Insects :: Incredible and Inspirational

Note: There is likely an abundance of examples of amazing insects of which I am unaware.

Insects are, in my opinion, God’s choice to demonstrate His omnipotent artistic and engineering abilities. Dr. Joseph Mastropaolo refers to God’s creation as a demonstration of vast originality”. Dr. Mastropaolo points out that, “All reproduced organisms are never identical. Even identical twins are not identical.”

My presentation (Insects: Incredible and Inspirational) reveals some of the incomprehensible facts about insects that are not on this webpage. Also, the presentation, discloses the importance of insects to the survival of all forms of life (including humans) on the earth. Below, in no particular order, are facts (from real science*) that overwhelming support the statement that we should “Thank God for Insects”.

"Vast originality represents a vast intelligence, not evolution, because endless originality requires infinite wisdom for the most difficult of intellectual tasks". (Dr. Joseph Mastropaolo)

Someone asked me if there was any insect that was put here just to torment mankind. Although some insects (mosquitoes and roaches, for example) are great pests (dangers in the case of mosquitoes) they all have a part in the balance of creation. Roaches recycle and mosquitoes pollinate and are part of the food chain. My questioner asked about bedbugs.

I am not sure what bedbugs did in the original perfect creation that God called “good.” However, bedbugs have some benefits. Pedanius Dioscorides a famous Greek physician, botanist, pharmacologist and surgeon attributed at least 11 medicinal virtues to bed bugs! Such as applying bed bugs mixed with tortoise blood to wounds. She also wrote that In Chinese medicine, the 1789 book entitled “Recipes for Restoring Life” and the 1590 book “A system of Pharmacopoeia” called for the following bed bug concoctions: “Bedbugs used for the treatment of lip-turning furuncle. Pound seven bedbugs thoroughly with some cooked rice and apply the paste on the lesion. It will effect a quick cure.” “For Stinking and gangrenous ulcers, pound some bedbugs with Shui Lung Ku ( a mixture of oil and lime used for filling cracks in a boat), mix with sesame oil and apply locally. “In case of chronic ulceration with a gaping wound, apply locally some bedbugs, the heads of which should be removed.” Bugs in the System: Insects and Their Impact on HumanAffairs by May R. Berenbaum, 1996 by Addison Wesley, Cambridge, MA Note: Bedbugs are basicly harmless, but an infestation is irritating. They were under control until liberals banned certain insecticides.

The corresponding gene in mammals and humans, called Dlx, is known to be important in the sense of smell. The Dlx gene has also been implicated in autism and epilepsy. By studying how distal-less works in fruit fly neurons, the scientists also hope to expand understanding of Dlx.

Diamond Weevil's Rainbow Bling Really Is Diamond

"Materials scientists could look to these scales to inspire new materials, but we don't yet know how they are made," said biophysicist Bodo Wilts of the University of Groningen, co-author of a Dec. 21 study of the scales in Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/diamond-weevil-rainbow-scales/

REVIEW: Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love & Language from the Insect World

And therein lies the true fascination of insect studies: they have a lot to teach us. Cutting-edge biology—genomes and nerve cells and evolutionary paths—is most effectively studied with bugs.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/09/28/review-sex-on-six-legs-lessons-on-life-love-language-from-the-insect-world/

Here’s Looking at You, Katydid

Zuk describes ingenious experiments showing that some social insects can recognize individuals of their own species while others can recognize individual humans (a finding with implications for facial recognition software or for helping people overcome face blindness), and that insects aren’t just “milling masses of sameness.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/sex-on-six-legs-by-marlene-zuk-book-review.html

(I)n the future, insects could potentially be used to enhance the lives of humans. If bees can be taught to count, as they can be, it's possible that they can help us understand and help humans with learning disabilities. If a neurochemical abnormality in "amnesiac" fruit flies affects their memories, then there's hope that the same neurochemical in humans could be targeted to affectively treat our own memory disorders.

The bees' ability is exciting not only because it helps demolish that boundary of the backbone with regard to intelligence, but because being forced to design the experiments required to demonstrate counting in a creature so different from us makes us strip down our methods to their essentials. Finding out if your three-year-old can count is one thing. But how do you come up with a test for counting, or learning in general, when your subjects can't talk, walk on two legs, point to anything, or even get rewarded with something they want, the way most people can? If we can design ways to study animals with these limitations, maybe it will help us work more effectively to test humans with limited abilities, or even design computer programs that could substitute for the abilities that are lacking…Computerized facial recognition would be a boon to security and crime-fighting agencies, and studying the mechanisms behind the bees' ability might yield insights into how to create such programs.

Some humans themselves cannot distinguish among human faces, a condition known as prosopagnosia, or face blindness, thought to be due to a genetic defect; one estimate claims that 2.5 percent of the population suffers from some form of it…In severe cases, sufferers cannot recognize their own face in a photograph. It seems to be related to the inability to navigate in the environment, which means that bees might be particularly suitable for using as models for studying the disorder..

Being able to break down a behavior such as recovering after a distraction into components so fine that we can determine exactly which gene is responsible for which part of learning is possible only in insects, at least so far, but maybe someday we will be able to extend this kind of detailed understanding to our own learning difficulties. What's more, the prospect of altering or curing defects in memory with gene therapy in insects suggests that similar treatments may eventually substitute for drugs or surgery in humans, a solution that could have fewer side effects and be targeted more precisely than current approaches.

http://www.npr.org/books/titles/139555362/sex-on-six-legs-lessons-on-life-love-and-language-from-the-insect-world?tab=excerpt#excerpt

How the Fly Flies: Scientists Discover Gene Switch Responsible for Flight Muscle Formation

These results (understanding the gene that regulates fly flight muscles) could be medically important. "Human body muscles do not have Spalt and are hardly regulated by tension," Frank Schnorrer explains. "But the human cardiac muscle builds Spalt and the tension inside the ventricle influences the heartbeat intensity. Whether Spalt plays a role in heartbeat regulation, is not yet known and remains to be investigated."

What good are yucky caterpillars? The next three articles (and some below) answer the question. Karl

Researchers have been examining the diverse behaviours of caterpillars to find solutions for the new generation of search and rescue soft robots. Despite their extreme flexibility and adaptability, current soft-bodied robots are often limited by their slow speed, leading the researchers to turn to terrestrial soft-bodied animals for inspiration

Some caterpillars have the extraordinary ability to rapidly curl themselves into a wheel and propel themselves away from predators. This highly dynamic process, called ballistic rolling, is one of the fastest wheeling behaviours in nature.

Researchers from Tufts University, Massachusetts, saw this as an opportunity to design a robot that mimics this behaviour of caterpillars and to develop a better understanding of the mechanics behind ballistic rolling.

"Due to the increased speed and range, limbless crawling robots with ballistic rolling capability could be deployed more generally at a disaster site such as a tsunami aftermath. The robot can wheel to a debris field and wiggle into the danger for us."

Caterpillars Crawl Like None Other: Unique Means of Animal Locomotion Has Implications for Robotics, Human Biomechanics

(T)the Tufts-led team reported that the gut of the crawling tobacco hawkmoth caterpillar ( Manduca sexta) moves forward independently of and in advance of the surrounding body wall and legs, rather than moving along with them. Collaborating with Tufts were researchers from Virginia Tech and Argonne National Laboratory.

"Understanding this novel motion system may help efforts to design soft-bodied robots."

Biomimetic Technologies Project Will Create First Soft-Bodied Robots

A group of researchers at Tufts University has launched a multidisciplinary initiative focused on the science and engineering of a new class of robots that are completely soft-bodied. These devices will make possible advances in such far flung arenas as medicine and space exploration.

Barry Trimmer, professor of biology, and David Kaplan, professor of biomedical engineering, are co-directors of the Biomimetic Technologies for Soft-bodied Robots project…

These devices, he notes, will have direct applications in robotics, such as manufacturing, emergency search and retrieval, and repair and maintenance of equipment in space; in medical diagnosis and treatment, including endoscopy, remote surgery, and prostheses design; and in novel electronics such as soft circuits and power supplies.

The Keck grant will provide the team with specialized equipment for use with soft materials and biomechanics experiments, according to Trimmer, whose work with caterpillars provides insights on how to build the world's first soft-bodied robot. Trimmer, a neurobiologist, has been studying the nervous system and biology since 1990 through grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. His goal has been to better understand how the creatures can control their fluid movements using a simple brain and how they can move so flexibly without any joints. He hopes to adapt his caterpillar research to this new project using the expertise of Tufts engineers.

The new robots developed at Tufts will be continuously deformable and capable of collapsing and crumpling into small volumes. They will have capabilities that are not currently available in single machines including climbing textured surfaces and irregular objects, crawling along ropes and wires, or burrowing into complex confined spaces. "Soft-bodied robots could make many dangerous surgeries much safer and less painful," Trimmer adds. "They could also be used by NASA to repair space stations by reaching places that astronauts can't, perform more complicated tasks in industry that require flexibility of movement, help in hazardous environments like nuclear reactors and landmine detection, and squeeze more efficiently into tight spaces."

"It has the potential to develop a new area of science and engineering with an immense impact on human and environmental health as well as in establishing a new mode of conducting academic research across departmental boundaries.

Today, the brilliant gold- ( Chrysina aurigans) and silver-colored ( Chrysina limbata) beetles have given optics researchers new insights into the way biology can recreate the appearance of some of nature's most precious metals, which in turn may allow researchers to produce new materials based on the natural properties found in the beetles' coloring.

In these beetles, the cuticle, which is just 10 millionths of a meter deep, has some 70 separate layers of chitin—a nitrogen-containing complex sugar that creates the hard outer skeletons of insects …

"The detailed understanding of the mechanism used by the beetles to produce this metallic appearance opens the possibility to replicate the structure used to achieve it," Vargas says, "and thus produce materials that, for example, might look like gold or silver but are actually synthesized from organic media."
This potentially could lead to new products or consumer electronics that can perfectly mimic the appearance of precious metals. Other products could be developed for architectural applications that require coatings with a metallic appearance. Vargas notes that in the solar industry, for example, chirped multilayer reflectors could be used as back layers supporting the active or light-absorbing medium, to improve the absorption of the back-reflected light.

http://www.osa.org/About_Osa/Newsroom/News_Releases/Releases/04.2011/MetallicBeetles.aspx

Ants in a Labyrinth: A Statistical Mechanics Approach to the Division of Labour

Division of labour (DoL) is a fundamental organisational principle in human societies, within virtual and robotic swarms and at all levels of biological organisation. DoL reaches a pinnacle in the insect societies where the most widely used model is based on variation in response thresholds among individuals, and the assumption that individuals and stimuli are well-mixed. Here, we present a spatially explicit model of DoL. Our model is inspired by Pierre de Gennes' 'Ant in a Labyrinth' which laid the foundations of an entire new field in statistical mechanics.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0018416

In the first serious study of the physics of fire-ant rafts, researchers have described how the insects form floating, waterproof islands.

In nature, the rafts allow fire ants to survive epic rainstorms in their native Brazil. In the lab, they could help inspire designs for small, swarming robots that might someday be used to explore inaccessible areas or even clean up oil spills.

