The Siberian Times just published amazing new pictures of an expedition of scientist who descended inside the mysterious crater on the Yamal Peninsula, northern Siberia. They are collecting data because its origin remains a mystery, and there may be a Bermuda Triangle connection.

According to the Russian scientist Igor Yeltsov—deputy head of the Trofimuk Institute—both the Siberian hole and the Bermuda Triangle may share the same phenomena:

There is a version that the Bermuda Triangle is a consequence of gas hydrates reactions. They start to actively decompose with methane ice turning into gas. It happens in an avalanche-like way, like a nuclear reaction, producing huge amounts of gas. That makes ocean to heat up and ships sink in its waters mixed with a huge proportion of gas. The same leads to the air to get supersaturated with methane, which makes the atmosphere extremely turbulent and lead to aircraft crashes.

The director of the Russian Centre of Arctic Exploration, Vladimir Pushkarev, however, says they are still collecting data:

I’ve heard about this Bermuda Triangle idea, but I repeat, our scientists need to work on materials first and only then draw some definite conclusions. At the moment we don’t have enough information.

Pushkarev says that it was easy to descend while the hole is solid because of the ice. In the summer the sides of hole were soft. At the bottom the lake—which is about at least 10 meters deep—is frozen.

[via The Siberian Times]

For years now, scientists have been trying to develop microscopic robots that can swim through bodily fluids and repair damaged cells or deliver medicine. Now, a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany believe they’ve got the perfect design – in the form of scallops so small, they can barely be seen by the naked eye. These micro-robots move back and forth to swim through blood, eyeball fluids and other liquids inside the human body. The scientists believe mimicking the way a true scallop swims is ideal, due to a number of reasons.

First, moving backward and forward is the best way to swim through Newtonian fluids, or liquids that can grow thicker or thinner, depending on the situation. Second, the micro-scallops don’t need much power be able to move that way. They don’t require batteries or even motors: just the energy provided by an external magnetic field.

According to the scientists, they don’t have a particular purpose in mind for their minuscule scallop. Instead, they’re hoping it becomes a reference design for other teams and companies that want to develop advance medical technologies. Read the whole study at Nature where the team’s paper was recently published.

[via Nature]