Urban farming goes underground in London When you think of urban farming, what comes to mind?
making an incredibly strong and naturally termite resistant building that is 100%recyclable. Wall cladding and structural bracing is fitted in ECO-ply plywood,
say, major wheat production centers with concentrations of Russian wheat aphids, a crop pest. The idea behind the Internet-based, bilingual maps, collectively called Agroatlas, is to promote world food security--with specific attention to nations who were a part of the former Soviet union.
and flies with a cyclic lift motion like a helicopter. It has two moving parts
D c. How samara fly In a manner similar to insects, hummingbirds and bats, maple seeds fly by creating a vortex over the leading edge of the wing.
Unlike many useful gadgets these days, it can sniff out bed bugs. Literally. The Bed bug Detective--modeled after canine bed bug detectives
which can nose out bed bugs with 98%accuracy--sniffs the air much the way dogs do.
Sensors inside the device detect the three signatures of a bed bug's scent: a combination of pheromones, carbon dioxide and methane.
It won one of Popular Science's 2011 Invention Awards
Water Wednesday: Smarter home irrigation technologiescontributor s Note: This is an ongoing column in water sustainability, consumption and management issues.
You have crickets and frogs, but they're vocalizing at a low frequency. This is a unique soundscape.
Enter the Butterfly Explorers exhibition Why you need to be biodiversity aware
Why thousands of bees are flying around with sensors  Wireless data-collecting sensors are everywhere:
So it's not surprising that they're now on honeybees to help solve a major problem.
Honeybees play an important role in pollinating roughly one-third of global food crops. But they are dying off annually in massive numbers.
Australia's national science agency, The  Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), is placing tiny sensors on the backs of 5, 000 honeybees.
 Bees are social insects that return to the same point and operate on a very predictable schedule.
so that they can be attached to smaller insects like mosquitos and fruit flies for future studies. Â Photo:
rooftop beehives have become popular symbols for businesses expressing their commitment to sustainability. From 2008-13 the number of beekeepers in Greater london tripled from  464 to 1,
237 and the number of hives doubled from  1, 677 to more than 3, 500.
hive density is quite high in London with 10 hives per square kilometer versus one per square kilometer in the rest of the country.
Good news for an insect that does so much for our agriculture but has been the subject of the terrifying colony collapse disorder,
 The researchers calculate that to sufficiently meet the needs of every new hive, about one hectare (or about 2. 5 acres) of  borage,
a flower that mostly attracts honeybees, would have to be planted. Combine the high-density of bees with the fact that many of the new urban beekeepers are inexperienced and,
and other diseases in the bees that could require burning entire hives. Of course, not every area has the beehive density of London.
But if your city is also experiencing a beehive boom you might be better off planting more flowers
if you want to help the bees. Read more: University of Sussex Photo: Flickr/nicolas. boullosa Related on Smartplanet:
Finally, some (sort of) good news about honeybees
Why you need to be biodiversity aware2010 was the year the world s governments agreed to achieve a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at global, regional,
Artificial plants could beat bed bugsbean leaves effectively trap bed bugs Bean plant leaves won't bite bed bugs back,
The scientists observed that tiny hooks on the leaves effectively immobilize the bugs. You might be wondering why bed bugs-the subject the famous childhood idiom sleep tight
don't let the bed bugs bite-are being taken so seriously by science. The pests have become a silent scourge in homes, hotels,
and even movie theaters throughout major cities worldwide. Social constructs don't matter to bed bugs: domiciles of the rich and poor are afflicted equally with infestations that can be costly and difficult to treat.
New york has a major bed bug problem. As a New yorker, I've been witness to friends being forced to vacate their apartments,
TV spots starring Roscoe the bed bug sniffing dog, mattress encasement ads on the subway, commercials with people freezing bugs,
and steaming the bugs. Bug sprays won't work. The pests, which have been a nettlesome problem throughout antiquity,
have mutated now to be resistant to insecticides, and their bite is just as bad as ever. It turns out that the bean leaf solution is as good as the best of those methods.
Borel traced the approach as far back as 1678 when English philosopher John Locke traveled across Europe with a supply of kidney bean leaves as defense against bed bug bites.
The Royal Austro-Hungarian Army used bean leaves to cleanse encampments and U s. researchers observed the effect in the 1940s, Borel noted.
