mel the magpie

The sight of a cockroach scuttling across the floor makes most of us shudder, but in a disaster, roaches might prove to be our new best friends.

Cockroaches that are surgically transformed into remote-controlled “biobots” could help locate earthquake survivors in hard-to-access areas. This new video from North Carolina State University’s iBionics Laboratory shows how the lab’s enhanced roaches can be steered with surprising precision.

(article)

14-billion-years-later:

Demodex folliculorum

D. folliculorum loves you and you have no idea that he even exists, much like that girl you liked in high school. You heartbreaking asshole. If you do know about this fellow you probably think he’s gross and creepy (again much like that girl thought of you). D. folliculorum is one of two species of adorably named face mites (the other being D. brevis). This small mite spends its time snuggling into your hair follicles where it feeds off your dead skin, hormones, oils and other skin secretions. Also they’re incredibly common with half of all adults being home to these critters. Another reason you may be unfamilar with D. folliculorum is that they only really come out at night, while you’re sleeping as they’re averse to light. Fortunately you don’t suffer any harmful effects as they’re fairly tidy tenants of your face real estate, unless you have a hypersensitive immune system. Sleep well.

invado:

Snake Digesting a Frog

thywake:

River dolphin fetus

theoutlawstar:

Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years

“No, this isn’t a make-believe place. It’s real.

They call it “Ball’s Pyramid.” It’s what’s left of an old volcano that emerged from the sea about 7 million years ago. A British naval officer named Ball was the first European to see it in 1788. It sits off Australia, in the South Pacific. It is extremely narrow, 1,844 feet high, and it sits alone.

What’s more, for years this place had a secret. At 225 feet above sea level, hanging on the rock surface, there is a small, spindly little bush, and under that bush, a few years ago, two climbers, working in the dark, found something totally improbable hiding in the soil below. How it got there, we still don’t know.

A satellite view of Ball’s Pyramid in the Tasman Sea off the eastern coast of Australia.

Here’s the story: About 13 miles from this spindle of rock, there’s a bigger island, called Lord Howe Island.

On Lord Howe, there used to be an insect, famous for being big. It’s a stick insect, a critter that masquerades as a piece of wood, and the Lord Howe Island version was so large — as big as a human hand — that the Europeans labeled it a “tree lobster” because of its size and hard, lobsterlike exoskeleton. It was 12 centimeters long and the heaviest flightless stick insect in the world. Local fishermen used to put them on fishing hooks and use them as bait.”

For all of you who don’t like insect, here’s something else to fear.

heythereuniverse:

A 13 day chick embryo that has been stained to highlight the skeleton. The blue stain shows cartilage, while the red indicates areas that have started to form bone. The other tissues have been partly dissolved by chemicals to show this more clearly. The row of blue rings in the neck shows the cartilage rings of the trachea (windpipe).

Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons.

I feel like someone did this to me this morning….