Word: insects
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...flying machine, a mosquito is not efficient, but since its weight is low it gets 450 million miles per gallon of nectar, which it uses as fuel. In the Scientific Monthly, Professor Brian Hocking of the University of Alberta tells about his experiments with the flight of insects. He puts his subjects on a "flight mill": a delicate arm that turns round and round, propelled by a buzzing insect cemented to its tip. A photoelectric cell counts the revolutions, and from its records the insect's speed, power and mileage can be computed...
...insects easiest to study in this way are mosquitoes, bees, flies, etc. Dr. Hocking puts one of them on the mill and makes it fly until it is exhausted, which means that its nectar tank is empty. Then he refuels it (a tricky business) with a measured amount of nectar and starts it flying again. When it stops he knows how far it has flown on the fuel that he gave it. Modifications of this experiment enable Dr. Hocking to figure the most economical cruising speed of each insect. Mosquitoes fly most efficiently at 2 ½ m.p.h. Bees cruising...
...conclusion that they should not be able to fly at all. Dr. Hocking is not much more impressed by the flying abilities of his pets. They are good at control and maneuverability, but they waste fuel. The maximum fuel efficiency of a mosquito is only .03%. Most insects fly much slower than they appear to. Top speed for horseflies is 14.8 m.p.h., far below the speed of horses. Dragonflies are insect speed champs, flying at more than 40 m.p.h...
...warfare, which he painted with the richness of Rubens, burned into his memory. In the postwar years of angry anarchy Grosz emerged as the self-styled "propagandada" of the Dada movement's antiart antics. (Today Grosz, an American citizen, lives on Long Island, N.Y., paints landscapes, nudes, and insect parables that "express the emptiness of man.") Oskar Kokoschka was shot and bayoneted through the chest on the Russian front, but survived. Seven years after the war he was jaunting about Europe, capturing in London Bridge (opposite), a bird's-eye view of what he still calls...
Each stinging insect's venom, most researchers agree, contains four or five protein substances that can cause severe sensitization reactions. In combining any two insects, e.g., wasp and yellow jacket, two of the proteins are likely to be identical, while each insect will also have two or three different ones. Thus the polyvalent extract from four species probably contains a dozen proteins, should help a sensitized victim to build up immunity against...