It's possible to replicate the effect with synthetics that can be placed within the bugs'path around beds, doors, suitcases,
Bedbug genome uncovers pesticide resistance Beyond bedbugs-lay your head to rest in the greenest hotel Watch robots climb trees,  helicopter  in and sniff bugs
Aztec"cuisine breeds gourmet taste for rare bugs"MEXICO CITY oe  Ant larva, wild boar, fly eggs, wild greens:
Meanwhile, an artist-turned-chef in San francisco, originally from Mexico city, is betting that health-conscious Americans are ready for bug tacos.
a downtown hideaway for pre-Hispanic cuisine in Mexico city, Chef Fortino Rojas serves plates of escamoles (ant larva), chapulines (crickets) and jabalã Â (wild boar),
Once derided, insects have become a symbol of exclusivity. Chefs catering to diners willing to pay for luxury will search high and low for the most sought-after species
. While insects are a striking feature of pre-Hispanic food, the cuisine encompasses a broad range of vegetables, legumes and game oe many
They say that the food of the future will include a lot of insects said Ricardo Muã Â oz Zurita, chef-owner of Mexican restaurants Azul and Azul y Oro.
But thankfully Mexico's insects aren't so well-known. Although he touts the healthfulness of protein-rich edible bugs,
Muã Â oz Zurita doesn't use native insects in his restaurants due to the scarcity and the cost.
The combination of depleted supply and increased demand for pre-Hispanic foods like gusanos de maguey, white worms that feed on the leaves of a maguey that grows as tall as a man,
waxworm larva tacos with pasilla pepper, and vanilla ice cream topped with caramelized worms and prickly pear syrup.
Crickets by Flickr/William Neuheisel Ant larva by Lauren Villagran
Baltimore's next steps: transportation, energy, green building, foodif Baltimores planning director has his way,
Yes, a bug. Linacre has said that his design for the Airdrop Irrigation system, which uses a turbine to gather
The insect is able to find precious liquid even in the ultra-arid Namibian desert in Africa.
Countryman loading a butterfly experiment that flew on STS-129 Tell me about some of the hardware youve developed to put the experiments on a spacecraft.
and they were living on fruit flies, but now theyre on their own living without too much food. They can live a long time without food,
She rolls her eyes every time the edible insects are mentioned. Shes somewhat frustrated with how little Australians know about their native foods.
So we're using cellulosic biomass waste streams--corn cobs, treetops and limbs, dead pine trees from pine beetles.
For yet another year, nearly one-third of U s. honeybee colonies didn t make it through the winter
Honeybee colony numbers are stable; they have been since before CCD hit the scene in 2006.
After sifting through economic measures on the state of honeybees, economists Randal Rucker and Walter Thurman arrived at this conclusion:
Commercial queen breeders can rear large numbers of queen bees quickly, putting little to no upward pressure on bee prices following CCD.
The cost of CCD on almonds, one of the most important crops from a honeybee pollinating perspective,
and being weakened by drought or insect infestations, such as the mountain pine beetle. These circumstances, the researchers said,
Mathur uses pheromone traps and sticky traps as well as a garlic and red chili paste to get rid of the bugs.
Honeybee decline spells trouble for our food supplybillions of honeybees have died worldwide since 2006. Coined the colony collapse disorder (CCD),
Honeybees pollinate close to 90 crops such as avocados, cucumbers, sprouts, apples, onions, broccoli, coffee and tomatoes.
Foods and beverages produced with the help of animal pollinators include almonds, apples, blueberries, coffee, melons and soybeans.
So what exactly is making the honeybees disappear? New research out of the University of Montana suggests there's a link between the CCD
German airports use honeybees to sniff out air quality
Hong kong cracks down on trade in baby formulamilk formula is sold alongside Chinese herbs. HONG KONG--Hong kong parents have been contending with a frustrating shortage of infant milk formula.
and the bug that lands on your arm isn t a fly but something green and a little fuzzy.
A mosquito doesn t really have 47 teeth(#50; it has serrated a proboscis. Pennsylvania isn t really misspelled on the Liberty bell(#300)
They ve also incorporated sustainability into every aspect of people's lives, down to chickens and beehives in people's backyards.
dozens of angry ants were scuttling furiously around the top of an anthill when a young Irish chef named Trevor Moran said,
and let the tiny ants rush to the attack, climbing onto my skin and pricking me with their minuscule pincers.
