For people who like to find faults, good news appeared in 1989, in this study: “Locating Faults in a Constant Number of Parallel Testing Rounds,” Richard Beigel, S. Rao Kosaraju [pictured here], and Gregory F. Sullivan, Proceedings of the First Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, March 1989, pp. 189–198. The authors, at […]
In 1997, right after Mark Hostetler won his Ig Nobel Prize, NBC’s The Tonight Show invited him to be on their program. Here’s edited video of that: The 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for entomology was awarded to Mark Hostetler of the University of Florida, for his scholarly book, “That Gunk on Your Car,” which identifies the insect […]
“Ice cream was made by using 0.5% insect’s gelatin and compared with that made using 0.5% commercial gelatin as stabilizing agent.” The two insects concerned, the melon bug (Coridius viduatus) and sorghum bug (Agonoscelis versicoloratus versicoloratus) were the subject of an investigation described in a new paper (for the journal Food Science and Technology International) […]
A frog’s eyes include networks of nerves that act as bug detectors — signaling to the frog’s brain whenever they see motion that’s typical of tasty bugs. That insight was revealed in 1959 in the study “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” written with Jerry Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, Warren McCullough, and Walter Pitts. This […]
In 1843, Edgar Allen Poe wrote a fictional story called “The Gold Bug,” about a bug made of gold. In 2012, Aaron Stewart, Ravi Anand and Jens Balkau wrote a scientific treatise about termites that accumulate gold in their nest: “Source of anomalous gold concentrations in termite nests, Moolart Well, Western Australia: implications for exploration,” Aaron D. […]
This week’s Headline of the Week comes from last year — June 30, 2011, to be specific. We neglected it, unfairly, at the time, though we did mention it later. Now we are mentioning it again. Behold: ‘Singing penis’ sets noise record for water insect By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature Scientists from France and […]
This commercial for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor claims [perhaps accurately!] to show that a few bugs can provide enough power to run the chip: [HT Ernesto Charles]