Tag: INSECTS

For the art.tech group exhibition currently on view at The Lab in San Francisco, artist David Bowen contributed a dynamic work called 'Fly Blimps' -- a trio of small, helium-filled dirigibles controlled by those pesky members of the order diptera. Sensors are embedded inside the flies' small chambers, each of which contains food, water and light. As the swarm, which includes up to 50 houseflies, ...

Share Winged nuisances, particularly those with stingers, serve as one of the few detriments to the lazy, sweltering days of summer. Apparently drawing inspiration from David Spade and 'Tommy Boy,' a resourceful insect adversary named Matthias has created an effective and inexpensive method of thwarting those painful and itchy assailants. Faced with an almost inaccessible wasp nest, Matthias ...

We've always thought that technology exists, in some sense, to scratch those hard-to-reach itches that are common to all lazy human beings. But we never thought the human race would devolve to the point where we'd need to develop complex technology to scratch real itches for us. Apparently, dear readers, we have. A new gadget, called the 'UBS Itching Removal Instrument,' uses electronic and ...

Scientists in New York City are asking all folks with a cell phone and a sharp ear to take part in an interesting, and some might say disgusting, survey. According to Wired, it's called the 'NYC Cricket Crawl,' and the goal is to get an idea of just how many crickets and katydids still live in the city. At least it's not a sewer rat survey, right? The 'Cricket Crawl' is quick, simple, and best ...

Using animals as sentinels is nothing new, such as when miners used canaries to detect carbon monoxide and methane in coal mines. As the New Scientist reports, the Pentagon plans to use cyborg crickets for very much the same purpose, only for detecting chemical and biological agents on the battlefield. By equipping the crickets with small electronics to control their muscle movements, and hence ...

Like the beginning of every great science fiction movie, experts claim that they've discovered a cure for our fuel-dependency woes that only requires an army of genetically modified bacteria... that eats wheat straw and excretes crude oil. You read that right: Scientists have created bugs that are able to snack on woodchips or sugar cane and produce waste in the form of easily malleable oil. Not ...