Fruit fly nervous system provides new solution to fundamental computer network problem

The fruit fly has evolved (NOTE: See BWAH HAH HAH HAAAA!--Karl) a method for arranging the tiny, hair-like structures it uses to feel and hear the world that's so efficient a team of scientists in Israel and at Carnegie Mellon University says it could be used to more effectively deploy wireless sensor networks and other distributed computing applications. With a minimum of communication and without advance knowledge of how they are connected with each other, the cells in the fly's developing nervous system manage to organize themselves so that a small number of cells serve as leaders that provide direct connections with every other nerve cell, said author Ziv Bar-Joseph, associate professor of machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University. The result, the researchers report in the Jan. 14 edition of the journal Science, is the same sort of scheme used to manage the distributed computer networks that perform such everyday tasks as searching the Web or controlling an airplane in flight. But the method used by the fly's nervous system to organize itself is much simpler and more robust than anything humans have concocted. They found it has qualities that make it particularly well suited for networks in which the number and position of the nodes is not completely certain. These include wireless sensor networks, such as environmental monitoring, where sensors are dispersed in a lake or waterway, or systems for controlling swarms of robots. The researchers created a computer algorithm based on the fly's approach and proved that it provides a fast solution to the MIS problem. (In the computing world, one step toward creating this distributive system is to find a small set of processors that can be used to rapidly communicate with the rest of the processors in the network — what graph theorists call a maximal independent set (MIS).)

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/01/13/fruit.fly.nervous.system.provides.new.solution.fundamental.
computer.network.problem

The technology is first being applied to banknotes but it also has many more practical applications, such as authenticating legal documents, retail merchandise, concert tickets, stock certificates, visas, passports, and pharmaceuticals. Landrock and Kaminska both continue their work as part of Nanotech’s scientific team. The company’s Nano-Optic Technology for enhanced Security (NOtES) product stems from an idea originating in the purest form of nature – insects using colorful markings to identify themselves. How this works is microscopic gratings composed of nanostructures interact with light to produce the shimmering iridescence seen on the Costa Rican morpho butterfly. The nanostructures act to reflect and refract light waves to produce the morpho’s signature blue wings and absorb other unwanted light. The highly advanced wing structures are the result of many millennia of evolution ( NOTE: See BWAH HAH HAH HAAAA!-- Karl) and only recently have Nanotech's scientists discovered how to reproduce these structures reliably. While others have talked about the possibility of re-creating it, Nanotech has made this a reality.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-butterfly-wings-anti-counterfeiting-technology.html

Ants are able to connect multiple sites in the shortest possible way, and in doing so, create efficient transport networks, according to a University of Sydney study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface . After two hours, the ants had created networks that closely resembled both efficient solutions. They frequently created difficult Steiner Networks, adding a central hub in the three-nest treatment and two central hubs in the four-nest treatment. Dr. Latty said: "It's interesting that the ants were able to create, on a blank slate, the mathematically shortest network between multiple points. Understanding how simple organisms like ants build efficient networks can inform the design of human transportation networks."

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-leader-less-ants-super-efficient-networks.html

Next generation of algorithms inspired by problem-solving ants

… University of Sydney researchers have shown that the humble ant is capable of solving difficult mathematical problems. These findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, deepen our understanding of how even simple animals can overcome complex and dynamic problems in nature, and will help computer scientists develop even better software to solve logistical problems and maximise efficiency in many human industries. Finding the most efficient path through a busy network is a common challenge faced by delivery drivers, telephone routers and engineers. To solve these optimisation problems using software, computer scientists have often sought inspiration from ant colonies… Discovering how ants are able to solve dynamic problems can provide new inspiration for optimisation algorithms, which in turn can lead to better problem-solving software and hence more efficiency for human industries."

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-algorithms-problem-solving-ants.html

In a recent paper published in Acta Astronautica, Aron Kisdi, a University of Southampton engineer, proposes an idea of utilizing a swarm of robots to search large areas of Mars and the caves which current robots have been unable to explore. The theory behind Kisdi’s robots incorporates the idea of quorum sensing, similar to that used by honey bees. Quorum sensing is a type of decision-making process used by groups to coordinate behavior and can be seen with honey bees when worker bees scout for new nest areas. Bees will leave the nest, gather information, and determine the best new location. Kisdi’s theory works on this same principle. A computer program has been created that functions in a similar way to the honey bees. This concept would be cheaper to build than the large rovers and allow for much more initial exploration, leaving the in-depth exploration for the rovers.

Beetle defence inspires University of Leeds research The deadly defence system of a tiny African beetle has inspired award-winning research into a new generation of technology. A team of scientists from the University of Leeds have developed a technology which is based on the beetle's spray mechanism. They say it may lead to improvements in the automotive and health industries. The project took five years to develop from first concept to prototype. It said it could inspire new types of nebulisers, needle-free injections, fire extinguishers and powerful fuel injection systems. The university's professor of thermodynamics and combustion theory, Andy McIntosh, who led the research team, said: "Nobody had studied the beetle from a physics and engineering perspective as we did, and we didn't appreciate how much we would learn from it."

Butterfly-Inspired Patch May Alert Soldiers to Brain Injury A color-changing patch modeled after the iridescent wings of butterflies could give soldiers a heads-up on the severity of injuries sustained on the battlefield. About the size of a binder hole in loose-leaf paper, the patch is made of 3D photonic crystals — tiny structures whose geometry can be manipulated to control the way it interacts with light. Like butterfly wings, these crystals get their color from light bouncing off of the nanoscale lattice. The patches could be worn on a soldier’s helmet to provide medical personnel with blast-exposure information to help them diagnose brain injury — a typical injury sustained in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are difficult to diagnose with today’s imaging technology , the researchers say. Yang also envisions uses for the patch beyond the battlefield. For example, it could also help gauge injury in football players and cyclists, or help diagnose damage to cell phones, computers , and other electronics.

http://www.livescience.com/9060-butterfly-inspired-patch-alert-soldiers-brain-injury.html

Firefly Glow: Scientists Develop a Hydrogen Peroxide Probe Based on Firefly Luciferin

A unique new probe based on luciferase, the enzyme that gives fireflies their glow, enables researchers to monitor hydrogen peroxide levels in mice and thereby track the progression of infectious diseases or cancerous tumors without harming the animals or even having to shave their fur. "The fact that in nature fireflies use the luciferin enzyme to communicate by light inspired us to adapt this same strategy for pre-clinical diagnostics," Chang says.

Flying insects' altitude control mechanisms are the focus of research being conducted in a Caltech laboratory under an Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant that may lead to technology that controls altitude in a variety of aircraft for the Air Force. "This work investigates sensory-motor feedback mechanisms in the insect brain that could inspire new approaches to flight stabilization and navigation in future insect-sized vehicles for the military," said Dr. Willard Larkin, AFOSR program manager who's supporting the work of lead researcher, Dr. Andrew Straw of Caltech. The research is being conducted in a laboratory where scientists are studying how flies use visual information to guide flight in natural environments. Straw noted that the flies don't have access to GPS or other radio signals that may also be unavailable in, for example, indoor environments. "However, with a tiny brain they are able to perform a variety of tasks such as finding food and mates despite changing light levels, wind gusts, wing damage, and so on," he said. "Flies rely heavily on vision." In their next phase, the scientists will study more sophisticated flight behaviors, asking if the fly creates a long-lasting neural representation of its visual surroundings or whether flight is only controlled by fast-acting reflexes.

The eyes of moths, which allow them to see well at night, are also covered with a water-repellent, antireflective coating that makes their eyes among the least reflective surfaces in nature and helps them hide from predators in the dark. Mimicking the moth eye's microstructure, a team of researchers in Japan has created a new film, suitable for mass-production, for covering solar cells that can cut down on the amount of reflected light and help capture more power from the sun. They estimate that the films would improve the annual efficiency of solar cells by 6 percent in Phoenix and by 5 percent in Tokyo. Yamada and his colleagues found the inspiration for this new technology a few years ago after they began looking for a broad-wavelength and omnidirectional antireflective structure in nature. The eyes of the moth were the best they found.

Prof. Amir Ayali of Tel Aviv University's Department of Zoology says the study of cockroaches has already inspired advanced robotics. Robots have long been based on these six-legged houseguests, whose nervous system is relatively straightforward and easy to study. But until now, walking machines based on the cockroach's movement have been influenced by outside observations and mainly imitate the insect's appearance, not its internal mechanics. He and his fellow researchers are delving deeper into the neurological functioning of the cockroach. This, he says, will give engineers the information they need to design robots with a more compact build and greater efficiency in terms of energy, time, robustness and rigidity. Such superior robotics can be even used to explore new terrain in outer space.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-common-cockroach-fine-tune-robots-future.html

Cockroaches are not the only insects that have captured the scientific imagination. Projects that highlight both the flight of the locust and the crawling of the soft-bodied caterpillar are also underway. Locusts are amazing flyers, Prof. Ayali notes. Scientists are studying both their aerodynamic build and their energy metabolism for long-distance flights. Recordings of their nervous systems and simultaneous video tracking to observe the movement of their wings during flight can be expected to lead to better technology for miniscule flying robots. As for caterpillars, engineers are trying to recreate in soft-bodied robots what they call the creatures' "endless degrees of freedom of movement." "Caterpillars are not confined by a stiff structure — they have no rigid skeletons," says Prof. Ayali. "This is exactly what makes them unique."

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-common-cockroach-fine-tune-robots-future.html

Australian scientists have developed a novel autopilot that guides aircraft through complex aerobatic manoeuvres by watching the horizon like a honey bee. Allowing aircraft to quickly sense which way is "up" by imitating how honeybees see, engineers and researchers at The Vision Centre, Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at The University of Queensland have made it possible for planes to guide themselves through extreme manoeuvres, including the loop, the barrel roll and the Immelmann turn, with speed, deftness and precision. “Our system, which takes 1000ths of a second to directly measure the position of the horizon, is much faster (than gyroscopes) at calculating position, and more accurate.” “We have created an autopilot that overcomes the errors generated from gyroscopes by imitating a biological system – the honeybees,” says Professor Mandyam Srinivasan. “Although we don't fully understand how these insects work, we know that they are good at stabilising themselves while making complicated flight manoeuvres by watching the horizon.”

THE way a dragonfly remains stable in flight is being mimicked to develop micro wind turbines that can withstand gale-force winds. Obata and his colleagues have used this finding to develop a low-cost model of a micro wind turbine whose 25-centimetre-long paper blades incorporate bumps like a dragonfly's wing.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927975.000-dragonfly-wings-inspire-micro-wind-turbine-design.html

What the Israelites were gathering was the cocoon of the parasitic beetle Trehala manna from which trehalose gets its name… (Note: This is debatable as I discuss in my presentation “Bible Bugs” but, if true, it still does not negate God’s miraculous care of the children of Israel for forty years. Karl) Trehalose is now being used as a preservative for antibodies, vaccines, enzymes and blood coagulation factors. In 1985, Bruce Roser discovered that if trehalose was added to solutions of proteins like these, which were then dehydrated, the products could be stored at temperatures above 40C and when rehydrated were still active. This offers an alternative way of preserving medical supplies in Third World countries, where 90 per cent of vaccines are wasted through lack of refrigeration facilities. "After years of storage at room temperature, trehalose-dried antibodies worked well. Even notoriously unstable enzymes, such as DNA-modifying and restriction enzymes, worked after being stored for a month at 70C," says Mr Roser. Another use could be to store blood. "Fresh blood has a shelf life of 42 days, after which it must be disposed of. Trehalose-dried blood could mean an end to the critical blood shortages that are suffered by the health service."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-beetle-cocoon-that-was-manna-for-moses-1306263.html

By looking at what electrical impulses can do in a cockroach brain, co-founder Greg Gage hopes he can show the next generation of neuroscientists what the brain is made of before they ever get to college.

