Quite a few of these articles this month, so here goes:

•  Cloning animals is nothing new these days but, still, there is something symbolic about cloning one from a single drop of blood, as this article from BBC News covers.
• We all know that bats can navigate using ultrasound, but could prey make use of this fact as a defensive measure? This article from Popsci covers how hawk moths, found in the tropics, are able to respond to the ultrasounds emitted by bats hunting them by responding with ultrasound clicks of their own. It may be useful to just startle the moths or it could be part of an active jamming system to hamper the effectiveness of the bats’ echolocation abilities.
• Nearly a quarter of a century after its inception, a study into the crack babies phenomenon of the 1980s has finally ended. The term refers to an epidemic of babies born to mothers who were addicted to cocaine and were exposed to the substance while in-utero. Apocryphal stories at the time talked of babies with shrunken heads, poor muscle tone and troubling behavioural symptoms. Twenty-three years later this study found that there was no difference in IQ between such babies and those of a control group with no prenatal cocaine exposure. They did find that both groups had IQ scores that were markedly lower than the national average and attribute it to the effects of poverty.
• This next article is somewhat like the one above: conclusions that are “obvious” are not always correct. Pop quiz: which areas are safer to live in, for developed countries at least: urban areas or rural areas? As it turns out, this article from CNN explains how contrary to intuition, the risk of injury or death from violent crime and accidents are more than 20% higher in the countryside in the United States than in urban areas. We don’t know exactly why yet, but there are some educated guesses. In the US, rates of firearm ownership are higher in rural areas for example, and these residents tend to drive longer distances over more dangerous roads. Plus it’s easier and faster to get to a hospital in a city than in the countryside.
• Finally here’s a just for fun article about a couple of physics points from the Pacific Rim film in a Scientific American blog: specifically how much force is there in a rocket-assisted punch delivered by a giant robotic fist and can a giant monster with a huge wingspan fly its way into space? It’s just the first in a series of two such articles with maybe more to come so be sure to look out for more too.