If some dinosaurs had wings and flapped them would that frighten insects into fleeing? This study tried to tease out a likely answer, by making and using a dino-like robot. The video shows some of what happened. The study is: “Escape behaviors in prey and the evolution of pennaceous plumage in dinosaurs,” Jinseok Park, Minyoung […]
The 2022 Insect Fear Festival is coming. Run! Jump! Fly! One way or another or another, get to it on Saturday, February 26, 2022! The festival is organized by swarms of entomologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This year it begins with a special presentation by Ig Nobel Prize winner Justin Schmidt, creator of […]
The claim that “corporations are people” sometimes draws ridicule. A new paper suggests a related, maybe more accurate claim: “Corporate Insecthood,” Nina Strohminger and Matthew R. Jordan, PsyArXiv. February 14. psyarxiv.com/rxkhe. The authors, at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, explain: “Whether the corporation should be considered a person is a matter of active […]
It should be noted that the author of ‘The Physiology of Insect Metamorphosis’ (1954) was Sir Vincent Brian Wigglesworth CBE MD FRS [pictured] . . . . . . and not V. B. Wrigglesworth, as Cambridge University Press might suggest. (Neither was he V. P. Wigglesworth, as Google Books might have you believe) Research research […]