“Cooing softly in baby talk, German Viasus gently uses a toothbrush to bathe the little animal he has raised since infancy and then pampers it with a fresh meal of mango, bananas and melon. The object of his affection? A beetle the size of a hamster with a hard, shiny shell and 2-inch-long horns.

Viasus, 36, is a Colombian entrepreneur who is exploiting the beetle-mania sweeping Japan by raising and exporting hundreds of the creepy-crawlies every month. He has become a fearless (in more ways than one) pioneer of Colombia’s somewhat belated effort to promote the legal exploitation of its biodiversity, a stunning variety of plant and animal species that is second only to Brazil’s.”

(via The Chicago Tribune)

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“Animal world has provided mankind with locomotion over millennia. For example we have used horses and elephants for locomotion in wars and conducting commerce. Birds have been used for sending covert messages, and to detect gases in coal mines, a life-saving technique for coal miners. More recently, olfactory training of bees has been used to locate mines and weapons of mass destruction. The HI-MEMS program is aimed to develop technology that provides more control over insect locomotion, just as saddles and horseshoes are needed for horse locomotion control.

The HI-MEMS program is aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis.”

(via DARPA)

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To explore how groups of cockroaches make collective decisions, scientists have created a robotic cockroach that the real insects accept as one of their own.

The robot doesn’t look anything like a cockroach to human eyes.

“It looks like an electronic matchbox,” said Jose Halloy, a researcher at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. But that doesn’t matter, he says, “because in fact it has to look like a cockroach from a cockroach perspective.”

Basically, it has to smell like a cockroach. The scientists coat the boxy robots with a chemical, a cockroach smell, so the real roaches won’t run away.

Full Story: NPR.

See also: Ancient Scorpion Was Bigger Than Car.

(Both via Irreality News Wire).

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New piece by me on Alterati:

“Total chemical warfare against insects.”

That’s one of many proposals from Otto Muehl’s nihilistic ZOCK Manifesto. It’s the sort of thing most environmentalists would, at best, scoff at (or, at worst, give you a several hour lecture on the importance of biodiversity in ecosystems). In college, I once knew a guy who decided to live in harmony with the lice that had made his head a home. But that didn’t last more than a week. Even the most militant conservationist will break out the high power chemicals when their home is infested with cockroaches or ants, or if their body is plagued with lice or scabies.

Ever since I saw the mockumentary The The Hellstrom Chronicle when I was a teenager, I’ve been unable to forget the notion that humans and insects are at perpetual war. A war that we are losing.

I don’t know if Simon Oliver was influenced at all by Hellstrom Chronicle, but his comic Exterminators sure seems to detail the front lines of this imaginary war.

Full Story: Alterati.

Buy Exterminators vol. 1.

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Cockroaches govern themselves in a very simple democracy where each insect has equal standing and group consultations precede decisions that affect the entire group, indicates a new study.

The research determined that cockroach decision-making follows a predictable pattern that could explain group dynamics of other insects and animals, such as ants, spiders, fish and even cows.

Full Story: Discovery.

(via Abstract Dynamics).

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“Something in the insect seems to be alien to the habits, morals, and psychology of this world, as if it has come from some other planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insensate, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.” — Maurice Masterlinck, Belgian playwright, 1862-1949

Reality Carnival.

(via Posthuman Blues).

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The NY Times asks if we should we launch an all out war on mosquitos? That’s what the ZOCK manifesto proposed. Actually, they proposed chemical war on all insects. Maybe this writer has seen the Hellstrom Chronicles too many times.

Link.

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“Destructive artist” Otto Muehl’s ferociously nihilistic manifesto ZOCK, originally published in 1967 and translated in the most recent Exquisite Corpse, is one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in a long time. It calls for the complete destruction of pretty much everything. However, one idea in it blew my mind: “ZOCK will eliminate the race problem in a very simple way: 1. A general ban on sexual intercourse between people with the same skin color.”
Link.

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In high school I had this biology teacher named Mr. May that showed the Hellstrom Chronicle to all his classes. I saw it twice: once in biology and once in AP Environmental Science. I thought that it was a real documentary about a particularly cracked-out scientist but it turns out that it’s a mocumentary. I’m sure that May knew all along, but he never let on. I wonder if any of my peers ever knew it was fake or if I was the only sucker who thought this kook was for real. Anyway, it’s worth watching if you happen to find it for rent somewhere.
Link.

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A brilliant idea: encode works of art into the DNA of cockroaches (one of the toughest species on the planet). “Weirder things have happened. The Egyptians worshiped scarab beetles pushing little balls of dung.” Maybe we should be looking at cockroaches and beetles to see if there’s ALREADY anything encoded in their DNA. Link (via Boing Boing).

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Plastic has some interesting science/tech updates today: the failure of fetus cells implanted into Parkinsons patients (with what some doctors are calling tragic results),

genetically altered insects, and sky diving from space.

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