All posts tagged: claws

Scorpions reinforce their claws and stingers with metals

Scorpions reinforce their claws and stingers with metals

Published by skeptic

Scorpions fluoresce under ultraviolet light Erwin Niemand/Shutterstock Scorpions strengthen their claws and stingers with metal, effectively turning these weapons into the equivalent of a steel-capped boot. The use of metals to strengthen vulnerable body parts – such as teeth in vertebrates like Komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis) – is already known, and the areas of a scorpion that contain metals are visible as stains to the naked eye. Sam Campbell at the University of Queensland, Australia, and his colleagues examined the claws and stingers of 18 species of scorpion from around the world to determine the extent and composition of their metal reinforcements. The team used two different X-ray techniques and electron microscopy to examine the scorpions, enabling them to map the presence of three main metals – iron, zinc and manganese. They also found traces of a range of other elements, including copper, nickel, silicon, chlorine, titanium and bromine. The metals are largely found within the tips of the stingers and along the cutting edge of the claws, as well as in their mouth and …

500-million-year-old spider relative has claws where it shouldn’t

500-million-year-old spider relative has claws where it shouldn’t

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The fossil was completely unremarkable. That’s what Harvard University paleontologist Rudy Lerosey-Aubril initially thought while examining an arthropod fossil dating back to the Cambrian period (538.8 million to 485.4 million years ago).  “As I prepared it, however, it unexpectedly revealed exquisitely preserved limbs—including a pair of frontal claws projecting from the head,” Lerosey-Aubril tells Popular Science. Early arthropod specimens don’t have claws like these. Instead, Cambrian arthropods usually have an antenna in that position. In other words, the claws Lerosey-Aubril was seeing were not supposed to be there.  This unassuming fossil belongs to Megachelicerax cousteaui, a 500-million-year-old sea predator. The fossil was first dug up over 40 years ago in a desert in western Utah and is the oldest known chelicerate—the arthropod group that includes modern spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and sea spiders. This single strange specimen pushes the evolutionary history of chelicerates back by 20 million years and helps explain the evolution of claws. The findings are detailed …

Nvidia lets its ‘claws’ out: NemoClaw brings security, scale to the agent platform taking over AI

Nvidia lets its ‘claws’ out: NemoClaw brings security, scale to the agent platform taking over AI

Published by skeptic

Every few years, a piece of open-source software arrives that rewires how the industry thinks about computing. Linux did it for servers. Docker did it for deployment. OpenClaw — the autonomous AI agent platform that went from niche curiosity to the fastest-growing open-source project in history in a matter of weeks — may be doing it for software itself. Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang made his position plain at GTC 2026 this week: “OpenClaw is the operating system for personal AI. This is the moment the industry has been waiting for — the beginning of a new renaissance in software.” And Nvidia wants to be the company that makes it enterprise-ready. At its annual large GTC 2026 conference in San Jose this week, Nvidia unveiled NemoClaw, a software stack that integrates directly with OpenClaw and installs in a single command. Along with it came Nvidia OpenShell, an open-source security runtime designed to give autonomous AI agents — or “claws”, as the industry is increasingly calling them — the guardrails they need to operate inside …

z.ai debuts faster, cheaper GLM-5 Turbo model for agents and ‘claws’ — but it’s not open-source

z.ai debuts faster, cheaper GLM-5 Turbo model for agents and ‘claws’ — but it’s not open-source

Published by skeptic

Chinese AI startup Z.ai, known for its powerful, open source GLM family of large language models (LLMs), has introduced GLM-5-Turbo, a new, proprietary variant of its open source GLM-5 model aimed at agent-driven workflows, with the company positioning it as a faster model tuned for OpenClaw-style tasks such as tool use, long-chain execution and persistent automation. It’s available now through Z.ai’s application programming interface (API) on third-party provider OpenRouter with roughly a 202.8K-token context window, 131.1K max output, and listed pricing of $0.96 per million input tokens and $3.20 per million output tokens. That makes it about $0.04 cheaper per total input and output cost (at 1 million tokens) than its predecessor, according to our calculations. Model Input Output Total Cost Source Grok 4.1 Fast $0.20 $0.50 $0.70 xAI Gemini 3 Flash $0.50 $3.00 $3.50 Google Kimi-K2.5 $0.60 $3.00 $3.60 Moonshot GLM-5-Turbo $0.96 $3.20 $4.16 OpenRouter GLM-5 $1.00 $3.20 $4.20 Z.ai Claude Haiku 4.5 $1.00 $5.00 $6.00 Anthropic Qwen3-Max $1.20 $6.00 $7.20 Alibaba Cloud Gemini 3 Pro $2.00 $12.00 $14.00 Google GPT-5.2 $1.75 $14.00 $15.75 …

Oldest known rock art is a 68,000-year-old hand stencil with claws

Oldest known rock art is a 68,000-year-old hand stencil with claws

Published by skeptic

This hand stencil appears to have been modified to appear more claw-like Ahdi Agus Oktaviana A nearly 68,000-year-old hand stencil found on the wall of a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia, may be the oldest rock art ever discovered – and rather than a simple handprint, it appears to have been touched up by the artist, possibly to make the fingers look claw-like. In recent decades it has become apparent that Sulawesi is a key location in the human story – home to numerous species of hominins from as long ago as 1.4 million years when an early human species, likely Homo erectus, made the first known sea voyages. In 2024, Maxime Aubert at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia, and his colleagues reported that they had found the world’s oldest known “representational” art on the island – a pig depicted alongside human-like figures, that was at least 51,200 years old. Now, his team have announced the discovery of a further 44 rock art sites in south-eastern Sulawesi, and dated one partial hand stencil at a site …