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global headtags -- adtag init -- Earn NeatoPoints! Hello, ! ( logout ) sign up | login ≡ ← Home Upcoming Submit NEW FEATURE: VOTE & EARN NEATOPOINTS! Submit your own post and vote for others' posts to earn NeatoPoints that you can redeem for T-shirts, hoodies and more over at the NeatoShop! 5 America’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms Miss Cellania • 3 hours ago Every week, planes drop millions of sterilized screwworms over the border of Panama and Colombia, creating a transcontinental "barrier" to the pests far, far away from the U.S. Here's one of the planes getting loaded with chilled boxes of adult screwworms: 3/ pic.twitter.com/VvDxx86fDG — Sarah Zhang (@sarahzhang) May 26, 2020 You may have never heard of screwworms, but they are horrible parasites that eat animal flesh. They were once the scourge of livestock, wildlife, and pets alike, and occasionally infected humans. But scientists developed a program 70 years ago to rid North America of screwworms. The man who came up with the scheme, and believed in it most passionately, was Edward F. Knipling, a USDA entomologist who, in the 1930s, spent long hours watching screwworms mate. As a boy, he had waged constant war against insect pests on his family’s Texas farm. “Every plant that we grew,” he later said, “there was some type of insect that was causing damage.” Screwworms infected the farm’s cows and pigs, and Knipling remembered them as one of the worst pests. He had to climb into the hog pens to smear medicine on the wounds of uncooperative sows. “That was a very unpleasant task,” he recalled some eight decades later, in an interview shortly before he died. Adult screwworms are actually flies, with big red eyes and metallic blue-green bodies. After mating, the females lay their eggs in open wounds, and the resulting larvae eat through a ring of surrounding flesh. Once sufficiently engorged, the larvae drop off the wounds to pupate, emerging as a new generation of flies. As Knipling watched screwworms churn through their life cycle in his government laboratory, he made an observation whose importance he could intuit but not yet put to use: Female screwworms mate only once in their entire life. If a female screwworm mates with a sterile male, she will never have any offspring. So if the environment could somehow be saturated with sterile males, Knipling surmised, screwworms would very quickly mate themselves out of existence. Raising, feeding, sterilizing, and distributing screwworms by the millions was not easy, but once they figured out how to do it, it was effective. Read about the screwworm eradication program , which continues today, at the Atlantic. The very abbreviated version is at Twitter . -via Metafilter 0 6 Jet Suit Hoverboarding Miss Cellania • 5 hours ago It's 2020, and we were supposed to have flying cars, or at least flying hover boards by now. Crazy inventor Colin Furze ( previously ) took matters into his own hands to make a Back to the Future 2 experience happen. He took one of the hover boards made to commemorate the film and made it really hover by using a jetpack and two small jetpacks on his arms! He shows us how he did it, but if you want, you can skip to 6:00 to see him fly. That's a lot of equipment to carry around, but he's flying and we're not. -via Geekologie 1 6 Mayflower’s Billington Brothers: America’s 1st Juvenile Delinquents? Miss Cellania • 5 hours ago There were 33 children aboard the Mayflower when it sailed to America in 1620. Among those were John Billlington Jr. and his brother Francis. They were not good little Pilgrims, and archives of their rambunctiousness survives 400 years later. The ship hadn't even arrived in Massachusetts when the scandalous behavior started. From a journal written by William Bradford and Edward Winslow: “The fifth day [of December, 1620] we through God’s mercy escaped a great danger by the foolishness of a boy, one Francis of Billington’s sonnes, who in his father’s absence had got gun powder and shot off a piece [musket] or two and made squibs [small fireworks], and there being a fowling piece charged in his father’s cabbin, shot her off in the cabbin. There being a little barrell of [gun] powder halfe full scattered in and about the cabbin, the fire [discharge] being within foure foote of the bed [bunk] betweene decks and many flints and iron things about and so many people about the fire. And yet by God’s mercy no harme was done.” But that was minor compared to his brother John, who later went missing in the woods. He was eventually rescued by Native Americans, which caused a diplomatic problem. And their parents? Also troublemakers. Read about the Billington family at Genealogy Bank . -via Strange Company 0 6 The 1959 Curtiss-Wright Model 2500 Air-Car Miss Cellania • 5 hours ago Colin Furze found his own way to hover around , but back in 1959, you could zip along in Curtiss-Wright Model 2500 Air-Car. Or maybe not, as there were only two built. Curtiss-Wright is an aircraft company, but delved into experimental vehicles for the military, including this hover car. Each engine was used to drive, via reduction gears, a single four-bladed lift fan placed within a plenum chamber. The two chambers created a cushion of air 10-15 inches thick. Forward propulsion was supplied by air bled off the chambers and expelled at low velocity through two sets of louvers on each side of the vehicle. It was fairly maneuverable and could reach speeds up to 38 mph. It was not really capable of all-terrain operation and never caught on commercially. It was big and heavy and pretty cool, but that seemed to be about ll it had going for it. Both prototype models are still in existence. Read more at Vintage Everyday . -via Nag on the Lake 1 8 The Connection Between The Gut Mucus And The Brain Franzified • 12 hours ago Scientists have understood before that the mucus found in the gut is the body’s first line of defense against bacteria that attempt to attack the said part of the body. Now, scientists have discovered yet another feature of the gut mucus — it might also be the key towards therapeutic options for neurological disorders. Bacterial imbalance in the gut is linked with Alzheimer's disease, autism and other brain disorders, yet the exact causes are unclear. Senior author Associate Professor Elisa Hill-Yardin said these changes could be contributing to bacterial imbalance and exacerbating the core symptoms of neurological diseases. "Mucus is a critical protective layer that helps balance good and bad bacteria in your gut but you need just the right amount -- not too little and not too much," Hill-Yardin said. "Researchers have previously shown that changes to intestinal mucus affect the balance of bacteria in the gut but until now, no-one has made the connection between gut mucus and the brain. "It's a new gut-brain connection that opens up fresh avenues for scientists to explore, as we search for ways to better treat disorders of the brain by targeting our 'second brain' -- the gut." More details about this over at Science Daily . (Image Credit: Pixel_perfect/ Pixabay ) 1 12 We Are But A Dot From Saturn’s Point Of View Franzified • 14 hours ago It’s always amazing when we think how big our planet is, and then we see images of our planet from another place in space, and then we realize how tiny our planet is compared to the gigantic stars, moons, other planets, and other celestial bodies. Just over three years ago, because the Sun was temporarily blocked by the body of Saturn, the robotic Cassini spacecraft was able to look toward the inner Solar System. There, it spotted our Earth and Moon -- just pin-pricks of light lying about 1.4 billion kilometers distant. I can’t imagine just how grand the universe is, and how much outside our planet is left unexplored and unknown. (Image Credit: NASA, ESA, JPL-Caltech, SSI, Cassini Imaging Team; Processing & License: Kevin M. Gill) 1 11 Monopolies That You’ll Have A Hard Time Believ...