"You could argue that there are slight differences between the neurons in cockroaches and in humans," he told AOL News. "But they are really similar: They both encode information the same way, and they both look the same way. So you can learn a lot about human physiology from studying these simple creatures."

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/15/roboroaches-students-prepare-to-control-roaches-with-remote-con/

"Parasitic wasps can also make the host weave a special cocoon-like structure to protect the wasp pupae [offspring] against heavy rain," Thomas added. While revelations about the hairworm's antics may inspire a new generation of sci-fi aliens, the study team says their findings may also help the development of new medical treatments. Biron says mind-altering human pathogens—such as those that cause rabies, sleeping sickness, and toxoplasmosis—may manipulate their victim in similar ways. He said further understanding of biochemical communication between a parasite and its host may "ultimately assist researchers in the search for new drugs and vaccines."

The insectlike robots that my colleagues and I at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory are creating are intended to perform rescue and reconnaissance operations with equal ease. Search-and-rescue operations, hazardous environment exploration and monitoring, planetary exploration, and building inspections are just a few of the potential applications for highly agile, insect-scale rescue robots.

The researchers also found a number of energy processes unique to the insect. Like air conditioners and refrigerators, the hornet has a well-developed heat pump system in its body which keeps it cooler than the outside temperature while it forages in the sun. This is something that's not easy to do, says Bergman. To determine whether if the solar collecting prowess of the hornet could be duplicated, the team imitated the structure of the hornet's body but had poor results in achieving the same high efficiency rates of energy collection. In the future, they plan to refine the model to see if this "bio-mimicry" can give clues to novel renewable energy solutions.

http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news-DS-Weird-Life-Hornet-Exoskeleton-Harvests-Solar-Power-010611.aspx

Being able to mimic these features at a larger scale would spur new advances in renewable energy and medicine. In a paper published in the October 10 issue of Nature Materials, a team of researchers from Penn State, the Naval Research Laboratory, and Harvard Medical School report on the development of an engineered thin film that mimics the natural abilities of water striding insects to walk on the surface of water, and for butterflies to shed water from their wings… the nanofilm is envisioned for use as a coating that would reduce drag on the hull of vessels and retard fouling. Potential industrial and energy related uses are as directional syringes and fluid diodes, pump-free digital fluidic devices, increased efficiency of thermal cooling for microchips, coatings for tires, and even in energy production from rain drops.

Inspired by the natural design of the Hercules beetle, researchers have created a film that changes colour according to the ambient humidity.In muggy weather, microscopic pockets in the insect's shell trap water, transforming the beetle (Dynastes hercules; pictured) from khaki-green to black.

http://feeds.nature.com/~r/nature/rss/current/~3/Dnr7TD223ro/467370c

When honeybees seek a new home, they choose the best site through a democratic process that humans might do well to emulate, says a Cornell biologist in his new book, "Honeybee Democracy" (Princeton University Press). Indeed, humans can learn much about democratic decision-making by looking at bees, Seeley said. If the members of a group have common interests, like the bees in a swarm, then the keys to good collective decision-making are to ensure the group contains diverse members and an impartial leader, and conducts open debates.

Because bees and mammals' circadian clocks are similarly organized, the question is whether the clocks of other animals also strongly depend on their social environments. The next step is to find just how social exchanges influence gene expressions. Further research into this question may have implications for individuals who suffer from disturbances in their behavioral, sleeping, and waking cycles. Research into how these rhythms may be altered and even stabilized might identify new treatment options.

A breakthrough finding in the common fruit fly could help explain how humans learn and remember -- or why some suffer from conditions that limit both capacities.

Of course, animal studies don't always offer a clear parallel to human health. But in this case, fruit fly genes have already been closely tied to those of human subjects. Indeed, scientists already know that fruit flies and people share a gene -- called dunce -- implicated in vulnerability to schizophrenia.

A better understanding of how learning and memory work could, scientists hope, improve insight into diseases like Alzheimer's, as well as learning disabilities.

http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk/article/fruit-fly-gene-could-unlock-the-mysteries-of-human-memory/19628803

Cockroaches could be more of a health benefit than a health hazard according to scientists from the University of Nottingham, who have discovered powerful antibiotic properties in the brains of cockroaches and locusts. Simon Lee, a postgraduate researcher who is presenting his work at the Society for General Microbiology's autumn meeting in Nottingham, describes how the group identified up to nine different molecules in the insect tissues that were toxic to bacteria. These substances could lead to novel treatments for multi-drug resistant bacterial infections. The group found that the tissues of the brain and nervous system of the insects were able to kill more than 90% of Meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Escherichia coli, without harming human cells. Studying the specific properties of the antibacterial molecules is currently underway in the laboratory. "We hope that these molecules could eventually be developed into treatments for E. coli and MRSA infections that are increasingly resistant to current drugs," explained Mr Lee. "Also, these new antibiotics could potentially provide alternatives to currently available drugs that may be effective but have serious and unwanted side effects," he said.

Engineers at Harvard University have created a millionth-scale automobile differential to govern the flight of minuscule aerial robots that could someday be used to probe environmental hazards, forest fires, and other places too perilous for people. To fly successfully through unpredictable environments, aerial microrobots -- like insects, nature's nimblest fliers -- have to negotiate conditions that change second-by-second. Insects usually accomplish this by flapping their wings in unison, a process whose kinematic and aerodynamic basis remains poorly understood. "We suspect that similar passive mechanisms exist in nature, in actual insects," Sreetharan says. "We take our inspiration from biology…"

X-ray Movies Reveal Insect Flight, Muscle Motion

Watching flies fly may not seem like high-tech science, but for researchers using the Western Hemisphere's most brilliant X-rays, located at the Advanced Photon Source at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, it not only helps explain how insects fly but also may someday aid in understanding human heart function. The authors note that the many similarities between insect muscle and other oscillatory muscles, including human cardiac muscle, mean that the research may be adaptable for other uses. “The data collected in these experiments," Irving said, "suggest new ways to study cardiac muscle that may allow us to explain how changes in its molecular machinery determine heart muscle performance. The fact that flight muscles are genetically mutable by the investigators raise the possibility they could serve as useful models of inherited human heart disease.”

The bombardier beetle is inspiring designers of engines, drug-delivery devices and fire extinguishers to improve spray technologies… This new technology is likely to be of interest to firms making drug-delivery systems as it could prove far more reliable than the mechanically-driven spring technology used in, for example, inhalers. It could also provide a much more energy-resourceful mechanism for fuel-injection in car engines and even lead to a new generation of fire extinguishers that can both produce either a fine mist or large droplets depending on what type of fire needs to be put out.

Bug With Bifocals Baffles Biologists The new article is an exploration of two eyes of the larvae of the sunburst diving beetle ( Thermonectus marmoratus). The two eyes have the bifocal lens, which the researchers have found in four of the larvae's 12 eyes, says researcher Elke K. Buschbeck, a UC associate professor of biology. "We're hoping this discovery could hold implications for humans, pending possible future research in biomedical engineering," Buschbeck says. "The discovery could also have uses for any imaging technology," adds Stowasser.

Genome Comparison of Ants Establishes New Model Species for Molecular Research

By comparing two species of ants, Shelley Berger, PhD, the Daniel S. Och University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues Danny Reinberg, PhD, New York University, and Juergen Liebig, PhD, Arizona State University, have established an important new avenue of research for epigenetics -- the study of how the expression or suppression of particular genes affects an organism's characteristics, development, and even behavior. "Many of the changes that underlie human disease are epigenetic in nature," Berger points out. "Using very sophisticated models like ants, the more we can understand how epigenetics might regulate these profound changes in physiology, the more we're going to understand about human development, aging and disease, and ultimately behavior."

Why the fly?

Some of the most remarkable discoveries in biology have come from studies of the humble fruit fly. In its natural habitats, this 3 mm-long fly is widely regarded as a pest by farmers, as it feeds on decaying vegetation and overripe fruit. Yet in the laboratory, it has developed into one of the most powerful tools available to scientists. While it has made its name in studies of genetics and in development, the fruit fly is used for the study of topics as diverse as alcoholism, learning and behaviour, ecology and evolution, human disease and the development of new pharmaceuticals. Nearly a century on from Drosophila's entrance on the world stage of biological research, this tiny fly has become probably the most well understood organism there is - and hundreds of scientists remain committed to unravelling its remaining secrets. "The fly has made a huge contribution to our understanding of biology," concludes Dr Martinez Arias, "and it will continue to do so in years to come - most importantly because it is an experimental system in which we can probe in exquisite detail the function of the proteins and macromolecular aggregates that shape and run human beings. The fly has taught us a great deal about our molecular make-up and now it will teach us how this make-up works."

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has the longest history of any model organism and has been widely used to study genetics and developmental biology.The relationship between fly and human genes is so close that the sequences of newly discovered human genes, including disease genes, can often be matched against their fly counterparts. This provides a lead towards the function of the human gene and could help in the development of effective drugs. The analysis of fly embryonic development has made a particularly important contribution to the understanding of developmental processes in humans. The genetic basis of many human birth defects is now known thanks to experiments on developmental mutants in the fly.

Insects in flight must somehow calculate and control their height above the ground, and researchers reporting online on August 19 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, have new insight into how fruit flies do it. The answer is simpler than expected. The researchers figured this out thanks to a sophisticated "gizmo" built by Andrew Straw, also of Caltech, that allowed them to track the movements of free-flying fruit flies using multiple digital cameras as they moved through a 3D virtual-reality space in which the researchers had complete control over what the insects saw. The researchers could even cancel out the effects of the flies' own movement on what they saw as they flew through space, allowing them to put the optic ground flow theory to the test in a rigorous way. The findings might have practical applications, he added. For example, they could come in handy for working out the ideal rules of operation for flying robots

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster does boast a powerful genetic system making it an ideal organism to test a cool new discovery: how an enzyme regulates body energy levels. Shutting off this molecular thermostat could result in a newfound cold tolerance that has multiple applications, including extending the 24-hour window donated organs now have for optimum use. “The goal is to make human cells survive on ice. Twenty-four hours on ice is pushing it and many people die waiting

http://news.rutgers.edu/medrel/news-releases/2010/08/rutgers-camden2019s-20100818

Bee sting therapy, which involves placing live bees on a patient's body at certain pressure points, dates back over 3000 years in China and was considered legal in 2007. It is similar to acupuncture in that it uses bees stingers instead of needles and the same principles, but the bees' toxin, which doctors say is a natural medicine, is essential, making the treatment like an injection. Doctors at the Kang Tai Bee Clinic, a traditional Chinese medical facility in northeast Beijing, say the therapy has proved effective in curing diseases such as rheumatism and arthritis, as well as a list of other ailments.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/world/bee-sting-therapy-all-the-buzz/story-e6frea8l-1225844127200

Despite their tiny brains, bees have remarkable navigation capabilities based on their vision. Now scientists have recreated a light-weight imaging system mimicking a honeybee's field of view, which could change the way we build mobile robots and small flying vehicles. As the researchers write, "Despite the discussed limitations of our model of the spatial resolution of the honeybees compound eyes, we are confident that it is useful for many purposes, e.g. for the simulation of bee-like agents in virtual environments and, in combination with presented imaging system, for testing bee-inspired visual navigation strategies on mobile robots."

