Bumblebees teach each other.
Nature shares a study that found that bumblebees somehow communicate the solutions to complex puzzles to each other, something that only humans were thought to […]
entomology
Cicadas are so loud, they cause fiberoptic-cable interference.
Wired reveals a very strange insect-monitoring device called DAS, or “distributed acoustic sensing,” normally used to track vibrations made by seismic shifts and volcanic eruptions. […]
Science Art: The beetle (Byturus tomentosus) living on raspberry, from Nordisk familjebok, 1920
A raspberry beetle and its favorite fruit, from a very special category on Wikimedia Commons. We do love an encyclopedia.
Science Art: Habitus images of Chimairacoris lakshmiae, 2015.
This is a plant bug. That’s the technical term – it’s part of that group of insects called “true bugs,” the family Miridae; plant bugs […]
The last leg of the longest butterfly migration has been mapped at last.
Science News brings tidings from Central Africa, where painted lady butterflies born in Europe spend their winters in the longest migration of any butterfly: Pinpointing […]
Science Art: Papillons, from Larousse Universe, 1922
Thanks to an unexpected gift from an old friend, I was just reading an article in the print edition of Scientific American about the Sora […]
Butterfly wing-patterns come from ancient DNA, switched around by junk.
The National Science Foundation follows researchers taking a second look at “junk” DNA – the genes that don’t seem to do anything and instead just […]
Silk for Teflon. Non-stick silk. Silk without friction.
The National Science Foundation puts a spotlight on Tufts University, where researchers have taken proteins from the cocoons of silk moths and used them to […]
A bee swarm can generate 8 times more electricity than a storm cloud.
New Scientist reveals an accidental discovery that happened when a passing swarm of bees got close to a weather station on a clear day – […]
Robot honeybees can steer hives to safer flowers.
MIT Technology Review offers a strange solution to a serious problem. They’ve got robot bees who can dance inside a bee hive to direct workers […]
In case you ever wondered, there are 20 quadrillion ants in the world. And that makes them important.
Reuters reports on a painstaking headcount that proves that for every one of the nearly 8 billion humans on Earth, there are 2.5 million ants: […]
“Necrobotic” spiders grab things more precisely than machine fingers.
Rice University robotics engineers are playing with dead things – spiders, to be precise – and say they’ve come up with a breakthrough in precision […]
The orange-blossom odor of mosquito-borne diseases… actually attracts mosquitoes.
Science News takes a long whiff of a chemical that smells like oranges and flowers that’s given off by people (and other mammals) infected with […]
Science Art: Lycidae, Plate XVIII, Edw. A. Smith, 1879
These are beetles, mostly from southern Asia except the last one, Dexoris, which is from Sierra Leone. These specific beetles became British (perhaps posthumously) and […]
Science Art: Lysiopetalum Cavernarum, Etc., Emerton & Packard, del., 1888.
This is a collection of bits and pieces (including “male genital armature” in 1s and 1t) of Pseudotremia cavernarum, the cave millipede. Yes, the researchers […]