Science News

One of the more difficult aspects of evolution for some people to swallow is the notion that random copying errors in DNA can add up to anything useful. In two recently published projects, however, scientists show how typos can indeed lead to improvements. In numerous species of insects, they document the DNA errors that led to changes that are not only beneficial but also brilliant.

The next time you kill an insect, you might want to do it quickly — for the sake of the environment.

When a grasshopper dies, the chemical composition of its decomposing body has a large influence on the microscopic processes going on in the area's soil. And the chemicals in the corpse are influenced by the dread of living near a killer spider.

Beauty of the Butterfly Egg: Insects have been around for at least 300 million years.

Creepy crawlies you'd usually steer clear of become jewel-like just after the rain.

Erica McAlister, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum, knows that the link between sex and food is nowhere so direct as in the mating life of the sagebrush cricket: the meal with which this amorous little guy woos his sweet love is himself. To keep his lady friend engaged during sex, he turns his wings into her willing and delicious meal. “They’re quite meaty,” McAlister told the group.

Biologists had long assumed that predators were more concerned with the quantity of their food than the quality, but a recent study shows that nutritional value dictates how predatory ground beetles choose their prey.

The bright colors of the 50-million-year-old moth may have served to warn off predators.

Sure, scientists have spent some time studying the ecology of certain groups of home-dwelling species like cockroaches, termites, and bed bugs. But to our knowledge, no one has done a large-scale and systematic study of the arthropod diversity within homes.

‘Insect traps’ explores the digital nature of organic molecules and biological organisms. Virtual insects are injected in closed simulated environments where they fight for their lives against larger than life biomolecular structures.