Novel bee venom derivative forms a nanoparticle 'smart bomb' to target cancer cells

The next time you are stung by a bee, here's some consolation: a toxic protein in bee venom, when altered, significantly improves the effectiveness liposome-encapsulated drugs or dyes, such as those already used to treat or diagnose cancer. This research, described in the August 2010 print issue of the FASEB Journal ( http://www.fasebj.org ), shows how modified melittin may revolutionize treatments for cancer and perhaps other conditions, such as arthritis, cardiovascular disease, and serious infections.

Would you have ever guessed that this delicious food made by honeybees is actually one of mankind’s oldest-known medicines? Dating as far back as 5,000 years, honey has been successfully used to treat burns, coughs and ulcers. Recent Research shows that honey is far superior to antiseptics and antibiotics. Israeli researchers took honey to the test. They applied the sweet, sticky food twice a day to wounds of nine infants after two weeks of intravenous antibiotic treatment and daily antiseptic cleansing failed to heal them. Following just five days of honey treatment, the babies’ wounds improved significantly. After 16 more days, they were closed, clean, and sterile. In a Yemeni study, honey was shown to have a significant advantage over antiseptics used for infected surgical wounds. Fifty women whose wounds became infected were divided into two groups. One group was treated with honey, the other with antiseptics. The patients in the honey group recovered within 7 to 11 days, whereas the antiseptic group needed 12 to 27 days.

http://www.facebook.com/notes/andreas-moritz/honeythe-worlds-best-wound-healer/378973284706

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have used an ingredient of bee venom called melittin to shrink or slow the growth of tumors in mice.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203803904574433382922095534.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories#

Tougher than a bullet-proof vest yet synonymous with beauty and luxury, silk fibers are a masterpiece of nature whose remarkable properties have yet to be fully replicated in the laboratory. Thanks to their amazing mechanical properties as well as their looks, silk fibers have been important materials in textiles, medical sutures, and even armor for 5,000 years. Silk spun by spiders and silk worms combines high strength and extensibility. This one-two punch is unmatched by synthetics, even though silk is made from a relatively simple protein processed from water. But in recent years scientists have begun to unravel the secrets of silk. These discoveries have provided the basis for a new generation of applications for silk materials, from medical devices and drug delivery to electronics. The Science paper notes that the development of silk hydrogels, films, fibers and sponges is making possible advances in photonics and optics, nanotechnology, electronics, adhesives and microfluidics, as well as engineering of bone and ligaments. Because silk fiber formation does not rely on complex or toxic chemistries, such materials are biologically and environmentally friendly, even able to integrate with living systems. Down the silk road of the future, Kaplan and Omenetto believe applications could include degradable and flexible electronic displays for sensors that are biologically and environmentally compatible and implantable optical systems for diagnosis and treatment.

Imagine a material that is tougher than Kelvar or steel, yet remarkably flexible. It's something you can easily find in your attic or a lingerie store. It's as instantly recognizable today as it was to our early ancestors, yet we still aren't sure exactly how it's made. The miracle thread in question is natural silk, the ubiquitous fibers made by spiders and silkworms, which has been used throughout history for items ranging from stockings and parachutes to surgical sutures. Today scientists and engineers are creating a number of useful materials based on silk research. But many researchers believe these applications may just be the start of a whole web of useful new products and devices, if only we had a better understanding of just how these small creatures spin their precious thread. But no one knows how exactly the spiders and silk worms actually make silk. So why all of this focus on silk? Omenetto and Kaplan say that figuring out how to replicate and modify silk could lead to new breakthroughs in medicine, among other fields. Although silk is used in sutures today, the authors explain, it has to be coated in wax, which prevents the sutures from being gradually absorbed into the body. Modified silks could be wax free, Omenetto and Kaplan write, and could be used to safely administer drugs within the body or even create "degradable and flexible electronic displays for improved physiological recording" of a person's body.

Rows of tiny raised blowfly corneas may be the key to easy manufacturing of biomimetic surfaces, surfaces that mimic the properties of biological tissues, according to a team of Penn State researchers. "These eyes are perfect for making solar cells because they would collect more sunlight from a larger area rather than just light that falls directly on a flat surface," said Lakhtakia.

"Weird movements" in the abdomens of freely crawling caterpillars are making headlines in the fields of engineering… Using powerful x-rays generated by the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois, they were actually able to track the tracheae of the caterpillars. Their findings are already finding their way into designing maneuverable and orientation-independent soft material robots. The next step for these 'softbots' includes a diverse array of potential uses, such as shape-changing robots capable of engaging in search-and-rescue operations, space applications for which a 'gravity-agnostic' crawler would be highly valued, and medical applications in which a biocompatible, soft robot would reduce incidental tissue damage and discomfort.

Investigators have found that fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) males -- in which the activity of an Alzheimer’s disease protein is reduced by 50 percent -- show impairments in learning and memory as they age. What’s more, the researchers were able to prevent the age-related deficits by treating the flies with drugs such as lithium, or by genetic manipulations that reduced nerve-cell signaling. “The results from our study suggest a new route to explore for the treatment of familial Alzheimer’s disease and possibly the more common sporadic forms of Alzheimer’s disease,” notes Jongens. “They also reveal that proper presenilin activity levels are required to maintain normal cognitive capabilities during aging.”

Honeybees are vitally important to our economy through pollination of crops as well as production of honey, wax and royal jelly. Understanding bee biology is crucial to maintaining this industry in the face of problems like colony collapse disorder. Wolschin adds that bees also provide an important model system that can help us understand our own biology. For example, scientists have successfully reversed many signs of aging in worker bees. "That is pretty unique," says Wolschin. "You don't have other model organisms in aging research that can do that."

Insects may have tiny brains, but they can perform some seriously impressive feats of mental gymnastics. According to a growing number of studies, some insects can count, categorize objects, even recognize human faces — all with brains the size of pinheads. Despite many attempts to link the volume of an animal's brain with the depth of its intelligence, scientists now propose that it's the complexity of connections between brain cells that matters most. Studying those connections — a more manageable task in a little brain than in a big one — could help researchers understand how bigger brains, including those of humans, work. Figuring out how a relatively small number of cells work together to process complex concepts could also lead to "smarter" computers that do some of the same tasks.

(S)ince the fly is the animal model in which motion perception has been studied in most detail, the scientists were all the more determined to prize (sic) these secrets from the insect's brain. A further incentive is the fact that, albeit the number of nerve cells in the fly is comparatively small, they are highly specialized and process the image flow with great precision while the fly is in flight. Flies can therefore process a vast amount of information about proper motion and movement in their environment in real time - a feat that no computer, and certainly none the size of a fly's brain, can hope to match. So it's no wonder that deciphering this system is a worth-while undertaking.

http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2010/pressRelease20100708/

The crystal nanostructures that ultimately give butterflies their color are called gryoids. These are “mind-bendingly weird” three-dimensional curving structures that selectively scatter light, said Richard Prum… Prum over the years became fascinated with the properties of the colors on butterfly wings and enlisted researchers to help study them from the Departments of Chemical Engineering, Physics and Mechanical Engineering , as well as the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science… Photonic engineers are using gyroid shapes to try to create more efficient solar cells and, by mimicking nature, may be able to produce more efficient optical devices as well, Prum said.

Those who believe termites’ only function is to keep pest control companies in business may want to visit Eastgate Center in Harare, Zimbabwe. Besides being the country’s largest office building and shopping center, the mostly concrete skyscraper built in 2007 features a unique climate-control system inspired by the gigantic termite mounds found in the Zimbabwean bush. Beyond eliminating the need for a $3.5 million air-conditioning plant, the structure uses 10 percent less energy than a conventional building of comparable size.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/termites-and-climate-control-3503/

While the average human being probably doesn’t find the sight of a cockroach dashing through the kitchen at 1 a.m. anything short of disgusting, researchers at Oregon State think it’s inspiring. They are using the creature, a biological and engineering marvel, as “bioinspiration” for the world’s first legged robot that can run over rugged terrain. Schmitt thinks that the running robots could serve a valuable role in military operations, law enforcement or space exploration, and the technology could also be used to improve prosthetic limbs.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/cockroaches-and-running-robots-6983/

e Back in the 20th century, seatbelts and crash resistant materials were critical components of auto safety. Now engineers at Nissan Motor Company are implementing a bigger-picture approach by mimicking the world’s best collision avoiders, bumblebees. By integrating the oval-shaped personal space used by bees, Nissan’s “Safety Shield ” technology is being developed to allow vehicles to instantly change direction when a crash is imminent.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/bumblebees-for-crash-avoidance-3500/

Swarm robotics is offering innovative solutions to real-world problems by creating a new form of artificial intelligence based on insect-like instincts. Mirko Kovac, from EPFL's Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, is a young robotics engineer who has already made leaps forward in the field with his grasshopper-inspired jumping robot. He and his collaborators have created an innovative perching mechanism where the robot flies head first into the object, a tree for example -- without being destroyed -- and attaches to almost any type of surface using sharp prongs. It then detaches on command. The goal is to create robots that can travel in swarms over rough terrain to come to the aide of catastrophe victims. Jumping, gliding and perching allow for mobility over rocky territory or destroyed urban areas. This new form of AI takes its inspiration from the insect world, but is more as an abstract reflection on their instincts and design principles than merely imitating their morphology. "I am fascinated by the creative process," says Kovac, "and how it is possible to use the sophistication found in nature to create something completely new.

Since the early days of the 20th century and Thomas Hunt Morgan's famous "Fly Room" at Columbia University, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has been at the forefront of biological research. The powerful arsenal of experimental methods developed for this model organism is now being used to tackle one of the great scientific challenges of a new century: understanding the nervous system. The larval Drosophila brain has been a valuable model for investigating the role of stem cells in development.

Honey as an antibiotic: Scientists identify a secret ingredient in honey that kills bacteria

Sweet news for those looking for new antibiotics: A new research published in the July 2010 print edition of the FASEB Journal explains for the first time how honey kills bacteria. Specifically, the research shows that bees make a protein that they add to the honey, called defensin-1, which could one day be used to treat burns and skin infections and to develop new drugs that could combat antibiotic-resistant infections. "Honey or isolated honey-derived components might be of great value for prevention and treatment of infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria." "We've known for millennia that honey can be good for what ails us, but we haven't known how it works," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of the FASEB Journal…

Bees help to beat MRSA bugs

Bees could have a key role to play in urgently-needed new treatments to fight the virulent MRSA bug, according to research led at the University of Strathclyde. The scientists found that a substance known as beeglue or propolis, originating from beehives in the Pacific region, was active against MRSA, which causes potentially fatal infections, particularly in hospital patients. "Beeglue is also a natural remedy widely-used in folk medicine for a variety of ailments…

Natural honeycombs are an engineering feat, able to house and store honey, pollen and a brood whilst maintaining strength and integrity even through large temperature shifts. But whilst researchers have thoroughly examined the macrostructure of combs, few have studied their microstructure. The team argue that cellular solids created to truly mimic the microstructure of natural honeycombs would overcome many of the drawbacks of modern cellular materials and provide a remarkable degree of design flexibility.

http://news.engineering.cf.ac.uk/news/natural-honeycombs-are-an-engineering-feat.html

Scientists at Johns Hopkins report using a laser beam to activate a protein that makes a cluster of fruit fly cells act like a school of fish turning in social unison, following the lead of the one stimulated with light.

