Pickleball mania is causing a strain on the healthcare system.

Some female frogs will go to the extent of faking their own deaths to avoid sex with their male counterparts, a new study has revealed. Researchers in Berlin and Finland focused on the European common frog for their investigation owing to the often alarming nature of the species' mating process. The short breeding season means that several males often cling to a single female – in a pile-on that can cause the female to drown. (So, pretty understandable that they might want to avoid this.) For the research published in the Royal Society Open Science, European common frogs were collected and divided into tanks where there were two females and one male in each. Before this research, it was thought that the females couldn't defend themselves against the aggressive amorous act. However, a number of the wily participants displayed the three avoidance behaviours. A rotation technique to escape mating was a popular option – carried out by 83 per cent of the females. While nearly half of them (48 per cent) mimicked how male frogs sound to trick them into letting them go. In 33 per cent of the females, the researchers recorded a stiffening of arms and legs for two minutes, in a convincing bid to play dead. Out of the females who got mounted by a lustful male, almost half were able to escape thanks to at least one of these avoidance behaviours. “The smaller females also showed the full repertoire of behaviours more often than the larger females," the researchers noted, and younger females were more likely to pretend they were dead. However, question marks remain on whether the frogs fake their death as a conscious choice or whether it is a stress response or even a means to test the male’s strength and endurance. “I think even if we call this species a common frog and think we know it well, there are still aspects we don’t know and perhaps haven’t thought about," Dittrich explained to The Guardian. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 20, 2023--

SAVE UP TO $32.97: As of June 27, anyone who hasn't signed up for Amazon

Looking to finally get your company's Facebook Page or Instagram business account verified? Well, the

Well, no one was expecting this: Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg wants to literally fight Tesla

A Vatican astronomer has come to the help of NASA with a historic mission to study an asteroid. Meteorite expert and Vatican astronomer, Jesuit Brother Bob Macke, came to the aid of the US space agency after building a custom device that would allow the study of material of a sample collected from an asteroid. The mission is that of the unmanned spacecraft, Osiris-Rex, which was launched in 2016 in order to collect samples on an asteroid named Bennu. Bennu is located close to Earth and Osiris-Rex successfully collected a cup of material from the asteroid in 2020. Now, the vessel is approaching Earth and is due to release the sample in a return capsule on 24 September before continuing its orbit of the sun. Macke was contacted by the lead of the mission’s sample analysis working group, Andrew Ryan, who asked him to build the device that was needed in order to analyse the sample of the Bennu asteroid. The device has been devised so that it can analyse the density and porosity of the samples to help identify the make up of the asteroid surface. It is known as a pycnometer and NASA has strict requirements for the device, though other companies contacted were not willing to custom make one. Macke, however, took up the task and was able to build it in five weeks thanks to the assistance of students at the University of Arizona who collaborate with the Vatican Observatory’s advanced technology telescope in Tucson. In March it was delivered to the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston for a test run and is hoped to be used for the real thing when the sample arrives from space. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

There's nothing particularly new about Google's latest-generation Pixel 8 smartphone hardware. That's why the company is pushing hard to tout its AI-powered new software, which Google says was built specifically for the "first phone of the generative AI era."

Robinhood Markets Inc. is no longer doing crypto business with market maker Jump Trading, according to the publication

Here's when players can pre-load Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

Twitter appears to be restricting access to its platform for anyone not logged into an account.

Best Buy Co. topped profit estimates as it navigated a long sales slump in consumer electronics and household