The lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) is a medium-sized bat found in Central and North America. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Biologists and engineers have joined forces to build a new robot bat that's helping us understand how bats use echolocation to hunt for food. By creating a robot that can echolocate, the team mimicked a bat's flight path and explained how bats can quickly determine whether or not their prey is on a leaf. This new bat's eye view is detailed in a study recently published in the The study was led in part by bat scientist and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute research associate Inga Geipel .

Is reading always better for your brain than listening to audiobooks? Reading books and listening to audiobooks tap into different elements of cognition, each with their own benefits. So which one should you choose, and when? But when a friend recently asked me whether her daughter was getting the same cognitive benefits from an audiobook as she would from reading, my instinct was to think "she's enjoying a book, the format doesn't matter". However, when I dug into the science, I found the medium does shape the mind in subtly different but meaningful ways.