Plenty of people have described Hurricane Harvey as a disaster of biblical proportions, and it seems the next plague is upon us. It’s not locusts. Thanks to untold quantities of filthy standing water, millions of mosquitos are starting to hatch. And yes, they do bite. They love to bite.

A single seared shrimp sat atop a scoop of mashed avocado with a healthy pile of salty black specks overflowing onto the plate beside it. If I didn’t already know what I had gotten myself into, I would have been certain the topping was caviar—each spot popped just like a sturgeon egg might have. But rather than…

Is Barnaby Dixon the reincarnation of Jim Henson? It’s hard to believe that there isn’t at least a little bit of Henson inside the young puppeteer as he demonstrates his latest creation, a glowing bug puppet that’s so articulated it even has moving fingers that can grasp tiny objects.

It all started when I thought I saw a bug crawling across my computer monitor.

Do you have hobbies? Maybe cycling or carpentry or something low key? Well, this guy has a cooler hobby than you.

First, there were snakes on a plane. Then, we had sharks in tornadoes. Now, there is a darker and more prevalent combination of pests and unlikely places they exist: cockroaches in your PS4.

A popular approach to designing robots that can navigate a world built for living creatures is to simply copy Mother Nature’s designs. But while trying to improve how a six-legged robot walks, researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne actually found a faster way for six-legged creatures to get around.

Say hello to Aethiocarenus burmanicus, an ancient insect so strange—and so god awfully ugly—its discoverers had to create an entirely new scientific classification to catalogue it.

We ate some weird shit in 2016. A person born in the year 1000 AD definitely wouldn’t comprehend a Dorito. He certainly wouldn’t understand why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and if you showed him a Twinkie, he’d probably burn you at the stake. But the way things are headed, our food is bound to get a…

What’s a few minutes of internet fame worth to you? Would you eat something gross? Would you risk your life flying down a mountain in a wingsuit? Or would you go so far as to let a bullet ant—the insect with the most painfully potent venom on Earth—purposely bite you?

One of the wildest things that happens in nature is caterpillars go to sleep one day and then transform into a damn butterfly after a month. I thought that as a kid, and I still think it now. Like, that’s the closest thing we’ve got to actual sorcery on Earth.

Making robots act like humans is hard, but making robots act like insects is considerably easier. And if you’ve ever seen a towering ant hill, or a massive bee hive, you know that thousands of insects working together can accomplish impressive things. So why not have a bunch of tiny robots do the same?

Meet the Lichen Katydid, an insect that has such impressive camouflage skills that it can hide in plain sight when walking on a lichen (a plant-like composite organism of an alga and a fungus). The bug’s body matches the wisps of the lichen so damn well that you’re not even sure which part belongs to which.