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Open Your Mind, and Your Mouth You might think of eating insects as something kids do on a dare. But some of these little animals are popular around the world for their nutritional value -- and they’re starting to catch on in the U.S. Not long ago, sushi and lobster didn’t seem all that appetizing to Americans, so it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.

PARIS — Beetleburgers could soon be helping to feed the world, according to new research. The creepy crawlers’ larvae — better known as mealworms — could act as a meat alternative to alleviate hunger worldwide. The process uses a fraction of the land and water and emits a smaller carbon footprint in comparison of traditional farming. To make this a reality, French biotech company Ynsect is planning a global network of insect farms, including nurseries and slaughterhouses. A pilot plant has already been been set up at Dole in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comte region of France. Unlike the livestock industry, where rearing...

Tiziana Di Costanzo makes pizza dough from scratch, mixing together flour, yeast, a pinch of salt, a dash of olive oil and something a bit more unusual — ground acheta domesticus, better known as cricket powder. Di Costanzo is an edible insect entrepreneur who holds cricket and mealworm cooking classes at her West London home, where she also raises the critters in a backyard shed with her husband, Tom Mohan. Her startup, Horizon Insects, is part of Europe's nascent edible insect scene, which features dozens of bug-based businesses offering cricket chips in the Czech Republic, bug burgers in Germany and...

The CIA's secret experiments to turn cats into spies Want to know what's going to happen to animals in the next century? Then you must read science journalist Emily Anthes' new book Frankenstein's Cat, about how the animals of tomorrow will be transformed by high tech implants and genetic engineering. We've got an amazing excerpt from the book -- about how the CIA tried to create cyborg cat spies. "Robo Revolution," an excerpt from Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts, by Emily Anthes In the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited an unusual field agent: a cat....

It might sound the stuff of nightmares, but giant cyborg beetles could soon be winging their way to a town near you, after scientists proved they can wire up insects and control them remotely. Several labs across the world are trying to design robot insect swarms because the creatures are good at getting into nooks and crannies so they could quickly locate earthquake survivors in piles of rubble, carry out surveillance or eavesdrop on criminals or terrorists. But engineers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the University of California Berkeley have gone one step further. Instead of creating robots...

A massive swarm of grasshoppers and beetles is making its way toward Oklahoma. Park rangers from Copper Breaks State Park in Quanah, Texas say the mob is so huge that its movement is being picked up on radar. They are reportedly headed northeast towards Oklahoma. We don’t know if they will reach us, but they are making impressive time. The National Weather Service says it is not unusual for the bugs to travel like this during the summer, but it is pretty incredible to watch it on radar. “It doesn’t take a whole lot of bugs to cause that on...

A tree planted in memorial to late Beatles guitarist George Harrison following his death in Los Angeles in 2001 has been killed by bark beetles amid California's epic drought, a local official said on Tuesday.

USA Today. No excerpts. Just title and link. http://www.kare11.com/story/entertainment/music/2014/07/22/george-harrison-memorial-tree-killed-by-beetles/12985001/

“A federal agency‘s recent decision involving the endangered American burying beetle could cause up to a year’s delay in construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, if the project wins federal approval,” the Omaha World-Herald reported Wednesday.

Barack Obama will fly to Colorado Springs Friday to tour the scene of the Waldo Canyon Fire, which continues to ravage homes and forest on the edge of Colorado’s second most populous city. ... Politically, the fire offers Obama a chance to be on the ground in a key swing state assuming the responsibilities of actually being President. Further, with the Supreme Court set to issue its ruling on the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, traveling to the fire lines on Friday offers the President an opportunity to attempt to turn the page should the Court rule part or all...

Male animals often use their horns to fight over females, but at least one species’ females use their horns to fight over excrement. The species, no surprise, is the dung beetle. Unlike many of the animals we usually associate with elaborate horns, antlers, or other head weaponry—in which the male has the most impressive set—dung beetle females have horns that put the male version to shame.

Surely Gators can beat beetles in nature's version of rochambeau.It's like inevitable doom in a horror flick: coming, slowly, killing everything in its path, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. Or is there? That's the question facing Miami-Dade County avocado growers and scientists locked in a race against a deadly killer stalking its way from the Carolinas through Georgia and currently found as far south as Central Florida thanks to free rides on firewood transported south. That's right -- the Redbay Abrosia beetle is coming, threatening to destroy the county's $30 million dollar avocado business even as...

