Graphene From Garbage (and Girl Scout cookies and bugs)

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 […]

Bugged by buggy bug IDs

Alex Wild writes in his Compound Eye blog: Why are media insects misidentified? That’s not a bee…. How does a fly end up advertising a book whose target audience, not to mention the mortified authors, will instantly recognize as a mistake? Publishers, photo editors, and stock agencies—those entities that purchase from image creators—trust photographers to correctly […]

Dutch bug-splatter-on-cars count

This graph shows seven days of bug-splat data. The bugs splatted onto the license plates of automobiles traveling in The Netherlands. The graph is color-coded to show approximate time-of-day when the splatting happened. It’s part of the Wageningen-University-based SplashTeller project. BONUS: Mark Hostetler was awarded the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize in entomology for his scholarly book, […]

Improbable Research