insects

Chris Knight's avatar

In keeping with this blogger’s enjoyment of finding and sharing good stuff, I’m going to do a review of something that I came across lately.  And so far I’m mighty impressed with it.

I don’t know where they came from, maybe on some vegetation that I got from the grocery store, but this summer has been absolutely wretched from gnats and fruit flies.  They’ve been getting all over the house, and I’ve had to swat them away from my computer screen Lord only knows how often.  Just a real nuisance.

So I was watching television a few weeks ago and caught some commercials for the Zevo flying insect trap.  According to the ads it uses ultraviolet and infrared light to draw in bugs and making them fall prey to the adhesive cartridge within.  You just slap a cartridge into the unit and plug it into a wall outlet, in ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

That’s odd. I’ve eaten lots of Milky Way bars at my girlfriend’s house…

…and I didn’t know the stuff was a laxative.

*rimshot* “Yes ladies and gentlemen I’ll be here all week!!”

Actually I speak of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is most visible in the Southern Hemisphere and which the humble dung beetle of sub-Saharan Africa uses for stellar navigation, scientist have recently discovered.

It’s like this: dung beetles roll around balls of… ummm, “Number Two”. They need to do it fast and in a straight line away from the source so that other natural predators of poo won’t swipe it first. During the nighttime hours the dung beetles use the Moon to guide them. But on nights when there is no lunar light, something else is required.

So these researchers conducted a series of experiments and found that in the absence of the Moon, the Milky ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Renfield had the right idea at least: if you’re gonna eat bugs, give it some variety!

Edward Archbold, age 32, is dead after eating “dozens of roaches and worms” in a pet store’s contest in Deerfield Beach, Florida.

From the article at The Smoking Gun…

Investigators reported that Archbold “wasn’t feeling well and began to regurgitate” shortly after the contest’s conclusion. “He had consumed dozens of roaches and worms,” a sheriff’s spokesman noted.

Archbold was pronounced dead after being transported to an area hospital. An autopsy was conducted, and the Broward County medical examiner is awaiting test results to determined Archbold’s cause of death.

The roach eating contest was part of the reptile store’s October 5 “Midnight Madness” sale. Contestants had four minutes to devour the most discoid roaches, which can grow up to three inches long. “Oh yeah, any vomiting is an automatic DQ,” the store cautioned in

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Miroslaw Swietek, a physical therapist in Jaroszow, Poland, has perfected the art of going out with a camera and flashlight in the early morning hours to capture stunning photographs of insects asleep and covered in drops of dew. That’s a dragonfly resting on a leaf that you see above.

Nothing else needs to be said: Swietek’s photos speaks for themselves. But if you want to see more of his handiwork, The Daily Mail in Great Britain has several other “sleeping insect” images that Swietek has made....

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Sounds like a Fifties B-movie, or maybe the genesis of a new Spider-Man villain: the country’s most contaminated nuclear waste site has provided building material for swarms of wasps building their nests and now the nests themselves are loaded with radioactive isotopes of cesium and cobalt. The Hanford nuclear reservation near Yakima, Washington is currently being cleaned up and workers are having to deal with the nests, which fortunately have already been abandoned by the wasps.

I must admit: ‘twould have been a pretty awesome sight to see the skies of Yakima filled with giant glowing wasps 😛...

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Chris Knight's avatar

This has been one of the most hyperactive days for crazy news. First it was the “Klingon convenience store robberies”, then the zombie street signs. Now this…

At some kind of pretentious pow-wow called TED, Bill Gates spoke to the audience about the efforts his foundation is undertaking to wipe out malaria. But being not content to deliver a simple speech, Gates engaged in some rather disturbing performance art… and unleashed a swarm of mosquitoes on the assembly of technocrats. “Not only poor people should experience this!”, Gates declared, as he released his airborne vector of blood-sucking insects at the crowd.

Doesn’t this come awfully close to being an act of biological terrorism? I mean, it’s not too far a stretch from this stupid stunt by Gates, to purposefully introducing mosquitoes laden with weapon-grade pathogens into a major metropolitan area.

And then again, some people will say ...

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