From Egg to Insect ~ A Bee's First 21 Days...

Rebecca O'Connell spots photographer Anand Varma partnership with the bee lab at UC Davis...

Beetle Farts ~ Pulse-Jet Explosive Defense Mech!

MIT Material Science grad student Eric Arndt describes and shows how explosive pulse-jet Bombardier Beetle defensive "farts" result from internal organ reaction chamber transmorphing!

Maggot Feed ~ Insects Next Link in Food Chain!-)

The BBC's Nic Fleming investigates How insects could feed the food industry of tomorrow...

"Millions of maggots squirm over blackened pieces of fruit and bloody lumps of fetid flesh. A pungent stench of festering decay hovers over giant vats of writhing, feasting larvae. It's more than enough to put most people off their lunch. Yet these juvenile flies could soon be just one step in the food chain away from your dinner plate."

Mmm, sounds tasty!

Blowfly Flight Motor ~ In Vivo Microtomo Imaging!

Thanks to io9's George Dvorsky for spotting new PLOS Biology research article In Vivo Time-Resolved Microtomography Reveals the Mechanics of the Blowfly Flight Motor...

"Here we present the results of a synchrotron-based study performing micrometre-resolution, time-resolved microtomography on the 145 Hz wingbeat of blowflies. These data represent the first four-dimensional visualizations of an organism's internal movements on sub-millisecond and micrometre scales. This technique allows us to visualize and measure the three-dimensional movements of five of the largest steering muscles, and to place these in the context of the deforming thoracic mechanism that the muscles actuate. Our visualizations show that the steering muscles operate through a diverse range of nonlinear mechanisms, revealing several unexpected features that could not have been identified using any other technique."

Amazing work by the researchers, including Simon Walker, Daniel Schwyn, Rajmund Mokso, Martina Wicklein, Tonya Müller, Michael Doube, Marco Stampanoni, Holger Krapp, Graham Taylor! Here's the experimental setup...

Gearlegs ~ Jumping Juvenile Issus Coleoptratus!

Sindya Bhanoo in the NYTimes Observatory column spots the study by Bristol researchers Malcolm Burrows and Gregory Sutton of the gear mechanism in the hind legs of the juvenile Issus Coleoptratus...

"...a champion jumper found in gardens throughout Europe. Its coglike joints were first described in the 1950s, but it was only with advanced high-speed video that the scientists were able to prove how the joints worked. Before the insect leaps forward, it hooks its gear teeth on one leg to the gear teeth on the other. That way, Dr. Burrows said, “the power is delivered to both legs at the same time, so no leg is twisted.” The legs are synchronized within 30 millionths of a second."