It’s time for our monthly round up of interesting science stuff. It’s a pretty thin month unfortunately:

• Let’s start with a fairly arcane article. It’s from Quanta Magazine and is about the discovery of a geometric construct that is called the amplituhedron. According to physicists, its discovery vastly simplifies the calculation of particle interactions. Along the way however, it does away with locality, which says that particles interact at specific points in space-time, and unitarity, which says that the sum of all quantum mechanical probabilities add up to 1. These are fundamental concepts in current quantum field theory and this discovery not only undermines these assumptions, but challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental constituents of nature. It suggests that space and time are emergent properties instead.
• Next is a link to the actual research paper, which makes for rather heavy reading. It appears in PLOS ONE and is about orangutans may have better abilities to plan for the future than anyone ever suspected. It seems that when male orangutans travel long distances, they emit long calls which are used to communicate with other orangutans, and specifically may attract female orangutans and repel male rivals. The researchers found that the direction of the long calls emitted at dusk corresponded well with the direction that the orangutan chooses to travel in on the next day, suggesting that the animal is mentally capable of planning out its trip well beforehand and acting out on its plans.
• Finally here’s a link that’s been going out to everyone interested in science. It appears in the Smithsonian and is about the discovery of the first and so far only functional gearing system found in nature. The gears were found in a species of long hopping insects. The gears lock their back legs together, allowing the two legs to swing at the precise same moment so that the insect jumps forward. It seems that this wasn’t discovered earlier because the system exists only in juveniles of the species as adults fail to regrow the gears as their skin molts away. The speculation is that the gears are too fine and fragile a structure to repeatedly regrow and even a single broken gear tooth would render the system useless.