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🔗 Insects 🔗 Insects/Ant 🔗 Birds 🔗 Ecology 🔗 Insects/Hymenoptera

Kleptoparasitism (originally spelt clepto-parasitism, meaning "parasitism by theft") is a form of feeding behavior in which one animal — i.e. the kleptoparasite — deliberately takes food from another animal, often via aggressive confrontations. The strategy is evolutionarily stable when stealing is less costly than direct predation, such as when food is scarce or when physically weaker/less assertive victims are abundant and unlikely to fight back.

Many kleptoparasites are arthropods, especially bees and wasps, but including some true flies, dung beetles, bugs and spiders. Cuckoo bees are specialized kleptoparasites which lay their eggs either on the pollen masses made by other bees, or on the insect hosts of parasitoid wasps. They are an instance of Emery's rule, which states that insect social parasites tend to be closely related to their hosts. The behavior also occurs among vertebrates including birds such as skuas, who persistently chase and harass other seabirds until they disgorge their food; and hypercarnivorous mammals such as spotted hyenas and lions, who routinely rob killed prey from each other and other mesopredators such as cheetahs. Other species might also opportunistically indulge in kleptoparasitism, especially when driven by the desperation of hunger and when scavenging isn't an option.

🔗 United States

🔗 Australia 🔗 Australia/Northern Territory 🔗 Weather 🔗 Weather/Weather 🔗 Weather/General meteorology

Hector is a cumulonimbus thundercloud cluster that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia, from approximately September to March each year. Hector, or sometimes Hector the Convector, is known as one of the world's most consistently large thunderstorms; specifically, a small mesoscale convective system (MCS) or large multicellular thunderstorm. It reaches heights of approximately 20 kilometres (66,000 ft).

🔗 Marine life 🔗 Animals

Deepstaria enigmatica is a very rarely seen giant jellyfish of the family Ulmaridae first described in 1967 by F. S. Russell.

🔗 Science

The Ortega hypothesis holds that average or mediocre scientists contribute substantially to the advancement of science. According to this hypothesis, scientific progress occurs mainly by the accumulation of a mass of modest, narrowly specialized intellectual contributions. On this view, major breakthroughs draw heavily upon a large body of minor and little-known work, without which the major advances could not happen.

🔗 Computer science

Algorithm X is an algorithm for solving the exact cover problem. It is a straightforward recursive, nondeterministic, depth-first, backtracking algorithm used by Donald Knuth to demonstrate an efficient implementation called DLX, which uses the dancing links technique.

🔗 Biography 🔗 England 🔗 Disability 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

Jeffrey Hudson (1619 – c. 1682) was a court dwarf of the English queen Henrietta Maria of France. He was famous as the "Queen's dwarf" and "Lord Minimus" and was considered one of the "wonders of the age" because of his extreme but well-proportioned smallness. He fought with the Royalists in the English Civil War and fled with the Queen to France but was expelled from her court when he killed a man in a duel. He was captured by Barbary pirates and spent 25 years enslaved in North Africa before being ransomed back to England.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Energy 🔗 Microsoft

The data furnace is a method of heating residential homes or offices by running computers in them, which release considerable amounts of waste heat. Data furnaces can theoretically be cheaper than storing computers in huge data centers because the higher cost of electricity in residential areas (when compared to industrial zones) can be offset by charging the home owner for the heat that the data center gives off. Some large companies that store and process thousands of gigabytes of data believe that data furnaces could be cheaper because there would be little to no overhead costs. The cost of a traditional data storage center is up to around $400 per server, whereas the overhead cost per server of a home data furnace is around $10. Individuals had already begun using computers as a heat source by 2011.

🔗 Marine life 🔗 Animals

Iridogorgia chewbacca is a species of deep-sea bamboo coral in the family Chrysogorgiidae. Named after the Star Wars character Chewbacca due to its long, flexible, "hairy" branches that evoke the Wookiee's fur, the species was formally described in 2025. It inhabits rocky seafloors in the tropical western Pacific Ocean at depths exceeding 400 meters, where it forms solitary colonies up to 1.2 meters tall.

🔗 Finance & Investment

A credit card imprinter, colloquially known as a ZipZap machine, click-clack machine or Knuckle Buster, is a manual device that was used by merchants to record payment card transactions before the advent of payment terminals.

The device works by placing the customer’s credit card into a bed in the machine, then layering carbon paper forms over the card. A bar is slid back and forth over the paper to create an impression of the embossed card data and the merchant information on the imprinter. The customer signs these paper forms, with one copy as the customer receipt and the other kept by the merchant.