. Claims that Apple is working on cars may seem like a leap, but it isn't the first time such projects have been discussed by the Californian firm.

For being known as fighting to keep their projects secretive, Apple doesn't seem to mind that it's not so secret car project is known everywhere. Now, there's been a slight change in focus from being an automaker to developing its own self-driving technology. The iPhone-maker's automotive project, long an open secret in Silicon Valley, is shifting to focus on creating the technology for an autonomous vehicle that doesn't require a human driver. The new direction apparently doesn't foreclose the possibility that Apple might someday build its own car, but it opens the door to partnering with other car companies. The new emphasis was confirmed Friday by a person with knowledge of the project after the New York Times reported that Apple is "rethinking" its automotive strategy. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the project.

Ford Motor Co. F -2.75 % unveiled on Friday the latest part of its vision for future: bicycles and buses. The 113-year-old auto maker, whose Model T spawned a billion-plus horseless carriages, is racing other auto makers and upstarts such as Apple, Google and Uber toward a world transformed by innovations such as self-driving cars. Chief Executive Officer Mark Fields on Wednesday announced the auto maker had agreed to acquire Chariot, a private shuttle service popular in the Bay Area, and that it would sponsor the city's version of New York's Citi Bike. Blue Ford GoBike bicycles will become ubiquitous starting next year as the San Francisco program run by Motivate ramps up to 7,000 bikes in 2018 from 700 today. The moves illustrate Ford's effort to provide solutions for big-city congestion, Mr. Fields told the crowd.

This fall, customers cruising the aisles of Lowe's home improvement stores in the San Francisco Bay Area may see a new type of employee taking inventory and assisting shoppers. You won't find a nametag on this worker, but you won't confuse it with other employees, either. The new kid in town is the LoweBot, an autonomous retail service robot that scans and audits store inventory on the floor. It uses voice recognition to identify products for customers and lead them to the right shelf -- in multiple languages. The retailer is deploying LoweBots at 11 of its Bay Area stores over a seven-month period using NAVii robots made by Fellow Robots, following a successful two-year pilot program of a first-generation robot called OSHbot that was tested at one of Lowe's Orchard Supply Hardware stores.