A couple of times a week from spring through fall, Moran and a Danish colleague, Thomas Paulsen, forage for ants for Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant where they work (often named the world's top table by food critics
attract the bugs onto rolled up pieces of waxed paper and pour them into a plastic container--all the
Over the past year or so, Noma's chef and co-owner, Renã Â Redzepi, has become a leading proponent of insects as food.
Now one of the lab's principal activities is exploring the gastronomic qualities of insects.
Nobody knows exactly how many people around the planet think of bugs as lunch. Some estimates say that 70 percent of the world's cultures have a tradition of eating insects
from Cambodia to Nigeria to Mexico--practically everywhere outside the modern West. One reason for this cultural disparity is that insects are larger,
more available and easier to harvest in tropical zones. But as the global population explodes, edible insects could become big business worldwide.
What interests Redzepi is their potential as a new source of deliciousness, especially since he restricts his cuisine to indigenous products in a place where variety is hard to come by.
the Brazilian chef Alex Atala showed up with Amazonian ants to try. Redzepi said the taste was explosive
while foraging for herbs, Moran met a Danish schoolteacher who had been serving local ants to his students,
when do we get past the point of seeing it as a bug rather than an ingredient?
In the spring of 2012 he added Danish ants to his tasting menu, served live,
Nonetheless, very few clients rejected the bugs. In fact, many showed up asking for them. But Redzepi has been disappointed by the reaction of others,
Right now, these three ants we've found are making our food better. And ants are only the beginning--the earth hosts at least 1
900 species of edible bugs just waiting for a creative hand in the kitchen. Every morning before work, Redzepi stops in at the Nordic Food Lab, a roomy houseboat docked in the harbor steps from Noma.
He conceived the foundation, sits on its board, and shares some of his kitchen staff, but makes clear the lab is a completely independent entity from the restaurant.
and explained to me that the primary focus of the insect project is what they call the hedonic factor.
It doesn't matter how nutritious insects might be or how impressive their food conversion rate--if they don't taste good,
The Food Lab receives the bugs in different stages of development: older pupae with the beginnings of a differentiated thorax and abdomen,
Reade explained that bee larvae were an excellent gateway insect for breaking down the mental barriers people have to ingesting bugs.
He said the first time you eat an insect is generally the hardest, but a positive experience can quickly change attitudes:
The staff at the Nordic Food Lab say there are many reasons for convincing Westerners to add insects to their diet.
But bugs should not be considered the sole solution to the problem of feeding a growing planet.
Insects emit less greenhouse gases, can often be grown on organic waste, frequently prefer to be packed together,
grasshoppers, for example, provide the same protein content as beef with less fat. They have a high food conversion rate--according to the U n. Food and agriculture organization,
crickets need six times less feed than cattle to produce the same amount of protein. With these facts in mind, the European union is investing some 4 million euros in a feasibility study of insects as protein in animal feed.
An important aspect of any such study is pathology: knowing which insects are safe to eat and
which might make us sick. At the Food Lab, the staff use cultural practices as a starting point.
If a certain insect is part of a human diet somewhere in the world, it is more likely to be pathogen-free.
Once they are convinced that a bug is safe, they search for the best ways to uncover its deliciousness,
The first time the grasshoppers arrived, Reade immediately thought of turning them into a garum, using a fermentation technique going back to Roman times.
they had made already a garum with grasshoppers and wax moth larvae, with excellent results. On this day they decided to try it with bee larvae.
pureed grasshoppers and added it to the blend. One main obstacle to eating insects is the exoskeleton,
but the food processor quickly solves the problem. Reade whizzed the mixture together until it turned the color of chocolate mousse with little brown specks.
It smelled sweet like the koji with an earthy, toasted note from the grasshoppers. Crickets don't taste like much to start,
he said. They're not flavor-rich like ants. But they are protein-rich so the flavor comes from fermenting.
The mix would sit for six weeks at 42 degrees celsius, during which time it would darken,
The fermented cricket paste was the first of the Food Lab's insect-based creations to make it onto the menu at Noma.
me a sorrel leaf folded around a bit of cricket miso, beet reduction and lacto-fermented red currants.
