Locusts contain multitudes. Though traditionally associated with Biblical plagues that destroy crops, it turns out they could have a second career as remote-controlled cyborgs that sniff out explosives. This possibility is only slightly less terrifying.
Locusts get a bad rap—noise and plagues!—but they’ve inspired Israeli engineers to make bug-like robots that could be a godsend in emergencies.
A plague of locusts sounds like the kind of biblical torment that we'll never really need to worry about. But they're real, they happen—and boy do they cause trouble.
After a rather lazy 17 years spent relaxing underground, billions of incredibly noisy insects are about to burst out of the earth, noisily swarming over the East Coast and wreaking havoc along the way. This is The Great Cicada Invasion of 2013—but what the hell is a cicadia, anyway, and why have they been hiding for…
Here are two things you should do immediately. One: watch this. It's a jaw-dropping video of starlings in flight that will straight up give you chills. The swirling cloud of birds is called a "murmuration," and it's just one example of how animals in very large groups can engage in remarkably coordinated collective…
And people say were-animals don't exist! One particular were-beast nearly wiped out the pioneers before anyone realized that it even had two different forms — or what, exactly, made its harmless version transform into something far more deadly.
With a swarming locust consuming its own bodyweight in food every day, the many-tonne swarms can utterly destroy a farmer's livelihood. But why is it that they seem to target farms that already aren't doing well?
When the conditions are just right, solitary grasshoppers undergo a terrifying transformation that converts them into masses of swarming locusts that destroy crops. New research reveals why swarming locusts grow much bigger brains than ordinary grasshoppers.
Scientists have discovered that locusts literally look where they're going, and this discovery about the importance of visual input may mean that bugs are a lot smarter than we thought they were...
