Credit: University of Utah

It's fascinating when scientists find a solution to a technological problem in nature. It hasn't happened yet with beetles and computers, but it might.

The scales of certain beetles, known for their iridescent colors, may hold the key to faster computers. The scales have properties that make them ideal models for photonic crystals, which can manipulate light in unique ways.

The goal of scientists, all over the world, is coming up with computers that can store, retrieve and transmit information using bits of light, instead of electricity. The theory is that they will be much faster and more powerful than anything on the market today.

So developing photonic crystals that can manipulate light, in ways that could be used by this next generation of quantum computers, is a major goal these days.

Researchers in Utah have found that that photonic crystals found in the scales of an inch-long weevil, Lamprocyphus augustus, pictured above, make an ideal model and they're using them as a mold to make the crystals from a transparent semiconductor. 

Any practical applications are still years away. But it makes for interesting reading. There's more on the story here. 

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Credit: Kyung-An Han Lab, Penn State

Researchers at Penn State say that getting flies drunk heightens their sex drive to a point where males either can't tell or don't care about the sex of the mate they're pursuing -- drunken males chased females and males alike. They also bump into each other and bump into the walls of their glass enclosure (see above). 

The scientsts say the work shows that you can use flies as a model for experiments on what happens to an organism during intoxication and to study issues like alcohol tolerance and alcohol withdrawal. On the other hand, I don't think they'd have trouble finding human volunteers for such studies.

There's more on the work here. 

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Plagued by household fleas? Consider vacuuming.

Entomologists at Ohio State University have come to the "surprisingly definitive" discovery that few fleas survive being sucked into a vacuum cleaner. The beating they take on the way to the vacuum bag is just too much for them.

Continue reading "Never fear, the fleaslayer is here" »

Posted by Chris Emery at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)