The grasshopper smear had a pungent umami flavor that contrasted with the tart greenness of the leaf.
Redzepi was careful to point out that insects are only a small fraction of what Noma serves.
The Danish wood ants, for example, are milder in spring and sweeter in summer. Sometimes when they have eaten just,
The ants have become an ingredient in two new dishes at Noma, ground into paste with a bit of thyme oil as a binder (and less recognizable than when served alive).
The insects added a bright citrus note, followed by an aftertaste of something wild and alien--an almost aggressive flavor
On the other hand, the relationship between a yucca plant and a yucca moth is both efficient and highly vulnerable.
today they are raising bugs and mice for the purpose of adding bite marks to pieces.
like a beehive project or even a donkey for children to ride. She wanted to bring people to the Paris Archives,
this industrial stronghold allows farm stands, beehives, barns, rain barrels, composting, greenhouses, coops and damn near everything you need to grow a green thumb.
Bugs and flaws aside, the tech giant publicly apologized for the state of ios 6 maps,
While creating more habitats for animals and insects, the gardens also act as insulation. Â During the winter they keep in heat
I had most of the bugs worked out, I started contacting journalists. I emailed Clare O â â¢Conner at Forbes on a Monday night at like one in the morning.
I was building it to work out all of the bugs. And I â â¢m seeing campaigns I never would have imagined
Some scientists are studying insects and others are studying flowering plants and all of the thousands of other distinctive species. How will the Open Tree of Life project unify them?
and beetles and big cats--are layered on top. That will give us a view of where we are with our knowledge of the tree of life.
given that the restaurant that invented it sits across the street from a place called the Grasshopper Cafe.
Salvaging biofuel from the West's pine beetle devastationmountain pine beetles have been ravaging western forests.
with warmer temperatures allowing the insect to move into previously inhospitable areas and shortening the beetle's life cycle by up to a year.
The company has found a way to produce biofuel from the dead wood that pine beetles have left in their wake.
If Cobalt can convert beetle-killed wood, it likely that the company can make biofuel from almost any cellulosic feedstock.
what a honeybee sees. The system could be applied to flying vehicles like drones and robots.
The lightweight imaging system, detailed in the Bioinspiration & Biometrics journal, features an artificial bee eye with a camera that aims to recreate an insect's processing and navigation skills.
The bee eye camera uses a curved reflective surface built into acrylic glass with lenses covering the frontal field to replicate an insect's view.
which is used by honeybees to recognize flowers. The paper, which requires registration and is available for free for 30 days,
We present a small single camera imaging system that provides a continuous 280 degree field of view (FOV) inspired by the large FOV of insect eyes.
(1996 Phd Thesis Australian National University) to the full FOV which enables us to remap camera images according to the spatial resolution of honeybee eyes.
The Wall street journal reports that firms across the region are adding  beehives  to their headquarters
founder of City Bees, a beehive management and advocacy group in San francisco...While there are no known statistics on how many buildings
and businesses have their own beehives, it is apparent the trend is growing, says Philip Gerrie, president of the San francisco Beekeepers Association.
which worker bees fail to return to their hives, leaving the colony to fend for itself. But it's not just tiny startups with apiaries,
WSJ points to Intel's five beehive and 200 000 bees and the four hives at Google's headquarters.
In addition to pollinating flowers on their grounds and throughout the region, the two companies use the honey in the employee  cafeteria Â
and sour milk German airports use honeybees to sniff out air quality Breath test can detect cancer New remote sensing system can detect explosives
Bumblebees become precision farm workersscientists at ADAS and East Malling Research have come up with a novel way of using bumble bees to deliver minute quantities of bio-fungicide to strawberry flowers.
ADAS and East Malling Research have been using bumble bee pollinator hives which are introduced already commonly to commercial strawberry crops to ensure good pollination.
which fits into the hive. As the bees move through the dispenser a minute quantity of a powdered formulation of the bio-fungicide containing Gliocladium catenulatum adheres to their bodies and legs.
