"insects" news and stories

Boffins down in Australia are attempting to use the odour receptors on insects to build a 'cybernose'. They think that the power that insects have will detect aromas in minute quantities. If they manage to do this the aim is to detect wine faults - brettanomyces (smells like shit), cork taint and other faults.

Wasps - well they had to have some use - have the ability to detect individual smells at concentrations of one part per trillion. Each insect has about 60 different odour receptor proteins and by using electrical signals the inventors hope to mimick an insects behaviour.

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Yesterday's New York Times featured a great account of eating a variety of insects in Thailand's Ubon province. Jennifer Gampell writes about tackling crunchy, salty fried scorpions (right), as well as grasshoppers and crickets. She passes on the large water beetles, but apparently takes a liking to a type of fly, fried with lemongrass and served in a spicy salad of chili and green papaya. Meals like this are abundant at roadside stalls in Ubon, Gampell says. The details of exactly what and where she ate are a little cloudy, however, since English names and locations seem, at times, hard to come by.

One exhibit at the Chicago BIO2006 trade show (for the world's $90 billion biotechnology industry) aims to harness the power of insects smell to improve the grape growing process.

By using an insect's acute sense of smell - which enables it to sniff out succulent grape vines - the Australian scientists plan to take the genes and turn them into electronic sensors. These will be used by grape-growers to produce tastier wines. They have several choices in how to harness the genes. They could identify how an insect's sense of smell works, and then build similar capability into an electronic chip or they could develop a "bio-chip" that incorporates needed genes into the chip itself.

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