The study of this unexpected cell movement, reported May 16 in Nature Cell Biology , holds potential importance for understanding embryonic development, wound healing and tumor metastasis — the process by which tumor cells acquire the ability to invade surrounding tissues and migrate long distances to colonize lymph nodes, bones and other distant organs.

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2010/06_17_10.html

For the first time, researchers from the University's Discipline of Physiology have worked out how insects judge the speed of moving objects. "It appears they take into account different light patterns in nature, such as a foggy morning or a sunny day, and their brain cells adapt accordingly. "This mechanism in their brain enables them to distinguish moving objects in a wide variety of natural settings. It also highlights the fact that single neurons can exhibit extremely complex behaviour." His team is collaborating with industry to develop artificial eyes in robots, mimicking human and insect vision.

In order to get closer to making these photonic crystals, the three Penn State scientists devised a process that allowed them to replicate butterfly wings.

If only a robot could be more like a cockroach "We see in these animals an ability to adapt to difficult and changing terrain and conditions," he continued. "What we'd like to see is a robotic brain that can make these kinds of decisions." He believes the research could help lead to better robots to search collapsed mines and buildings, to pilot drones, and for space exploration, where signals from Earth to a far off planet takes minutes, hours or longer.

"Michigan is focusing on horned beetles, while MIT and Boyce Thompson are working with large moths," said Darpa spokesman Jan Walker. "The program's first major milestone is scheduled for January 2008, when the contractors have to demonstrate controlled, tethered flight of the insect." Insect swarms with various sorts of different embedded MEMS sensors--video cameras, audio microphones, chemical sniffers and more--could then penetrate enemy territory in swarms to perform reconnaissance missions impossible or too dangerous for soldiers. "For instance, with genetic engineering Darpa could replace the sex attractant receptor on the moth antennae with receptors for other things, like explosives, drugs or toxins," said Easton.

Nanocoating Makes Perfectly Non-Reflecting Displays

A new nanocoating ensures a perfectly non-reflecting view on displays and through eyeglasses. The necessary surface structure is applied to the polymeric parts during manufacture, obviating the need for a separate process step. The hybrid coating has further advantages: the components are scratch-proof and easy to clean. Moths are the prototype. As they search for food at dusk they have to hide from predators. Their presence must not be betrayed by reflections on their facet eyes. On other insects these eyes shimmer, but the moth's eyes are perfectly non-reflecting. Tiny protuberances smaller than the wavelength of light form a periodic structure on the surface. This nanostructure creates a gentle transition between the refractive indices of the air and the cornea. As a result, the reflection of light is reduced and the moth remains undetected. Working in cooperation with industrial partners, the research scientists now aim to develop components for the auto industry, for example, which are not only attractive to look at but also hard-wearing and easy to clean.

From butterflies' wings to bank notes -- how nature's colors could cut bank fraud

Scientists have discovered a way of mimicking the stunningly bright and beautiful colours found on the wings of tropical butterflies. The findings could have important applications in the security printing industry, helping to make bank notes and credit cards harder to forge. The striking iridescent colours displayed on beetles, butterflies and other insects have long fascinated both physicists and biologists, but mimicking nature's most colourful, eye-catching surfaces has proved elusive. According to Kolle: "We have unlocked one of nature's secrets and combined this knowledge with state-of-the-art nanofabrication to mimic the intricate optical designs found in nature." As well as helping scientists gain a deeper understanding of the physics behind these butterflies' colours, being able to mimic them has promising applications in security printing. "These artificial structures could be used to encrypt information in optical signatures on banknotes or other valuable items to protect them against forgery. We still need to refine our system but in future we could see structures based on butterflies wings shining from a £10 note or even our passports," he says.

Galactosemia is a metabolic disease resulting from an inherited defect that prevents the proper metabolism of galactose, a sugar commonly found in dairy products, like milk. Exposure of affected people to galactose, can damage most of their organ systems and can be fatal. The ability to study the disease is limited by a lack of animal models. New information suggests that similarities between humans and flies may provide scientists with useful clues.

Using motion analysis software, the researchers were able to monitor the ornithopter's aerodynamic performance, showing that flight can be realised with simple flapping motions without feedback control, a model which can be applied to future aerodynamic systems.

Edible insects may be closer now than ever before to acceptance in the western world as a resource that should be considered in trying to meet the world's present and future food needs. Insects have played an important part in the history of human nutrition in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Bodenheimer, 1951). They were an equally important resource for the Indians of western North America, who, like other indigenous groups, expended much organization and effort in harvesting them (Sutton, 1988). Hundreds of species have been used as human food.

These tasty critters are full of protein, which makes them a very healthy snack. This means that one day astronauts may be taking a bucket of bugs into space. It would be very hard for astronauts to bring a cow aboard or grow plants. But a colony of worms would be ideal for space travel. They are easily stored, and can reproduce during the flight.

He believes the research could help lead to better robots to search collapsed mines and buildings, to pilot drones, and for space exploration, where signals from Earth to a far off planet takes minutes, hours or longer. So, to make a robot that can turn, back up, climb over or burrow under and obstacle without the guidance of a far off rescue worker using computer controls, what could be better than mimicking an insect's comparatively simple brain? Easier said than done. To get these first recordings of neural activity, Research Assistant Allan Pollack spent more than a year perfecting techniques to perform brain surgery in an area the size of the head of a pin.

Flies Don't Think Much Of Turning

Using a high speed camera filming at 8,000 frames per second and new image tracking software, Bergou discovered that flies rely less on their brains than previously thought and more on the clever design of their wings. This design principle behind fly U-turns -- wings that are self-adjusting and do the work of turning by themselves -- has attracted the interest of researchers like Robert Wood of Harvard University, who are developing the latest generation of tiny manmade flying machines that buzz not with life but with electricity.

While bees are extremely important to our ecology, they are becoming important to our defense against biological and other weapons, as the bee’s discreet sense of smell, equivalent to a dog’s, is being exploited as a much cheaper way to detect various odors in the environment. As far back as 1999, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Controlled Biological Systems Program funded a bee-training program to detect buried landmines, so that many thousands of acres of the world’s land could be productively farmed without encountering landmines the ugly way. A bee’s natural instinct is to extend its proboscis when it encounters a desirable odor, anticipating the taste of a flower, let’s say. But the bees used in the 1999 DARPA experiment were trained, via classical Pavlovian conditioning, to respond to the odor of TNT instead. Their reward when they responded with a Proboscis Extension Reflex (PER), was a taste of sweet syrup. Then, trainers attached small diodes onto the backs of TNT-trained bees and used handheld radar tracking devices to chart where the bees went. In 2010, bee training in the fields of defense and security, medicine, food, and building industries is big business. Bee training is essentially the same as it was in 1999, but the results are attained with more sophisticated and less expensive technology.

CSIRO scientist Dr Tara Sutherland and her team have achieved another important milestone in the international quest to artificially produce insect silk. They have hand-drawn fine threads of honeybee silk from a 'soup' of silk proteins that they had produced transgenically. These threads were as strong as threads drawn from the honeybee silk gland, a significant step towards development of coiled coil silk biomaterials. "It means that we can now seriously consider the uses to which these biomimetic materials can be put," Dr Sutherland said. "We had previously identified the honeybee silk genes and knew that that the silk was encoded by four small non-repetitive genes -- a much simpler arrangement which made them excellent candidates for transgenic silk production." Possible practical uses for these silks would be tough, lightweight textiles, high-strength applications such as advanced composites for use in aviation and marine environments, and medical applications such as sutures, artificial tendons and ligaments.

Biologists at New York University and the University of Würzburg have identified, in greater detail, how the retina's cellular hardware is used in color preference. The findings, published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), enhance our understanding of how eyes and the brain process color. Conducted by biologists at New York University's Center for Developmental Genetics and the Department of Genetics and Neurobiology at the University of Würzburg in Germany, the research specifically examined the photoreceptor cells in the retinas of the fruit fly Drosophila. Drosophila is a powerful model for studying the color vision process as it is amenable to very specific genetic manipulations, allowing researchers to analyze how its visual system functions when different elements of its retina are affected. "This simple insect can achieve sophisticated color discrimination and detect a broader spectrum of colors than we can, especially in the UV," said NYU biologist Claude Desplan, one of the study's authors. "It is a great model system to understand how the retina and the brain process visual information. The research was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

'Biological Clock' Could Be a Key to Better Health, Longer Life

If you aren't getting a good, consistent and regular night's sleep, a new study suggests it could reduce your ability to handle oxidative stress, cause impacts to your health, increase motor and neurological deterioration, speed aging and ultimately cut short your life. That is, if your "biological clock" genes work the same way as those of a fruit fly. And they probably do.

A protein discovered in fruit fly eyes has brought a Johns Hopkins team closer to understanding how the human heart and other organs automatically "right size" themselves, a piece of information that may hold clues to controlling cancer. Pan's team identified the gene they named Hippo in 2003, showing that an abnormal copy of it led to an unusually large eye in a developing fruit fly. The Johns Hopkins and Florida State teams discovered Kibra by studying ovarian cells from adult flies and by using a gene-controlling technique called RNA interference (RNAi) to systematically turn off each of the approximately 14,000 genes in the fly genome, one at a time, in cultured fly cells. Further studies on human cells measured the activity of the Hippo pathway while manipulating human Kibra and showed that like its fruit fly counterpart, human Kibra acts as a tumor suppressor protein that regulates Hippo signaling.

Spiders and silkworms are masters of materials science, but scientists are finally catching up. Silks are among the toughest materials known, stronger and less brittle, pound for pound, than steel. Now scientists at MIT have unraveled some of their deepest secrets in research that could lead the way to the creation of synthetic materials that duplicate, or even exceed, the extraordinary properties of natural silk. The long-term impact of this research, Buehler says, will be the development of a new material design paradigm that enables the creation of highly functional materials out of abundant, inexpensive materials. This would be a departure from the current approach, where strong bonds, expensive constituents, and energy intensive processing (at high temperatures) are used to obtain high-performance materials.

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, have identified a protein called Sestrin that serves as a natural inhibitor of aging and age-related pathologies in fruit flies. They also showed that Sestrin, whose structure and biochemical function are conserved between flies and humans, is needed for regulation of a signaling pathway that is the central controller of aging and metabolism. "Strikingly, the pathologies caused by the Sestrin deficiency included accumulation of triglycerides, cardiac arrhythmia and muscle degeneration that occurred in rather young flies," said Karin. "These pathologies are amazingly similar to the major disorders of overweight, heart failure and muscle loss that accompany aging in humans." "Maybe one day we will be able to use Sestrin analogs to prevent much of the tissue failure associated with aging, as well as treat a number of degenerative diseases, whose incidence goes up with old age, including sarcopenia and Alzheimer's disease," said Karin.

Staying the course: fruit flies employ stabilizer reflex to recover from midflight stumbles

Learning from the biological world could help the mechanical, as the research on insect flight could help engineers simplify the design of maneuverable and stable flapping-wing aircraft.

Like silkworm moths, butterflies and spiders, caddisfly larvae spin silk, but they do so underwater instead on dry land. Now, University of Utah researchers have discovered why the fly's silk is sticky when wet and how that may make it valuable as an adhesive tape during surgery. Their adhesive is able to bond to a wide range of surfaces underwater: soft and hard, organic and inorganic. If we could copy this adhesive it would be useful on a wide range of tissue types."

