Collaborate Disseminate
A scientist’s video shows a thirsty moth drinking tears from the eye of a comatose bird. Continue reading Rare Footage Captures Moth Slurping Tears From a Sleeping Bird’s Eyeball
Scientists working to advance the frontier of knowledge frequently also need to invent their tools along the way. Sometimes these are interesting little hacks to get a job done. Recently some researchers found ancestors of moths and butterflies older than any previously known by analyzing tiny scales found alongside ancient pollen. They needed a tool to manipulate these scales: separating them from surrounding debris, transferring them to microscope slides. The special tool was a needle tipped with a single human nostril hair.
As ancient insects were the published paper‘s focus, their use of nose hair tipped needle was only given …read more
Continue reading Ancient Insect Scales Analyzed With Help Of Nose Hair
Outlawed now in some places, or only available to tote your purchases at a ridiculous premium, the billions of “T-shirt” bags used every year present a serious waste management problem. Whether blowing across the landscape like synthetic tumbleweeds, floating in the ocean as ersatz jellyfish, or clogging up municipal waste streams, finding a way to deal with them could really make a difference. And finding a bug that eats polyethylene and poops antifreeze might be a great first step in bioremediating the mess.
As with many scientific discoveries, learning about the useful and unexpected eating habits of the larval stage …read more
Continue reading To Deal with Plastic Trash, All You Need is Bugs
Outlawed now in some places, or only available to tote your purchases at a ridiculous premium, the billions of “T-shirt” bags used every year present a serious waste management problem. Whether blowing across the landscape like synthetic tumbleweeds, floating in the ocean as ersatz jellyfish, or clogging up municipal waste streams, finding a way to deal with them could really make a difference. And finding a bug that eats polyethylene and poops antifreeze might be a great first step in bioremediating the mess.
As with many scientific discoveries, learning about the useful and unexpected eating habits of the larval stage …read more
Continue reading To Deal with Plastic Trash, All You Need is Bugs
“By naming this species after the 45th President of the United States, I hope to bring some public attention to […] the neglected micro-fauna component of the North American biodiversity.” Continue reading This Moth With a Golden Head and Small Genitals Was Named After Trump
Moth-powered robotics could come to replace drug sniffing dogs. Continue reading Horny Moths Can Pilot Robots
Harvard University has had the flying robot insect market covered for a long time. However, their robot bee, while cool, was starting to bum them out. They wanted to put the battery and brain on the robocritter and have it fly around without a tether. Technology just wasn’t moving fast enough for them, so they’ve picked a different bug, this time a moth.
The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University is known for its Flying Winged Micro Air Vehicles or FWMAV. Which is a pretty good example of what happens when you let engineers name things. This …read more
Continue reading Robot Moth Is Learning to Fly Like A Real Moth