Ants and bees have reputations as efficient team players. In Temnothorax rugatulus—a small brown ant found in pine forests in North America—division of labor is common, with workers specializing in tasks like foraging, building, and brood care. But new research shows that many ants in a colony seem to specialize in doing nothing at all. To get a closer look at how these ants filled their time...

How much would it cost you to take a three-mile taxi ride? The answer to that question depends heavily on which city you're visiting. Take Oslo for instance. For about $32, you could travel three miles in one of the city's cabs. Pretty expensive, right? For the same amount of money in Cairo, you could travel 41 miles, according to the 2015 UBS Prices and Earnings report.[statista]

Sharp, a Japanese electronics company has launched its latest cute concept, RoBoHoN. It looks like robot but actually a smartphone. Yes, the unique form represents a phone in human shape where you can hold it up next to your ear just like any other phone, awkward … yeah, that’s for sure. This phone can play different roles for different people, for babies, it’s a robotic toy, for younger gen...

How many of the 200,000,000 (yeah, you read that right, two hundred million) Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes sold in the last 11 years did you purchase?Our fresh fall infographic chronicles the exponential growth of pumpkin-flavored products – with sales up 79 percent since 2011.Good old pumpkin pie filling still dominates market share, with $135 million in 2014 sales. But other innovative prod...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio took aim at Uber this summer, trying (and failing) to set a cap on the number of its for-hire cars operating in the city. The ride-share service has drawn criticism on a number of issues — including its labor practices — but the mayor said his main concern was traffic congestion.The number of yellow and green taxis on New York’s streets is carefully control...

Starbucks is beginning pilot tests of its own delivery service, starting today. The company is debuting its Green Apron Delivery Service in New York’s Empire State Building.Where it will be able to trial food and beverage deliveries that reach the more than 12,000 people working in the building, and are promised to arrive within 30 minutes on less. Specifically, the company is focusing on lear...

In the future, your wearables might be a bit harder to spot than an Apple Watch or Google Glass. In a patent awarded Oct. 13, Google outlined a design for a wearable communication device, replete with sensors, memory and a microprocessor, shaped like a contact lens.This lens would at least be partially powered by what the patent calls “optical signals.” In theory, a tiny photodetector and sol...

A recent Nielsen global survey found that trust levels in advertising have remained fairly consistent across earned, owned and paid formats over the past two years. Furthermore, among global respondents, self-reported action levels as a result of advertising actually exceeded trust levels for 14 of 19 advertising formats reviewed, suggesting that trust is not always a prerequisite to purchase....

Qualcomm is hoping to bring neural networks to our smartphones to help them recognize the world around them, enabling them to identify objects and act upon this knowledge. With the upcoming release of Qualcomm’s smartphone processor, the Snapdragon 820, this capability could be just a few months away.Humans are really good at identifying and classifying objects. Computers, on the other hand, f...