An experimental fire planned for beetle-killed lodgepole pines in Rocky Mountain National Park should help determine when the trees are most flammable. Officials incessantly cite the increased risk of fire danger in beetle-killed forests as the prime reason to cut and thin dead lodgepole pines. But controlled burns also could prove a useful tool in treating blighted stands of pines, especially when it comes to regenerating new stands. The risk of a crown fire is thought to be greatest in stands comprised primarily of standing dead trees with red needles than among healthy, green trees. Sometime in the next few...

The remains of a burnt beetle found in a grain of wheat about 3,500 years old provided a group of researchers from Bar-Ilan University with a key to a question the Bible left without a definite answer: How did Joseph the Dreamer, who became the viceroy to the king of Egypt, succeed in preserving the grain during the seven lean years and prevent Egypt's population from starving? According to the description in the book of Genesis, during the seven years of plenty in Egypt, Joseph had all the wheat collected in silos. "And he gathered up all the food of...

Beetles, Lentils and Anchovies No, not some new dieting fad - what beetles, lentils and anchovies have in common is their value as indicators of ancient climate change. In a special issue of the journal Fisheries Research (Volume 87, November 2007), an international group of ecologists and historians have drawn upon archaeological material, tax accounts, church registers and monastic account books to present a picture of marine life in the North Sea from 7000 BC to the present. They found that warm-water species, including anchovy and black sea bream, once thrived around Britain’s shores – notably during the warm Atlantic...

GOLDEN — Federal and state forestry officials say at current rates, mountain pine beetles will kill the majority of Colorado's large-diameter lodgepole pine forests within three to five years. In a news conference this morning, Regional Forester Rick Cables and Jeff Jahnke, the Colorado State Forester, announced the results of the 2007 aerial survey of the state's forests. The survey concluded that the beetle infestation in 2007 claimed 500,000 new acres of trees, bringing the total number acres of up to 1.5 million since the first signs of the outbreak 1996. Officials described the infestation as a "catastrophic event" that...

Tree-thinning to begin in fall in Colorado, Wyo. The U.S. Forest Service is launching a major effort to battle bark beetles across an 80,000-acre swath of Colorado and Wyoming, its largest assault to date on the fire-prone forests. The plan, announced Friday, calls for thinning and tree removal in five Colorado counties and two in Wyoming. The program, aided by $8 million in new federal funding, relies on partnerships between the federal agency and the mountain counties where rust-red trees are causing the most danger to humans. Mary Ann Chandler, a Forest Service spokeswoman, said the agency has structured the...

An unstoppable wave could devastate 3 million acres of lodgepole pines. Mountain pine beetles are obliterating a forest that stretches from British Columbia to Mexico, and in the process are creating a hazard for fire, public safety and water supply. “What we’re looking at is an entire lodgepole pine forest dying right before our eyes,”... Severson described the problem to the Colorado Water Congress at its convention last week.... More than 22 million acres eventually will be destroyed in the American West. Meanwhile, the beetles are making their way across Canada toward the Atlantic Ocean as well. The lack of...

Firefighters in this mountain resort town love to tell the story of the couple from Texas who wanted to know where they could buy one of those beautiful red evergreens that surround Lake Dillon. They offered the couple a chain saw and told them to take as many as they wanted. The trees aren’t red, they’re dead. The stately green lodgepole pines that once provided million-dollar views high in the Rockies are turning red and then brown in waves as tiny bark beetles eat their way across the Continental Divide. But environmentalists say that’s no reason to chop them down....

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK -- A history of fire suppression, an invasive fungal plague, and rampant insect infestation fueled by global warming add up to likely extinction for the whitebark pine and serious trouble for the grizzly bear and other species that depend on it, some scientists say. That sets the stage for problem No. 2: white pine blister rust, an exotic species native to Eurasia and inadvertently introduced to western North America in 1910 near Vancouver, British Columbia... As the fungal disease spreads south and east, it leaves behind “ghost” forests, Tomback said -- stands of dead whitebark pine and...