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A 20-million-year-old bat fly was discovered in a mine in the Dominican Republic, the first fossilized fly of its type ever found. Its descendants are still around, sucking blood from modern bats, but scientists did not know how far back these parasites existed. But what’s even more enlightening is that this fly carried an ancient strain of bat malaria, of a species new to science. George Poinar, Jr. of Oregon State University found the fly, and also found the malaria while examining the fly under a microscope.
Before he became a specialist in ancient diseases inside equally ancient bugs, Poinar had worked on attempting to extract DNA from insects trapped in amber—work which author Michael Crichton has acknowledged as part of his inspiration for Jurassic Park.
But no ancient bats will be reconstructed from this specimen, even if it were possible.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Poinar said, “this specimen is so rare that we wouldn’t want to attempt to try it.”
Read more about the bat fly at National Geographic News. Link
His species only lives for a minute, but he has a long bucket list. (via the Presurfer)
Scientists
have just named the "all-time diva of flies" with a golden rear
end after a certain pop singer famous for her curves as well as her music.
Meet, the bootylicious Beyonce fly:
The rare Scaptia (Plinthina) beyonceae species of horse fly was collected in 1981 (the year that Beyonce was born) together with two other previously unknown specimens from northeast Queensland's Atherton Tablelands.
The singer Beyonce, on the other hand, was a member of the group Destiny’s Child, which recorded the 2001 hit single "Bootylicious." The fly got its booty-ful name from its extreme diva feature: a big gold butt.
"It was the unique dense golden hairs on the fly's abdomen that led me to name this fly in honor of the performer Beyonce as well as giving me the chance to demonstrate the fun side of taxonomy — the naming of species," Lessard said in a statement.
Link (Photo: CSIRO)
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Glow In The Dark Flying Piggy – $2.45
Are you a over-ambitious dreamer? Do you scoff at the impossible? Forget falling asleep under ordinary glow in the dark stars. You need the Glow In The Dark Flying Piggy from the NeatoShop because you are a doer. These winged plastic pigs are stuck to your bedroom ceiling to remind you that:
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fun Wall Decor.
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Every once in a while, a summer comes along in which you are desperate and will try anything to get rid of these flies. Luckily, that’s not this summer for me. But you can imagine the situations that caused people to try out these methods. Maybe you could use a homemade fly trap:
- Sugar trap. I was optimistic about this one: Dumping a quarter cup of sugar into an open mason jar, then filling the jar halfway with water. The hypothesis is that the flies are attracted to the sugar, then fall into the jar and drown. But I guess the flies here laugh in the face of such low-tech devices, instead preferring to walk down the sides of the jar, sip the nectar and fly out. Two fell in, though. Bottom line: Doesn’t really work.
- Dish soap trap. Instead of sugar, pour an inch of liquid dish soap directly into the jar, then add another inch of water. This worked nicely to trap flies. However, not all liquid dish soap fared well. A floral scent didn’t attract flies to the trap, but a green apple scent beckoned the flies to their doom. Definitely go for a fruit scent. Bottom line: This works. Be sure to use a fruit-scented dish soap.
Other methods were tried and rated for their effective as well. Link -via Breakfast Links
(Image credit: Flickr user Refracted Moments™)
If you want to catch Mother Nature at her best (and if by best you mean bizarre or darned scary), then look no further than how parasites hijack the biology of their hosts.
Take, for instance, the pseudacteon:
Though related to the harmless fruit flies breeding in the world’s neglected fruit bowls, Pseudacteon flies have a far more sinister appetite. The female lays her egg in the body of a living ant, and the tiny maggot will eventually move into the ant’s head to devour its brain. This won’t kill the victim, but will cause the ant’s (technically dead) body to wander aimlessly for days on end, until the ant’s head simply drops off from its body. The maggot will use the severed head as a pupation chamber, transforming into a new fly and finding itself a mate.
Gruesome, eh? Here are 9 more zombie parasites over at TopTenz: Link
The book Geekspeak: A Guide to Answering the Unanswerable, Making Sense of the Insensible, and Solving the Unsolvable by Dr. Graham Tattersall poses, and answers, those questions that no one else seems to address -until now. Can you tell how heavy a bus is by looking at it? What size wings does an angel need to fly? What are the best words to use in a personal ad? How much could sea levels rise?
Geekspeak is an essential tool that will help you exercise your brain and solve the unsolvable, make you sound intelligent so you can impress your friends, and enable you to better understand the fascinating world in which we live in ways never thought possible before.
This is one of those books that makes being a geek fun (which geeks already knew) and makes real-world math accessible to those who might avoid it otherwise. To give you a taste of Geekspeak, we have obtained permission to reprint a chapter for your perusal. Fly Wheels looks at measuring biological power in mechanical terms in order to compare the two.
Male flies have penises covered with spines and hooks. To figure out what the purpose of those spines are, researchers Michal Polak and Arash Rashed removed the spines to see what would happen.
