Blogs / Discoblog

• One market that has boomed in the recession: marijuana growing.

• Think you can hide in modern society? Good luck.

• Digitizing patient medical records? YES PLEASE!

• Isabella Rossellini’s legendary bug porn, profiled in depth.

• Want to make more money? Try being nice to other people (seriously).

• Happy 25th birthday, DNA fingerprinting! Now change.

• And finally, 18 awesome animated mad scientists (not that we’re supporting stereotypes that all scientists are crazy…just the animated ones).

Obama probably wouldn’t have as much success swatting this flying microrobot as he did his now-infamous one. Typically when engineers design flying bots, they assume they should build them with flapping wings, like insects, instead of helicopter airplane designs. But it turns out that flying robots aren’t as efficient when they’re built like flies.

David Lentink at Wageningen University and Michael Dickinson at the California Institute of Caltech pitted a robot made with fly wings and a micro-helicopter made with an attached wing against each other in an oil tank to test how much energy each one used. They found that the two robots produced the same amount of lift, but the one outfitted with the helicopter blade consumed 50 percent less energy, going against what researchers had long assumed:

The extra lift is generated by a stable ‘tornado-like’ vortex that runs parallel to the leading edge of the wing. This vortex lowers the pressure over the wing and sucks it upward, lifting the insect’s weight into the air. It was already known that both spinning and flapping insect wings can generate such a lift boosting vortex.

Still, let’s not discount our insect friends just yet: We still have much to learn from flies, Dickinson contends.

Related Content:
Discoblog: The Tiny Robot that Can Crawl Through Your Veins and Treat Your Tumors
Discoblog: Microbot Grabs and Moves Tiny Objects

Image: Wageningen University

Could all those furry lab rodents soon be replaced with insects? Possibly, as Irish scientists discovered while testing how the immune systems of insects fights off a bacterial or fungal infection. It turns out insect cells respond to infections the same way mammals’ cells do, producing similarly structured enzymes to kill off intruding microbes.

When National University of Ireland’s biologist Kevin Kavanagh looked at immune cells in insects, and compared them to the white blood cells in mammals, he found that they both fought the invading pathogen through a similar chemical attack—which makes sense given that mammals and insects have immune systems that are 90 percent identical.

The researchers believe that substituting moths in the initial testing of new antimicrobial drugs could reduce the demand for mice by 80 percent. Reuters reports:

“It is now routine practice to use insect larvae to perform initial testing of new drugs and then to use mice for confirmation tests,” said Kevin Kavanagh, a biologist from the National University of Ireland, who presented his research at a Society for General Microbiology meeting in Edinburgh.

“This method of testing is quicker, as tests with insects yield results in 48 hours whereas tests with mice usually take 4 to 6 weeks. And it is much cheaper too.”

The cost savings of switching to bugs would be enormous: A caterpillar costs 16 to 32 cents, while a mouse chews up between $80 to $130 per experiment. Kavanagh tested 700 new drugs using a relatively small number of insects—the same research would have needed 14,000 mice.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Mice Breed Without Fathers
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Image: flickr/ CameraShyMom

The animal kingdom is full of weird stuff, like animals that turn into zombies—and one thing many of them will do is go to great (and gross) lengths to avoid predators.

Armored crickets, which are native to Namibia, South Africa, and Botswana, have a particularly disgusting means of driving away predators: They spew vomit and spurt hemolymph (the mollusk and arthropod version of blood) from under their legs and through slits in their exoskeleton. Katydids do it too; in fact, in Germany the species has acquired the nickname “blutspritzer,” or “blood squirter.”

But that’s not all. Wounded crickets can attract other crickets foraging for protein and salt—and the healthy crickets are happy to become cannibals. According to BBC:

“When swarms [of crickets] in the African bush meet a road, lots get squashed and the others gather for a feast, so more get squashed until there can be a thick, acrid pancake of dead and moribund crickets on the roadside, bleeding and attracting more cannibals,” says [entomologist Bill] Bateman.

The Regal Horned Lizard, too, uses the blood-spewing tactic, shooting the substance from a pocket near its eyes…straight at its attacker’s eyes and mouth.

Check out this video of the lizard shooting blood. (Caution: It’s graphic, as videos of animals spurting blood are wont to be).

Related Content:
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Discoblog: Disgusting Things Are Just as Gross Whether They’re Real or Imagined

Image: iStockphoto

• Between global warming and trans fats, there are plenty of things to worry about. But we bet you forgot about this one: A massive jellyfish invasion that some Japanese researchers fear could occur this year.

• If you think you’re important, think again—unless you have a fish or insect christened in your honor. Check out this list of species named after famous people.

• Always having to see with your eyes can get tiring. Luckily, you can use sound to “see” by using echolocation, the same technique used by dolphins and bats to guide themselves and find prey. Experts in Spain say it takes just a few weeks of training to master the method.