As they leave the hive and begin pollinating they transfer the powder directly to the flowers,
and improvise rapidly just like a"real"animal or insect brain. The project has been funded by the Engineering and Physical sciences Research Council with a £1m grant,
That's especially pertinent as recent research has indicated that many insects, including bees, have personalities like vertebrates--let's hope they upload a relatively laid-back bee's brain,
Robotic Pollinators: who said industrial agriculture was doomed? Robotics engineers are buzzing about a machine with potentially transformative implications for agriculture, surveillance, and mapping:
since the insects are able to efficiently adapt to changes in their environment without receiving orders from one authority.
and Mr. Perry said the pest could pose as big a threat to cotton farming in the South as the beetle that devastated the industry in the early 20th century.
it going to be like the boll weevil did said to cotton Mr. Perry, who is also chairman of the Georgia Cotton Commission. oeit will take it away
where the Yorkshire-Lancashire boundary bisects the town hall and cricket pitch. Vegetable beds, herb gardens and orchards have sprung up on sites as varied and previously urban as the railway station forecourt and an elderly people's home, under the aegis of the Incredible Edible Todmorden campaign.
and termites that can eat old cars. If regulation of biohacking is too tight, such innovations or, at least,
and the rising price of honey have made hives, complete with their inhabitants, a target for thieves.
where 18 hives containing about a million bees used to pollinate the strawberry crop were stolen. Police are investigating
who says it was"heartbreaking"to discover so many hives had been stolen.""Beekeeping's not an easy job even at the best of times,"she says."
the government's National Bee Unit-set up to protect the honeybee in England and Wales-says it is"aware"of an increase in thefts.
Satellite tracking It advises keepers to brand wooden hives with their name and address and to keep bees out of sight where possible.
"The Lindseys are already taking steps to protect their remaining hives. They are considering installing satellite tracking devices so the hives'whereabouts can be traced should any be stolen in the future.
Mrs Lindsey feels the police and the authorities need to take the problem more seriously."
Besides its sound theoretical basis in the well-known mechanisms of natural selection, the Evolution Theory of Aging has also been tested directly in Drosophila melanogaster by Michael Rose (UCI Professor and cofounder of Genescient.
Dr. Rose started with 5 lines of wild type Drosophila flies and selected for reproductive longevity over a 27-year period.
Genescient has carried out several independent experiments to verify that these Methuselah flies are lived indeed long compared to wild type flies.
I carefully monitored the most recent comparative lifespan experiment done in 2010 (Fig. 2). The Methuselah flies (O populations) far outlive their unselected wild type fly B populations.
The selected Methuselah O flies have some 3 or 4 times longer mean lifespan than the non-selected wild type B flies (Fig. 2). This selection experiment is a dramatic verification that evolution modulates the aging process.
Studying gene expression in the wild type and Methuselah flies, Genescient has shown that several hundred genes have altered an expression in the Methuselah flies.
In late 2010, Genescient sequenced the DNA of the wild type and Methuselah flies and again found that more than a hundred genes appear to be altered in the long-lived Methuselah flies.
These experimental results are fully consistent with the Evolution Theory of Aging, which predicts that aging leads to poorly functioning organisms as natural selection for optimal gene function wanes with age.
In summary, we age because of the declining force of natural selection in adult life, which leads to unfit gene expression with age.
and thereby extend Drosophila lifespan. Unfortunately, none of the single compound nutraceuticals tested appeared to significantly extend fly lifespan in our longevity screens.
Drosophila Longevity Studies Using Treatment with Stemcell 100 The current Stemcell 100 herbal blend has gone through extensive longevity testing with Drosophila fruit flies.
The Drosophila longevity study (see Figs 3 and 4 below) included three cages of fruit flies that were treated with Stemcell 100 (T1 to T3)
Each cage started with 500 fruit flies including 250 males and 250 females. The experiment showed that mean lifespan more than doubled with a 123%increase.
While fruit flies are not people, they are more like us than you might think. Drosophila has a heart and circulatory system,
and the most common cause of death is heart failure. Like humans and other mammals (e g. mice), it is quite difficult to increase their lifespan significantly.
The doubling of mean lifespan by Stemcell 100 outperforms every lifespan enhancing treatment ever tested in flies including experiments using genetic modification and dietary restriction.
The longest living fruit fly receiving Stemcell 100 lived 89 days compared to the longest living untreated control
It is possible that the single longest living fruit fly lived longer for other reasons such as genetic mutation;
For example, the oldest 5%of the treated fruit flies lived 77%longer than the oldest 5%of the control group (see Fig. 4 below
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