Their spines are too small to cut off by hand. So the duo used a laser instead, wielding the light with such surgical precision that they could cut off a third of each millimetre-long spine, or the entire structure.
They found that a partial shave did nothing, but the full treatment significantly reduced the odds of the males mating with females.
The conclusion is that the fly’s penis hairs act as Velcro, to grasp the female long enough to inject sperm. Now you know. Link -via Treehugger
Previously at Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits.
Photo manipulated at Speechable.
I don’t know who created these little comics using dead flies, as the source site is not in English. Some are very funny! Link -via Unique Daily
Update: Some of the comics have dialog in Swedish. Lexi has provided a translation in the comments here at Neatorama. -Thanks, Lexi!
An Israeli woman paid $32,000 for the entire Business Class of an El Al flight to allow her dog (and an accompanying vet) to fly with her. She told reporters any price was worth it to keep her pet free from the stress of cargo travel:
“All that mattered to me was to have my baby with me during the flight so that I can take care of him.”
El Al told the Haaretz newspaper in Israel it had never had such a request before. “But after the lady explained her special relationship with her dog and expressed her willingness to pay extra in order to fly with him, we agreed.”
Link – via boingboing
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by coconutnut.
Photo: Eric Long / Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
It goes without saying that the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has some of the neatest collection of planes in the world, but this one is particularly intriguing: fly-powered aircrafts built by famed aircraft modelered Frank Ehling in the 1970s.
The AirSpace Blog has more:
Designed and built by famed aircraft modeler Frank Ehling in the 1970s, they are the smallest flying models the Museum owns. But more unusual than their size is that they are powered by flies – yes, you heard right, houseflies, the insect. Constructed from balsa wood and red tissue paper, the one-fly design has a wingspan of two inches, and the two-fly version, which features a delta-wing design, is four inches wide. In both cases, contact cement was used to attach the live powerplant to the fuselage.
If you’re skeptical, there’s a video clip of another fly-powered airplane, this time by inventor Thomas Fetterman (oh, you can also buy the kit from his website)
By now, I’m sure you’ve all have heard the fly swat heard ’round the world. Late night talk show hosts had a field day making fun of President Obama’s artful swat of a persistent fly that bugged him during an interview.
Enter PETA to the fray: the animal rights group decried Obama’s display of unchecked executive power and suggested that next time he used a humane fly catcher instead:
“We support compassion for the even the smallest animals," says Bruce Friedrich, VP for Policy at PETA. “We support giving insects the benefit of the doubt."
Friedrich says PETA supports "brushing flies away rather than killing them" and was disappointed that the President had gone ahead and squashed the pesky fly.
This afternoon PETA sent a Katcha Bug, a device which traps bugs and allows their safe release back into nature to the White House.
Good thing it didn’t happen to Cheney – he’d have used his shotgun fo’ sho’: Link
A new article released today in the journal of African Inverterates by Alex Wild and Irina Brake details the unusual behavior of a group of kleptoparasitic flies in South Africa. They lay in wait for ants, and mug them, literally stealing food from their mouths!
Last July, while wandering about the coastal forests of St. Lucia in eastern South Africa, I happened across an intriguing scene half-way up a spiny Acacia trunk. Some diminutive gray flies were pestering a trail of ants as they walked along the tree.
The flies’ exact activities were hard to observe with the naked eye, but it looked like nothing I’d ever seen. They seemed to be grabbing ants, pinning them to the trunk, and after a few seconds letting them go again.
The macro lens on my camera serves as a handy field microscope. Conveniently, the flies were so focused on attacking the ants I could place the lens nearly on top of them and observe the details of their activities without spooking them. On inspection, it turned out that the flies were stealing food.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by liquidanbar.
Jeb Corliss has leaped from buildings and other places in a single bound. Now, he plans to do it without the aid of a parachute.
Corliss, who is a base jumper, has made jumps in 16 countries and five contents, more than 1,000 in all, from the likes of the Eiffel Tower and Golden Gate Bridge.
His latest venture is trying to jump from a helicopter and land without using a parachute.
Corliss says he’ll wear a wing suit, which makes him look like a flying squirrel. He plans to landing on a specially designed runway he designed. It will cost up to $2 million. Once he gets the funding for his project, he says it could take up to four months to actually pull off.
He added, “A wing suit, basically, is fabric that goes between your arms and between your legs and it changes the shape of your body. So you become, in essence, a flying squirrel.
He explains that he plans to land on his belly, suggesting, “Imagine an aircraft — aircraft don’t land on their tails, they land on their bellies. That’s exactly what I’m gonna become. I’m gonna become an aircraft’ I’m gonna be landing on my belly.
Why in the world would Corliss try this?
“I wouldn’t I’m doing this because I’m a thrill-seeker. I’m a person who has dreams and my life is based on making those dreams come true. And that’s what I focus on.”
Source: CBS News
Video: Breitbart
