Think back to the very first scene of Game of Thrones. It wasn’t about Jon Snow or Daenerys Targaryen or Tyrion Lannister, though we meet all of these characters in the show’s opening hour. It’s about a small group of men from the Night’s Watch, barely named and swiftly dispatched, who encounter something so terrible that they’d rather be executed than face it. It’s the stuff of fairy tales and nightmares, it hates mankind, and it’s coming.

The confrontation between humanity and the eldritch terrors from north of the Wall has been Game of Thrones‘ endgame since that very first scene, but the six years of show since have moved toward that confrontation in fits and starts. At its best, the series draws us in completely, allowing us to root for multiple people on multiple sides of a conflict even when they change sides. Never has a show so effortlessly mastered the heel-face turn. At its worst, Game of Thrones meanders, too absorbed in the 8,000 little stories it’s trying to tell to meaningfully advance that Big Story.

The federal government is taking another step it says would make the US homeland safer from terrorism. US border authorities are proposing that millions of tourists entering the country each year reveal their social media identities.

Chameleons have the seemingly impossible ability to capture their prey while remaining motionless simply through the flick of their tongue. This sensationalized predatory ability depends in part on a sophisticated ballistic projection of the chameleon’s tongue. The chameleon is able to extend its tongue as far as two body lengths away during a predatory attack, sending it towards its victim using accelerations that range from 300 to 1500 m/s².

Given the forces involved, what happens next is a bit surprising: the victim sticks to the tongue, even in cases where the prey is up to 30 percent of the chameleon’s own body weight. Recently, a team of scientists investigated how this works.

It all depends on extremely viscous spit. The team characterized the viscosity of the mucus that’s present on the chameleon’s tongue by rolling small steel beads over a thin mucus film. During the rolling, the viscous forces of the mucus produce a drag force on the beads, which can be used to indirectly measure the viscosity. The scientists determined that the mucus viscosity (0.4 ± 0.1 Pa-s) is roughly 400 times larger than that of human saliva (~10^-3 Pa-s).