Collaborate Disseminate
To the extent that one has strong feelings about insects, they tend toward the extremes of a spectrum that runs from a complete fascination with their diversity and the specializations …read more Continue reading Mothbox Watches Bugs, So You — Or Your Grad Students — Don’t Have To
Sometimes, a limb is damaged so badly that the only way to save the patient is to amputate it. Researchers have now found that humans aren’t the only species to …read more Continue reading Surgery — Not Just For Humans Anymore
There are about one million known species of insects – more than for any other group of living organisms. If you need to determine which species an insect belongs to, …read more Continue reading Neural Network Identifies Insects, Outperforming Humans
A new study found that American bumblebees are in big trouble up north. Continue reading The American Bumblebee Is Facing Extinction in Canada
More than 40 percent of insects are at risk of extinction within 100 years. Continue reading Insects Are In ‘Catastrophic’ Decline Worldwide, Scientists Warn
For a century, nobody knew why Satyrini butterflies had inflated veins on their forewings. Turns out the structures are hearing aids. Continue reading These Butterflies Can Hear With Their Wings
“We want to put water right into your processor.” If that statement makes you sweat, that is good. Sweating is what we’re talking about, but it’s more involved than adding some water like a potted plant. Sweating works naturally by allowing liquid to evaporate, and that phase change is endothermic which is why it feels cool. Evaporative coolers that work in this way, also known as swamp coolers, haven’t been put into computers before because they are full of sloshy water. Researchers in South Korea and the United States of America have been working on an evaporative cooling system mimicking …read more
Humans and insects think on a different scale, but entomologists study the behavior of these little organisms, so they’re not a complete mystery. There isn’t much intelligence in a single ant or a cubic millimeter of gray matter, but when they all start acting together, you get something greater than the sum of the parts. It is easy to fall into the trap of putting all the intelligence or programming into a single box since that’s how we function. Comparatively, itty-bitty brains, like microcontrollers and single-board computers are inexpensive and plentiful. Enter swarm mentality, and new tasks become possible.
[Kevin …read more
Don’t bee afraid. Continue reading Trend Alert: Covering Yourself in Bees
There have been reports of higher than normal firefly populations, but it’s probably fine. Continue reading Why Are We Seeing So Many Fireflies in New York This Year?