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)

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:

• Unattractive men do marry supermodels
• People do win the lottery
• And pigs do fly

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fun Wall Decor.

Link

- 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

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.

One of the key technologies for personal transportation is a way of storing energy in something that doesn’t weigh very much. A gallon of gas will keep your car going for about an hour, with the engine developing an average power of, say, 30hp (20kW). The gas effectively stores 20 kilowatt-hours of energy in each gallon.

Gasoline is an amazingly compact way of carrying a lot of energy. A gallon of it weighs only about 6 pounds. A figure of merit for gasoline as a portable fuel might be the amount of useful energy for each pound of fuel-its energy density. On this count gasoline is rated at nearly 2 kilowatt-hours per pound (kWh/pound).

I once made an electric bike powered by a pair of lead-acid car batteries carried in baskets. Together they weighed about 50 pounds and could deliver a total energy of only 2kWh. That’s a puny energy density of 0.04kWh/lb, just one-fiftieth as effective as gasoline.

This, of course, is the curse of electric cars. There is no cheap battery technology that allows anywhere near as much energy to be stored per pound of battery as per pound of gas.

Pedaling the bike, plus its 50 pounds of batteries, back from work yet another day when the charge had run out, I made a calculation: 2 pounds of sugar digested by a human would give more muscle energy than both batteries combined.

The energy in a 2-pound bag of sugar is almost 4kWh. Muscles can convert that energy into mechanical work with an efficiency of up to 20 percent. That’s an output energy density of 0.4kWh/lb-not as good as gasoline, but, amazingly, in the same ballpark.

A muscle engine in a car would be a winner; the emissions would be just carbon dioxide, water, and maybe a bit of wind, depending on the food of the engine. And this may not be just the science-fiction dream that it sounds. There is a lot of academic research into so-called molecular motors, the power source of our muscles.

The molecular motors inside your body are built from a particular kind of protein molecule, the shape of which can be distorted, rather like scrunching up a piece of rubber band in your fist. The scrunching is done by a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is supplied to the muscle in the bloodstream. ATP is itself synthesized from the sugars in your food.

At a signal from your brain, the chemical fist of the ATP is unclenched-the molecule rearranges its shape into a more relaxed form, providing mechanical force as it goes. There are billions of these molecules acting together, making the muscle pull. Synthetic proteins, which act in a similar way, might provide the basis of future power plants.

Flying insects can do even better. They use similar molecular motors to make the wing beat repetitively with a very high energy efficiency, up to 40 percent. But could harnessing the power of houseflies be the way forward for car travel? If so, how many would you need to pull your car along at, say, a respectable 40 miles per hour?

First you need an idea of how much power a single fly can generate. A very rough estimate of 1 fly-power can be made if you know the fly’s weight and how long it takes to rise a certain distance into the air after taking off from a tabletop.

When the fly takes off, it uses energy to lift its weight. Some of that energy is used to accelerate its body and lift it into the air, and some will go into heating its body and warming the air. But as the fly rises, it also increases its energy in another way. This newly acquired energy is called potential energy. The higher the fly flies, the more potential energy it gains.

The energy is “potential” because it doesn’t come into play until something happens. If a fly stopped moving its wings, its potential energy would change into speed energy as it fell back down and would finally be released as a small amount of heat energy when it crash-landed on the table.

It’s a fair approximation to say that the energy expended by the fly in rising to its cruising height is the same as the potential energy it will have once it’s there. (It’s actually a bit more, but for the purpose of our armchair arithmetic we can let that go.) So if we can work out our fly’s potential energy, we can work out the value of 1 fly-power. We just need to divide this energy by the time it takes the fly to reach cruising height, and we have its power in watts.

The formula for potential energy is this:

Energy = g x Mass x Height

The g here is the acceleration due to gravity: the rate at which the speed of a falling object increases. Its value is 9.81 meters per second per second. Call it 10 to make life easier.

But what about mass-what does a fly weigh? Think of something of a similar weight that you can conveniently measure. For example, suppose that a housefly weighs about the same as a grain of rice. It could be half as much, or twice as much, but it is unlikely to be either a tenth, or ten times as much. A grain of rice will do nicely.

Count how many grains of rice you can scoop up with a teaspoon, and put ten teaspoonfuls of rice onto the kitchen scales. Divide the weight by ten, and then by the number of grains per teaspoonful. You now have the weight of one rice grain-and the approximate weight of a fly. It’ll come out as about 50 mg. That’s fifty-thousandths of a gram, which is the same as fifty-millionths of a kilogram.

Next, have a look at some flies as they take off. How long do they take to rise to their cruising height? That’s a tricky one.

You can make several rough timings and average them to get a more accurate final value. But even one timing is hard, because the time is so short. One way if to hold a ticking clock against your ear as you watch the flies rise. Older clocks have a tick-tock time of one second, but the ticks on some modern clocks are much more rapid. Count the number of ticks per second from your clock to calibrate your “audio timer”.

My clock does five ticks per second, and the fly rises to about 1 meter in the time of one tick-that’s one-fifth of a second. Now the fly-power can be calculated. So, to put into the formula above we have values 10 (for g), 0.00005 kg and 1 meter:

Energy = 10 x 0.00005 x 1 = 0.0005 joules

Power is energy per second, and our fly has taken 0.2 seconds to rise 1 meter, so its power is 0.0005 divided by 0.2. That makes 0.0001 watts-one-tenth of a milliwatt. That’s enough to make an LED glow dimly in the dark. A small battery-powered torch gives out about 1 watt-that’s 10,000 fly-power. Flies aren’t very bright.

A typical car engine running on the flat at 40 mph will be generating around 20,000 watts, or 200 million fly-power. So 200 million flies, attached by silken threads to the front of your car and suitably trained, could pull it along at up to 40 mph. Whether that’s a green alternative depends on the flies.

________________________

Geekspeak is available from publisher HarperCollins, at Amazon, and at a bookstore near you.

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.

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.

Link

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)

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.

Link

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