• Add one more thing to the list beer can do: Send you into space on Sir Richard Branson’s spacecraft. Guinness is offering one lucky winner the chance to hurtle 68 miles above the Earth at three times the speed of sound. The contest is accessed via the company’s Web site and is open to people in 28 countries.

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Discoblog: The Curious Case of the Immortal Jellyfish
Discoblog: Remote-Controlled Flying Jellyfish!
Discoblog: Celebrities Sell Cars, Beer, Clothes…and Toilet Use?

Are ants taking over the planet? Well, they’ve definitely spread, and they know which ants are on their colonial “team.” In fact, a single colony consisting of billions of Argentine ants, originally natives of South America, have spread onto every continent save Antarctica, thanks to human activity.

Even more remarkable, the insects can tell which ants are from their own colony, even if they live on different continents. When scientists placed ants from the Argentine colony together, even if they were taken from other countries, they were amiable (i.e., nonviolent) to each other. Contrast that with the aggression ants from separate colonies displayed when they came into contact with each other, according to the BBC:

Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops. In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the ‘Californian large’, extends over 900km along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan….

Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn’t get on with those from the Iberian colony. But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.

Experts say the ants likely are genetically related, so they recognized the chemical composition of each others’ cuticles.
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Mormon crickets have no taste in music, and Nevadans are using it against them. Residents of Tuscarora are getting ready to blast their boomboxes to ward off the crickets’ semi-annual invasion, after the townsfolk realized three years ago that the pests don’t like Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones.

Mormon crickets are a real problem in northern Nevada and other parts of the Great Basin: They march in columns up to two miles long and one mile wide from about May through August. They hatch in April and invade all aspects of life before they finally lay eggs and die. They destroy crops, invade people’s homes (one resident said, “You’ll wake up and there’ll be one sitting on your forehead, looking at you”), and clog roadways—even requiring snowplows to clear out their piled-up carcasses.

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The newest battle being fought by U.S. military forces is against insects. Fluorescent rodent feces and a new, improved flytrap were among the pest-control innovations presented at this week’s American Mosquito Control Association convention. In attendance were researchers from the Pentagon’s Deployed Warfighter Protection Research Program, whose goal is “to take no prisoners among disease-carrying flies, mosquitoes and other bugs that threaten Americans in uniform abroad.”

The program spends an annual $5 million developing methods to fight disease-carrying insects that threaten troops. And what’s good for the troops, officials say, is ultimately good for the public: Existing malaria- and dengue-fighting technologies have been the result of military-driven research. Citizens at large have the military to thank for DEET, a common ingredient in insect repellents, as well as several chemical-treated fabrics that keep ticks and mosquitoes at bay.

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Space travel isn’t exactly known for its culinary pleasures. But astronauts in the future may have a fresh alternative to freeze dried food: A team of Chinese scientists are proposing that silkworms—the mulberry-leaf-munching larvae of silkmoths—can be easily reared on long-term space flights and provide valuable protein (as in, meals) for astronauts.

On missions that may last several years, astronauts will need a sustainable, renewable source of animal protein. Researchers have considered everything from poultry to fish to sea urchin larvae. Chicken, they decided, would require too much room and food, and would generate too much excrement. Fish are too sensitive to water conditions—H20 being of such limited supply in space that astronauts drink recycled urine and sweat.

Silkworms, on the other hand, require minimal space, food, and water, and produce very little excrement. The critters are packed with protein and rich in amino acids (twice the amount in pork and four times the amount in milk and eggs). Even the silk that the pupae use to spin their cocoons can be chemically processed to become edible.

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Good public sanitation is a mark of advanced civilizations. Humans have dealt with the “bathroom problem” mainly by burying, flushing, or otherwise sequestering our waste products in some far off, out-of-sight, out-of-mind location. In this way, we’re similar to mole rats that build specialized “latrine chambers” in their underground habitats. A new paper in Animal Behavior examines alternative ways to handle the sanitation issue, developed by some of the world’s most sophisticated societies: eusocial insects like ants, bees, and wasps. One strategy involves something known as the “blind gut.”

Colonies of eusocial insects can contain millions of individuals. Because dropping feces at will would cause a serious toxic hazard, many species have developed a way of holding it in for a really long time. The youngsters, or larva, of the order hymenoptera, have a “blind gut,” meaning one that does not connect the mouth with the anus. Essentially, this means their waste products are trapped inside their bodies for weeks to months, or the entire duration of the larval stage. Only when they pupate (when the larva changes into the adult form), does their waste get expelled in one big, stinky pellet known as the meconium. In the honeybee, the meconium is expelled during its first flight out of the nest. (Imagine human teenagers holding it all in until right before they leave home for college…) After the meconium is quickly disposed of, the adult insects develop a normal continuous gut.

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