A device inspired by a tiny purple beetle that feeds on palm leaves could one day allow humans to walk up walls like the comic book hero Spiderman. The researchers, whose work was funded by the US military, hope to use their invention to develop gloves and shoes that will allow the wearer to climb up even the blankest of walls. The technology was inspired by the Palmetto tortoise beetle from Florida, which uses surface tension from tiny droplets of oil secreted by glands at the top of its legs to clamp its shell down onto a leaf when it is under attack from ants. Once attached, the beetle is capable of holding loads 100 times its own weight. Their research has been funded by Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is the research and development wing for the US military. Such a device could prove useful for special forces looking to scale buildings quickly as the ability to reverse the grip of the device makes it easy to release limbs independently. With such small power demands, the device could easily be incorporated into clothing, according to Professor Steen. "At the moment we don't know what DARPA envisages the end use of our research will be, but having the ability to stick and release a load easily could have a number of uses."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7280275/Device-could-create-real-life-Spiderman.html

Aphids are not just pests, Gerardo says. They are also potential resources for questions related to human health. "Humans need beneficial bacteria for proper digestion in the gut and to protect against cavities in the teeth," she says. "Some people feel sick when they take antibiotics because the drug kills off all the beneficial bacteria. If we can study the process of how to keep beneficial bacteria while clearing out harmful bacteria across several organisms, including aphids, we might be able to understand it better."

"Flies are a good model in which to study and test new therapies for retinal degeneration," says Montell. "This research opens the door to using flies as a way to look for drugs to reduce human retinal degeneration due to defects in the visual cycle."

"Prior work on fruit flies has led to many important breakthroughs in biology. For example, the fact that genes reside on chromosomes and our understanding of how genes control development both emerged from experiments on fruit flies," Maimon says. "New research hopes to use these tiny insects to help determine how neurons give rise to complex behavior.”

Tiny fruit fly could offer big clues in fight against obesity, researcher says

The tiny tongue of a fruit fly could provide big answers to questions about human eating habits, possibly even leading to new ways to treat obesity, according to a study from a team of Texas A&M University researchers. Obesity is one of the major threats to health worldwide, especially in the United States, where the number of obese persons has skyrocketed in recent years.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-02/tau-tff021110.php

Bees recognize human faces using feature configuration

What is really amazing is that an insect with a microdot-sized brain can handle this type of image analysis when we have entire regions of brain dedicated to the problem. Giurfa explains that if we want to design automatic facial recognition systems, we could learn a lot by using the bees' approach to face recognition.

Scientists trying to understand how cancer cells invade healthy tissue have used the fruit fly's metamorphosis from maggot to flying insect as a guide to identify a key molecular signal that may be involved in both processes. At a glance, the change from crawling maggot to flittering fruit fly seems a long way from the search for new treatments or cures for human health. But there are good reasons scientists study the fruit fly. Many processes in fruit flies are very similar to those in people, only simpler and thus much more approachable to the probing eyes of scientists. In the case of cancer, the action in fruit flies allows scientists to take a close look at molecular signals that may be involved in both development and disease. "The principles that govern how organs are made in a fruit fly and in a person are more similar than most people ever believed," said Dirk Bohmann, Ph.D., professor of Biomedical Genetics and the leader of the team. "Many of the same signals that control the growth and organization of fruit fly organs control similar processes in people. If we can understand such signaling in fruit flies, it will help us understand what is happening in people, to try to prevent or stop diseases like cancer…

The research showed that Drosophila produces a pheromone — a chemical messenger — that promotes aggression , and directly linked it to specific neurons in the fly's antenna. Anderson and his colleagues believe that the findings ultimately may be relevant to the relationship between the neurotransmitter dopamine and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

http://feeds.livescience.com/~r/livescience/animaldomain/~3/5zk0EH2C444/fly-agression-bts-100115.html

Why bees always have a safe landing-- Graceful and acrobatic motions would be well suited to aircraft design

Now, for the first time, scientists have figured out how these insects maneuver themselves onto all sorts of surfaces, from right side up to upside-down. The bees' technique, which depends mostly on eyesight, may help engineers design a new generation of automated aircraft that would be undetectable to radar or sonar systems and would make perfectly gentle landings, even in outer space. "This is something an engineer would not think of while sitting in an armchair and thinking about how to land an aircraft," said Mandyam Srinivasan, a neuroscientist… "This is something we wouldn't have thought of if we hadn't watched bees do their landings." It's a graceful and acrobatic motion that would be well suited to aircraft design, Srinivasan said. Current landing systems use radiation-emitting systems, which are detectable and often undesirable for military applications. "It's a beautiful way of landing using biological autopilot," he said of the bees. "We would like to make spacecraft that do smooth, flawless dockings.

Scientists in Vienna have developed a new technique for producing vaccines for H1N1, 'swine flu', based on insect cells. The research, published today in the Biotechnology Journal, reveals how influenza vaccines can be produced faster than through the traditional method of egg-based production, revealing a new strategy for the fight against influenza pandemics. Using insect cells also bypasses the disadvantages of egg-based production, such as limited production capacity, allergic reactions to egg proteins and biosafety issues.

The sight of a cockroach scurrying for cover may be nauseating, but the insect is also a biological and engineering marvel, and is providing researchers at Oregon State University with what they call “bioinspiration” in a quest to build the world’s first legged robot that is capable of running effortlessly over rough terrain. If successful, Schmitt said, running robots could serve valuable roles in difficult jobs, such as military operations, law enforcement or space exploration. Related technology might also be applied to improve the function of prosthetic limbs for amputees, or serve other needs.

http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2009/dec/cockroaches-offer-inspiration-running-robots

When given the chance to consume alcohol at will, fruit flies behave in ways that look an awful lot like human alcoholism. "Previously, we studied simple behaviors, such as intoxication and development of tolerance," Heberlein said. "This work opens the door for us to study much more complex alcohol-related behaviors, such as 'use despite adverse consequences' and 'relapse.'"

Almost a century after it was discovered in fruit flies with notches in their wings, the Notch signalling pathway may come to play an important role in the recovery from heart attacks.

http://www.embl.de/aboutus/communication_outreach/media_relations/2009/091210_Monterotondo/index.html

Studies with fruit flies have shown that the specialized nerve cells called neurons can rebuild themselves after injury. These results, potentially relevant to research efforts to improve the treatment of patients with traumatic nerve damage or neurodegenerative disease, were presented at the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) 49th Annual Meeting, Dec. 5-9, 2009 in San Diego.

Fruit flies may seem like unlikely heroes in the battle against drug abuse, but new research suggests that these insects — already used to study dozens of human disease — could claim that role. Scientists are reporting that fruit flies can be used as a simpler and more convenient animal model for studying the effects of cocaine and other drugs of abuse on the brain. Their study appears online in ACS Chemical Neuroscience, a new monthly journal.

Latest epidemic? High cholesterol, obesity in fruit flies ( Tiny insects can shed light on human regulatory processes

How do fruit flies get high cholesterol and become obese? The same way as people do – by eating a diet that's too rich in fats. More importantly, according to two new studies led by a University of Utah human geneticist, fruit flies use the same molecular mechanisms as humans to help maintain proper balances of cholesterol and a key form of stored fat that contributes to obesity. The findings mean that as researchers try to learn more about the genetic and biological processes through which people regulate cholesterol and fat metabolism, the humble fruit fly, also called Drosophila, can teach humans much about themselves. "Not a lot is known about these regulatory mechanisms in people," says Carl S. Thummel, Ph.D., professor of human genetics at the U of U School of Medicine and senior author on the two studies. "But we can learn a lot by studying metabolic control in fruit flies and apply what we learn to humans."

Intriguingly, the hyper-reactivity to environmental stimuli seen in the flies with the DopR mutation is similar to some of the symptoms seen in humans with ADHD, which has also been linked to dopamine. The genetic basis of emotional behavior is significant because it is believed that abnormalities in such behaviors may underlie psychiatric disorders. Further, it is important to note that Drosophila shares most of its genes in common with humans and also has many of the same brain chemicals that have been implicated in psychiatric disorders, including dopamine.

Butterfly proboscis to sip cells

A butterfly's proboscis looks like a straw -- long, slender, and used for sipping -- but it works more like a paper towel, according to Konstantin Kornev of Clemson University. He hopes to borrow the tricks of this piece of insect anatomy to make small probes that can sample the fluid inside of cells.

Nanotechnology biomimics insects

Researchers in Australia and the UK are flying the idea that insect wings could act as a model for making self-cleaning, frictionless, and superhydrophobic materials.

Insects are incredible nanotechnologists…For instance, some wings are superhydrophobic, due to a clever combination of natural chemistry and their detailed structure at the nanoscopic scale. This means that the wing cannot become wet, the tiniest droplet of water is instantly repelled. Likewise, other insect wing surfaces are almost frictionless, so that any tiny dust particles that might stick are sloughed away with minimal force.

Now(scientists) are hoping to mimic these properties by using the surface of insect wings as a template for producing plastics, or polymeric, materials with novel surface properties. If they are successful, they might then develop self-cleaning, water-resistant, and friction-free coatings for a wide range of machine components, construction materials, and other applications, including nano- and micro-electromechanical systems (NEMS and MEMS) and lab-on-a-chip devices for medical diagnostics and environmental sensing.

The simulator could be a big step forward for the many teams around the world who are designing robotic insects, mainly for military purposes, though Thomas expects them to have a massive role as toys, too. "Imagine sitting in your living room doing aerial combat with radio-controlled dragonflies. Everybody would love that," he says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327275.600-locust-flight-simulator-helps-robot-insects-evolve.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Secrets Of Insect Flight Revealed: Modeling The Aerodynamic Secrets Of One Of Nature's Most Efficient Flyers

Researchers are one step closer to creating a micro-aircraft that flies with the manoeuvrability and energy efficiency of an insect after decoding the aerodynamic secrets of insect flight. The breakthrough result, published in the journal Science this week, means engineers understand for the first time the aerodynamic secrets of one of Nature's most efficient flyers – information vital to the creation of miniature robot flyers for use in situations such as search and rescue, military applications and inspecting hazardous environments.

Martín-Palma points out that the structures resulting from replicating the biotemplate of butterfly wings could be used to make various optically active structures, such as optical diffusers or coverings that maximise solar cell light absorption, or other types of devices. " The compound eyes of certain insects are sound candidates for a large number of applications as they provide great angular vision. "The development of miniature cameras and optical sensors based on these organs would make it possible for them to be installed in small spaces in cars, mobile telephones and displays, apart from having uses in areas such as medicine (the development of endoscopes) and security (surveillance)", Martín-Palma says.

Butterfly wings may help scientists better understand photonic crystals

Lakhtakia and his colleagues believe that there are several applications that could be enhanced through research of these butterfly wing replicas. “This could lead to smaller electronic circuitry, since it could lead to ultraviolet optics to fabricate semiconductor devices.” He also sees uses at infrared wavelengths. “There aren’t many materials that are useful with infrared, but this could help. Some of the applications include sensors for the military and police.” He and his colleagues are most interested in the photonic capabilities, as well as the possibility that studying butterfly wings could lead to better solar energy concentrators.

Drunken fruit flies help scientists find potential drug target for alcoholism

This discovery, published in the October 2009 print issue of the journal GENETICS, provides a crucial explanation of why some people seem to tolerate alcohol better than others, as well as a potential target for drugs aimed at preventing or eliminating alcoholism. In addition, this discovery sheds new light on many of the negative side effects of drinking, such as liver damage.

