Word: insects
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...taysee, little firefly, Little, flitting white-fire insect, Little, dancing white-fire creature, Light me with your little candle, Ere upon my bed I lay me, Ere in sleep I close my eyelids...
...company, Schwartz Bio-Research Inc. of Mount Vernon,N.Y.,had found a happy way of 1) letting children turn their firefly chasing to profit, 2) putting firefly tails to practical human use, and 3) offering hope that science may soon solve the longstanding puzzle of the little white-fire insect...
Midge flight is controlled by two sets of opposed, springlike muscles in the insect's thorax. Acting through elastic structures in the thorax wall, one muscle set draws the wings up, the other pulls them down. At a specific point on the upswing, the wings "click" to a fully elevated position, the elevating muscles automatically relax, and the tautly stretched depressing muscles take over. The same sequence is repeated on the downswing. The flying muscles do not need to be triggered by nerve commands. The insect's nerves serve only to start and stop the process-like...
...Insect muscles that burn fat are fairly economical, but those that burn carbohydrates such as glycogen are lavish with fuel. Reports Wigglesworth: the carbohydrate-fueled fruit fly, Drosophila, can stay aloft for five hours at a stretch, but it beats its wings 250 times per second, and it burns up 10% of its body weight during an hour's flight-proportionately as much fuel as a 600 m.p.h. jet airliner. Drosophila's cruising speed: 2-3 m.p.h...
Part of the trouble down on China's farms was caused, as so often in China's history, by natural disasters-drought and insect pests in the northern provinces, floods along the southern coast. But nature's harshness was compounded by the adoption last year of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's "three-thirds" theory of agriculture, under which one-third of China's land was to be left fallow each year, one-third was to be given over to forest and the final third to be intensively cultivated Japanese-style...