Counting moths is not as easy as it may seem. Jamm Hostetler, and collaborators at the University of Florida’s Natural History Museum, created a system to count moths more indefatigably than most people would be able to do it. It’s called AutoMoth. The heart and eyes of it are an Android app called BioLens. Biolens […]
If you somehow are not already in love with bark beetles, we self-interestedly recommend this wonderful new book: The Surprising Lives of Bark Beetles, by Jiri Hulcr and Marc Abrahams.
“A New Species of the Genus Eurytoma Illiger Parasitic on Bees of the Genus Ceratina Latreille (Hymenoptera: Eurytomidae and Apoidea)” [by Robert E. Bugbee, Pan-Pacific Entomologist, vol. 42, no. 3, 1966, pp. 210-211.] is the study featured in “May We Recommend: Bugbee on Bugs that Bug Bees“, which is a featured article in the special […]
The bugs research that won Mark Hostetler an Ig Nobel Prize in 1997 is now, two decades later, finding new uses. A news report in Forbes magazine explains: Ford Launches Bugs At Sensors Because Keeping Them Clean Is Crucial For Self-Driving Cars To address this, Venky Krishnan, Ford Autonomous Vehicle Systems Core Supervisor and his team consulted […]
Here’s Olga Shishkov talking about some bugs that, when Olga was a child, excited Olga in a way that led to her eventual unusual career. Olga studies how maggots manage to do some of the surprising, impressive things they do. ABOUT THIS LITTLE VIDEO SERIES—This is part of a series of sessions we (David Hu […]
Travellers on the New York and Boston subway systems might allow themselves a sigh of relief – Yersinia pestis (the causative agent of plague) and Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax) might not be living in the subway systems after all. This is the finding of a new investigation published in the journal mSystems™, […]
“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) […]
QUESTION: When you mail live creatures, insects and invertebrates (including bees, caterpillars, cockroaches, crickets, destroyers of noxious pests, earthworms, fish fry and eggs, leeches and other parasites, lugworms, maggots, mealworms, pupae and chrysalides, rag worms, silkworms, spiders and stick insects) in the UK, must you box and package them? The answer lies on page 26 of the Royal Mail‘s […]
Researchers at Toolik Field Station, Alaska, made this brief video of native bugs at work or play. The filming occurred at a place and moment in which it also captured a performance, by some of their fellow researchers, of Michael Jackson’s song “Thriller“. This is reportedly the northernmost performance of that song: (HT @ErinPodolak) BONUS: […]
Biscuits, rubbish and bugs in Texas raise hopes that Britain will grow a lucrative new techology-based empire soon, rather than just eventually. This is all about getting usable amounts of graphene – the two-dimensional form of carbon. An American experiment, so goofy-sounding that it has drawn little attention, points towards a cheap way of obtaining […]