Cyborg beetles may serve as useful models for "micro air vehicles", the Berkeley team say in their findings. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which funds their research, has been pursuing a Nano Air Vehicle (NAV). "It's actually quite useful to find out about the dynamics of flight and the biomechanics of the insect," says Professor Starkey.

"Flies have the ability to learn, but the circuits that instruct memory formation were unknown,"… the simple brain of a fly likely can tell us much about how more complex brains work.

Flies fed an "anti-Atkins" low protein diet live longer because their mitochondria function better. The research, done at the Buck Institute for Age Research, shows that the molecular mechanisms responsible for the lifespan extension in the flies have important implications for human aging and diseases such as obesity, diabetes and cancer. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/bifa-lp092409.php

In the never-ending battle to protect computer networks from intruders, security experts are deploying a new defense modeled after one of nature’s hardiest creatures — the ant.

Scientists from Imperial College London have described the connections between two key sets of nerve cells in a fly's brain that help it process what it sees and fast-track that information to its muscles. This helps it stay agile and respond quickly to its environment while on the move. The study, published in the journal PLoS Biology, is an important step towards understanding how nervous systems operate, and could help us improve our knowledge of more complex animals. It could also be used to improve technical control systems in autonomous air vehicles - robots that stay stable in the air without crashing and with no need for remote control.

Fireflies have long been used by scientists for health related research and to answer basic biological questions. Other recent research has used chemicals from fireflies to test bacteria for antibiotic resistance, giving hope for human health in the battle against drug-resistant tuberculosis in developing countries.

http://news.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-2/Tufts-University-biologists-unveil-more-mysteries-of-fireflies-flash-5077-1/

In a move that could signal an end to bad backs, writing in last week's edition of Nature a team of Australian scientists led by the Queensland researcher Dr Chris Elvin have successfully copied the insect gene that enables the wings of a bee to flap at least 500 million times during its life, and has catapulted "frog hoppers" into the Guinness Book of Records as the world's greatest jumpers. Resilin is essentially Nature's elastic band. It's extremely tough, it can store energy like a spring, which is how blood-hungry fleas bounce from one tasty host to another, and it can expand and contract very fast withour wearing out. Until now it has been impossible to produce this substance artificially…

Scientists in America have been training 'sniffer wasps' to sniff out explosives, dead bodies and mouldy corn…Maybe in future airports will be hiring sniffer wasps instead of sniffer dogs.

Insects such as fruit flies (Drosophila), Greater Wax Moths (Galleria) and a type of Hawkmoth (Manduca) can be used to test the efficacy of new antimicrobial drugs or to judge how virulent fungal pathogens are. It is now routine practice to use insect larvae to perform initial testing of new drugs and then to use mice for confirmation tests. As well as reducing by up to 90% the number of mice required, this method of testing is quicker as tests with insects yield results in 48 hours whereas tests with mice usually take 4-6 weeks.

"Manuka and other honeys have been known to have wound healing and anti-bacterial properties for some time," said Dr Jenkins, "But the way in which they act is still not known. If we can discover exactly how manuka honey inhibits MRSA it could be used more frequently as a first-line treatment for infections with bacteria that are resistant to many currently available antibiotics". (Manuka Honey is produced by bees that gather nectar from the flowers of the Manuka bush. Karl)

There is a growing need for biocompatible photonic components for biomedical applications – from in vivo glucose monitoring to detecting harmful viruses or the telltale markers of Alzheimer's. Optical waveguides are of particular interest because of their ability to manipulate and transport light in a controlled manner in a variety of configurations. In an article featured on the cover of Advanced Materials, researchers at Tufts University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated a new method for fabricating silk-based optical waveguides that are biocompatible, biodegradable and can be readily functionalized with active molecules. The Tufts-UIUC team successfully demonstrated light guiding through this new class of waveguides created by direct ink writing using Bombyx mori (silk worm) silk fibroin inks.

As recently as last year (2008), scientists discovered that the tiny heart of a fruit fly known as Drosophila can be used as an excellent model system to study many of the genes associated with human heart disease. Use of the common honey bee as a model is allowing scientists to explore the factors responsible for conditions such as progeria, a rare genetic disorder in which the ageing process is accelerated. Importantly, the potential application of these intriguing insect-sourced factors and processes could have an impact on the ageing process for us all.

Police release a swarm of robot-moths to sniff out a distant drug stash. Rescue robot-bees dodge through earthquake rubble to find survivors. These may sound like science-fiction scenarios, but they are the visions of Japanese scientists who hope to understand and then rebuild the brains of insects and program them for specific tasks. Such modifications could pave the way to creating a robo-bug which could in future sense illegal drugs several kilometres away, as well as landmines, people buried under rubble, or toxic gas, the professor said.

With more than 1,500 eyes, not much escapes the fruit fly's sight. Now, a new research report in the journal GENETICS describes how researchers from the United States and Ireland used those eyes to "see" new proteins necessary for memory. In addition to shedding light on this critical neurological process, the study also provides information on a form of mental retardation in humans…this area of research holds tremendous promise for millions or people with neurological diseases and disabilities, as well as for those with learning disorders."

Volvo Thinks Locusts Can Make Us Safer Drivers

Volvo is determined to build an injury-proof car by 2020, and the engineers working out the bugs developing so complex a vehicle hope to include a few as well. They’re studying the African locust to figure out how to make cars mimic the insect’s uncanny ability to avoid crashing into each other as they swarm.

Modelling biomimetic algorithms for velocity discrimination in motion of natural scenes.

After 30 years of physiological research, the visual processing pathway mediating wide-field motion detection in insects is among the best studied of all neural pathways. We are using knowledge acquired about the key stages of motion analysis, in combination with our recent studies of adaptive properties of insect motion detectors, to develop and model 'biomimetic' algorithms based on insect vision…Thus we may be well served by 'reverse engineering' the relatively simple brain of the fly. The aim is not to model specific biological processes in detail, but rather to derive inspiration from the neurobiological system to seek simple solutions to tasks that have posed major challenges to traditional engineering approaches…we are presently developing algorithms for incorporation into analog VLSI hardware based on local adaptive properties of insect motion detectors. We aim to develop motion-processing chips with applications in the area of flight control for autonomous aerial vehicles and passive motion detection for surveillance. Analog VLSI has very low energy consumption compared with digital computer technology, so that the potential cost and size requirements of control systems based on insect vision may be very modest, and suitable for adding low-cost embedded control elements to a variety of vehicle types, from miniature unmanned vehicles to collision avoidance detectors that can be embedded into the bumper bars of future cars.

The fly's eye is one of the most well-organized units of visual optics in the world. But is it possible to understand how it works and reproduce it on board neuromimetic robots that could navigate in complete safety? You listen to him (the director of the biorobotics department) enthusing about the amazing behavior of these “agile airships” that he's been studying for over thirty years and that today enable him to design “artificial flying creatures.” These are so efficient, that they make planes and helicopters pale with envy. You just can't help looking out to marvel at the arabesques of these insects buzzing past at high speeds without ever crashing. But what's so special about the fly's eyes, that have made these insects champion stunt fliers for over 100 million years?...the fly's “cockpit” contains about 1 million neurons powered by electric signals from the 48,000 photoreceptor cells that make up the mosaic of the retina. The neuron network processes these signals and sends the “electric flight controls” to 18 pairs of motor muscles that adjust the amplitude, frequency, and angle of attack of the wings in real time...Having deciphered how the movement-detecting neurons work, using microelectrodes and special microscopes, the team in Marseille managed to transcribe the main functions into miniature optoelectronic circuits…”

Scientists from CSIRO’s Food Futures Flagship have made a breakthrough in efforts to extend the sensory range of ‘electronic noses’ (e-noses) by developing a system for comparing their performance against the much-superior nose of the fly…The fly seems to make a range of broadly tuned receptors that are independent of each other and human engineers haven’t yet worked out how to do this.

Insects (for example, honey bees and dragonflies) cope remarkably well with their world, despite possessing a brain that carries less than 0.01 percent as many neurons as that of the human. Although most insects have immobile eyes, fixed-focus optics, and lack stereo vision, they use a number of ingenious strategies for perceiving their world in three dimensions and navigating successfully in it. We are distilling some of these insect-inspired strategies to obtain unique solutions to navigation, hazard avoidance, terrain following, and smooth deployment of payload. Such functionality can enable one to reach previously unreachable exploration sites.

TUM researchers are developing small, flying robots whose position and movement in flight will be controlled by a computer system for visual analysis inspired by the example of the fly's brain.

Stealing the beetles’ tricks may also help researchers design materials with desirable optical properties, comments Michael Barnes of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Although it’s too early to say what specific devices might be created with inspiration from the beetle shell, “the scientific goal is to understand the 'what' and the 'how' of micro- and nanoscale structures in natural systems,” he says, “so that we can design our own systems for specific purposes.”

A number of studies have shown that propolis (a mixture made by honeybees) has a range of antimicrobial properties, but mostly in relation to human health. For example, numerous publications cite its effectiveness against viruses, bacteria and even cancer cells.

Melissa Bateson, an ethologist at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, believes the findings could have "really interesting implications for the benefits of collective decision-making, which we could learn something from." Many grant-review boards, for example, behave like ants: Reviewers see only a subset of the total grant applications and thus have to make a decision without seeing every option.

Understanding how animals (artic springtail insects in this article) survive harsh cold environments will hopefully provide novel solutions for medical research and preserving tissues for transplant operations".

If yoou’re trapped under rubble after an earthquake, wondering if you'll see daylight again, the last thing you need is an insect buzzing around your face. But that insect could save your life, if a scheme funded by the Pentagon comes off. The project aims to co-opt the way some insects communicate to give early warning of chemical attacks on the battlefield - the equivalent of the "canary in a coal mine". The researchers behind it say the technology could be put to good use in civilian life, from locating disaster victims to monitoring for pollution and gas leaks, or acting as smoke detectors.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327165.900-cyborg-crickets-could-chirp-at-the-smell-of-survivors.html?full=true&print=true

A young brain for an old bee

The scientists are planning to use them as a model to study general aging processes in the brain, and they even hope that they may provide some clues on how to prevent them… We thus hope to study the mechanisms responsible for age-dependent effects, like oxidative damage, and also to discover new ways to act against these aging processes."

A similarity in brain disturbance between insects and people suffering from migraines, stroke and epilepsy points the way toward new drug therapies to address these conditions.

In this article you will find many references to how God has used the lowly fly to better the conditions of mankind. The next three references showed up in the news on the same day so I placed them in their own category that fits aa parallel with a Bible verse. The ointment in this article is that used by evolutionists to attempt to cover the wound of their dogma. "Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour." Ecclesiastes 10:1

Fate in fly sensory organ precursor cells could explain human immune disorder

In an article that appears in the current issue of Nature Cell Biology, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine report that a new finding about the Notch signaling pathway in sensory organ precursor cells in the fruit fly could explain the mystery behind an immunological disorder called Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome.

"By putting mutant genes from human patients into fruit flies, we've created the first ever fly model for this kind of neuromuscular disease," says Albena Jordanova. "Now we have the opportunity to unravel the molecular mechanism behind Charcot-Marie-Tooth, as well as to start looking for substances with therapeutic value”… Charcot-Marie-Tooth is a hereditary disorder of the peripheral nervous system that affects 1 in 2,500 people worldwide.

Researchers at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore have found a tumor-suppressing protein in the fly's brain, with a counterpart in mammals, that can apparently prevent brain tumors from forming.

