Word: insects
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...since 2001 has a movie so cannily inverted consciousness and altered audience perception as The Hellstrom Chronicle. It is a wry and scarifying cautionary tale, whose point is most neatly summed up by the fictional scientist-narrator Dr. Nils Hellstrom: "The insect has the answer because he never asked the question." In scene after remarkable scene, assorted species of insect are shown as unreasoning, unfeeling creatures who will survive the kind of atomic cataclysm that man, with his superior intellect, continues to shape for himself. "The true winner," says Hellstrom, "is the last to finish the race...
...latest advance in insect weaponry came to light while a team of Cornell University scientists was studying a flightless Southern grasshopper called Romalea microptera. During egg-laying periods, when the female Romalea has its large abdomen stuck in the soil, and at other times when the grasshopper is vulnerable to attack by ants, it noisily emits from openings in its thorax a foul-smelling, brownish froth that halts predator ants in their tracks. To find out why the liquid is so effective, the scientists, led by Biologist Thomas Eisner, extracted it from several hundred grasshoppers and analyzed its contents...
...showed that although the grasshoppers eat herbicide-sprayed plants with no ill effects, ants will not touch food that has been doused with 2,5-dichlorophenol. Thus, the scientists concluded, the herbicide had become an effective component of the grasshopper's defense-the first known instance of an insect's using as a weapon a chemical "unleashed upon the ecosystem...
This vicious stereotype has nothing to do with the facts. You should be leading the media in correcting this subtle act of bigotry. Instead, within the past two months, you have used a pejorative name-an insect's name!-13 times in stories dealing with our minority...
Though bee and wasp stings are little more than a brief, painful annoyance to most people, they occasionally produce violent-even fatal-reactions in those who are allergic to insect venom. Severe sudden respiratory impairment and circulatory collapse are among the possible consequences. Victims must have prompt treatment to minimize their reactions. Even better, says Dr. Mary Loveless, a semiretired member of the Cornell Medical School faculty, those reactions may now be prevented. During the past two decade,,Dr. Loveless told the biological societies, she has treated more than 200 patients who are allergic to wasp bites by injecting them...