“Can maggots devour all our food waste?” and convert the food bits we wasted into something again useful to us humans? Ig Nobel Prize winner David Hu and colleagues—led by master maggot-mystery solver Olga Shishkov— explore that question, in their lab, and in this Science Friday video:
Brian Soash writes about the question, for Science Friday, in a special report called “Hungry, Hungry Hermetia.” Hermetia illucens is the name of the fly that’s involved, hungrily, in these convert-the-food-waste experiments. Hermetia illucens gets called other names, one of which is “black soldier fly.”
Last weekend, Olga Shiskov explained and demonstrated her work, assisted on stage by several rabidly donut-eating audience members, in the Improbable Research session at the AAAS Annual Meeting, in Washington, DC.