An obscure species of beetle has shown how brilliant white paper could be produced in a completely new way. A team from Imerys Minerals Ltd. and the University of Exeter has taken inspiration from the shell of the Cyphochilus beetle to understand how to produce a new kind of white coating for paper. This higher performance could result in lighter weight paper with a very high degree of whiteness. Lighter paper would also reduce transportation costs, simultaneously reducing the economic and environmental cost of manufacture.

Today hospitals around the world breed selected fly larvae in sterile environments. These "medical maggots" are applied directly to wounds such as ulcers and burns, which are otherwise difficult to heal. "Now that we understand the 'mechanism of maggots,' we are translating this knowledge to make effective wound-care products." A bandage impregnated with maggot "juice" is one possibility. But a gel containing maggot enzymes is the most likely product, Pritchard said. Such a gel could be spread over wounds to promote healing.

Not so long after scientists discovered that fruit flies sleep, Paul Shaw of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleagues bred a strain of Drosophila melanogaster to have many of the characteristics, and complications, of insomnia in people. Shaw’s team bred 60 generations of fruit flies, selecting for flies that slept the shortest amount of time. The resulting insomniac fruit flies may help scientists find genetic roots of the sleep disorder, the team reports in the June 3 Journal of Neuroscience.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/44292/title/No_rest_for_weary_fruit_flies

Ants Don't Have Traffic Jams

“Now entomologists have to connect this behavior of ants to their ‘thinking and sensing’ process. Our work opens up the possibility of collaborations between entomologists, physicists, mathematical modelers and traffic scientists.” While this study shows that the collective marching of ant traffic seems to be very different from vehicular traffic, the scientists suggest that ant traffic might be more analogous to human pedestrian traffic. They plan to explore this analogy in the future, and they predict that their results could have applications in swarm intelligence, ant-based computer algorithms, and traffic engineering.

Fungus farmers show way to new drugs

Because distinct ant species cultivate different fungal crops, which in turn fall prey to specialized parasites, researchers hope that they will learn how to make better antibiotics...“These ants are walking pharmaceutical factories,”…That’s not the end to the possible applications. The ant colonies are also miniature biofuel reactors…

http://www.greatlakesbioenergy.org/2009/03/30/fungus-farmers-show-way-to-new-drugs/

An aerospace engineer in Australia was inspired by insects to design a better way for missiles to find their targets. Aviation Week reported… It is planned to incorporate the final Bioseeker technology in a low cost, miniaturised and rugged add-on device that provides autonomous guidance to airborne systems, increasing their ability to acquire, track and strike moving targets.

Sneaky drug smugglers and terrorists may soon meet their match: a handheld chemical detector powered by trained wasps.

That pesky fly's eyes hold an important blueprint for creating better video cameras, military target-detection systems, and surveillance equipment, Australian researchers say.

Fruit flies soar as lab model, drug screen for the deadliest of human brain cancers

Fruit flies and humans share most of their genes, including 70 percent of all known human disease genes… researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies transformed the fruit fly into a laboratory model for an innovative study of gliomas, the most common malignant brain tumors… Better models for research into human gliomas are urgently needed. .. "Fruit flies possess homologs of many relevant human genes including EGFR, Ras, and PI-3K," explains postdoctoral researcher and first author Renee Read, who spearheaded the project. "We developed the Drosophila model to figure out how these genes specifically regulate brain tumor pathogenesis and to discover new ways to attack these tumors.”… In flies, I can test hundreds of genes every week."

Learning more about how these viruses work could have clinical applications, says Drezen. The polydnavirus acts as a gene vector, carrying much larger chunks of DNA to the caterpillar than any synthetic gene therapy agent can transport. Thus, studying these viruses could enhance gene-therapy techniques, Drezen says.

Natural Solar Collectors On Butterfly Wings Inspire More Powerful Solar Cells

The discovery that butterfly wings have scales that act as tiny solar collectors has led scientists in China and Japan to design a more efficient solar cell that could be used for powering homes, businesses, and other applications in the future.

New research from Monash University bee researcher Adrian Dyer could lead to improved artificial intelligence systems and computer programs for facial recognition..."What we have shown is that the bee brain, which contains less than 1 million neurons, is actually very good at learning to master complex tasks. Computer and imaging technology programmers who are working on solving complex visual recognition tasks using minimal hardware resources will find this research useful," Dr Dyer said.

Baby Beetles Inspire Scientists To Build 'Mini Boat' Powered By Surface Tension

Inspired by the aquatic wriggling of beetle larvae, a University of Pittsburgh research team has designed a propulsion system that strips away paddles, sails, and motors and harnesses the energy within the water's surface.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090121144105.htm

Wasp inspires brain-boring surgical robot

Now, a team that includes Rodriguez y Baena is mimicking this mechanism to create a medical probe. The researchers have developed a prototype silicon needle consisting of two shafts with 50-micrometre-long fin-shaped teeth. Motors oscillate the two shafts to propel the device forwards in the same way as the wood wasp's ovipositor

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126926.300-wasp-inspires-brainboring-surgical-robot.html

“There are very few, if any, interventions that are known to dramatically extend healthy lifespan,” Helfand said. “Understanding how … the Indy mutation alters the metabolic state of the fruit fly would allow someone to come up with pharmacological interventions that could mimic it and give you the benefit of genetic manipulation without having to do genetics.”

>Insects aid decomposition, stimulate the breakdown of organic materials, enhance soil fertility and plant growth, burrow in soils and increase its porosity and water-holding capacity.
>Insects are herbivores that eat plants, influencing where they can grow. Sometimes they kill trees and other plants to reduce competition, and many times feed on trees without killing them in ways that actually improve the health and long-term growth of trees and forests.
>Insects are a key food source for vertebrates and other animals, and play a major role in the food chain.
>Insect are dispersal agents to carry seeds, fungal spores, and even other invertebrates from one place to another.
>Insects are pollinators, and in this role also help control the movement of plant species. "When you have a highly destructive insect epidemic, what that really should be telling us is not that we have an insect problem, but that we have a forest health problem," Schowalter said. "It's monocultures and fire suppression that cause insects to become nuisances. The pests that plague us are all too often of our own making."

Ants may help researchers unlock mysteries of human aging process The research will investigate what ants can teach us about aging and behavior. Results of the ant study may translate to other species including humans, using gene regulation in ants as a model for aging.

"Ants live exceptionally long lives, they are social creatures, and they engage in stereotypical behaviors that befit their station in life, whether it be worker ant, soldier or queen," said Dr. Reinberg, professor of Biochemistry at NYU School of Medicine's Smilow Research Center. "Ants seem to be a perfect fit for study about whether epigenetics influences behavior and aging."

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2008/11/24/ants _may_help_researchers_unlock_mysteries_of_human_aging_process.html

A new recruit to the University of Alberta's Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, Bolduc has shown that genetically disrupting a specific gene called FMR1 in a fruit fly's brain will wipe out its long-term memory. Bolduc has also found a class of drugs that helps fruit flies with this disrupted gene to regain their memories. The news is significant for humans, because FMR1 may malfunction in people with intellectual disabilities like Fragile X syndrome, and there are currently no clinically available treatments.

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2008/12/10/fly_guy
_makes_memory_breakthrough.html

Butterfly wings used to print self-cleaning windows

Butterfly wings - and lotus leaves - are able to repel water with ease because of the microstructures on their surface. The densely packed microscopic bumps of the lotus leaf and the waffle-like structures found on butterfly wings both make it difficult for water droplets to spread out. As a result, the drops roll off, and they take dirt with them. This makes the surfaces ideal as the basis for self-cleaning windows and windshields.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026855.900-butterfly-
wings-used-to-print-selfcleaning-windows.html Antioxidant-rich honey is a healthy alternative to chemical additives and refined sweeteners in commercial salad dressings, said a new University of Illinois study.

Scientists announced recently the development of a microphone that can pinpoint exactly where a sound is coming from. This technology could be added to hearing aids, making them more efficient. Although this may sound like a feat of human engineering, its design was nicked from a parasitic fly called Ormia ochracea. This bug has exceptional hearing thanks to a bridge of protein linking its eardrums. This bridge rocks up and down and amplifies differences in the sound waves arriving at each ear, allowing the fly to detect the tiniest of differences and get a much better directional signal. Work at the University of Maryland indicates that this “fly mike” is eight times more effective at pinpointing the direction of sound than the best commercial one.

Dr Abigail Ingram, a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum, is studying butterfly iridescence. Butterflies have two layers of scales on their wings: the deeper basal one contains melanin, a pigment that absorbs light; the top cover scale reflects it. The complex 3-D structure of these scales, combined with the dual layers, creates the shimmering colours of the insect's wing. Dr Ingram is working with a leading cosmetics company to see if butterfly technology can be copied or adapted to create more luminescent, sparkling eye shadows, lipsticks and foundation. Butterflies also have an important place in our medical history. The mocker swallowtail (Papilio dardanus) is one of the butterflies you will be able to see at the Amazing Butterflies exhibition, which opened this week at the Natural History Musuem. It was the inspiration for a life-saving discovery, through its ability to closely resemble nasty-tasting species that birds avoid. Cyril Clarke, a Liverpool doctor who became a well-known medical geneticist, kept butterflies as a hobby. He realised that the butterfly's ability is an inherited trait and that the way it was passed from one generation to another was similar to the way the Rhesus blood groups were inherited in human beings. In the late 1950s, the babies of women who were rhesus negative often died or developed life threatening anaemia. Antibodies formed during a first pregnancy caused problems in later pregnancies when they attacked the baby's red blood cells. Inspired by his butterflies, Dr Clarke developed anti-D, a way of destroying any antibodies that the mother had developed so that future pregnancies would be protected. Professor Parker agrees that whether a particular application takes off is dependent on the moment. He cites solar panels and flies as an example. There is a particular part of a fly's eye through which light passes with almost no reflection. Professor Parker's group copied this material, which is used on solar panels, resulting in a 10 per cent increase in energy capture. A decade ago, there was no commercial imperative to make solar panels more efficient.

Barron is confident that honeybees are as susceptible to cocaine's allure as humans, and is keen to find out more about the drug's effects. He hopes to identify the neural pathways that it targets to find out more about the mechanisms involved in human addiction and to find out whether the drug has as devastating an effect on honey bee society as it does on human society

Engineers have been attempting to gain control of insects' bodies for some time, to act as discreet spies or to take advantage of their advanced sense of smell to detect chemicals or explosives.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126884.200-cyborg
-cockroaches-could-power-own-electric-brains.html

Fruit fly discovery generates buzz about brain-damaging disorder in children

Johns Hopkins researchers have used fruit flies to gain new insights into a brain-damaging disorder afflicting children. Their work suggests a possible therapy for the disease, for which there is currently no treatment.

The immune system of the Tenebrio molitor beetle eliminates the great majority of bacteria infecting it within less than an hour, and then restricts the development of resistant bacteria thanks to the production of antimicrobial peptides over several days, thus preventing the emergence of resistant bacteria. Might it not be possible to copy this model when designing drug therapies that would reduce the development in pathogens of multidrug resistance to antibiotics?

*Nearly every article from which these examples were obtained has the obigitory mantra of some reference to evolutionism. The reader should refer to the articles “BWAH HAH HAH HAAAA!” and “Helping Evolutionists Get It Right” for a point of view regarding the pathetic attempts to attach “evolution” to the facts above.