Loading Stories...
Loading Stories...
Keys will often ring in the ultrasonic and poorly mimic the frequencies that a lot of bats use.
If you have a population of bats that hunt near you, the bugs will typically just drop. Like, just drop to the ground as fast as they can.
They know the sound of hunting bats and your keys may be just close enough to that sound that they think they're being hunted. So they do the best that they can to get out of the way and go with gravity. At least, that's my theory.
Fun little thing to do as a bet or with the kiddos.
At one point for unrelated reasons I replaced light fixture in my room with more than 200W worth of strongest E27 Philips LED lightbulbs I could find (20*1521lumen).
Few flies gathered in the middle of the room as usual during the summer day. Then I turned on this light just out of curiosity. The flies dispersed within seconds, suddenly perfectly capable of not flying in circles. I don't think it was the heat or the discomfortably bright light just scaring them off. Even this amount wasn't as bright as sunny day. I think more light and more distributed light (not just comming from the direction of the window) fixed their navigational abilities somehow.
Most "bug zapper" design are wrong. It should consist of a light source and a single grid perpendicular to the light source rather than surrounding the light source.
The light source should also be constantly varying to ensure the insects' tilt (and hence their circling behavior) will also change the radius of their circles.
If I'm reading it correctly, insects don't fly toward the light, they turn the front of their body toward it. Under natural light, this helps them fly correctly ("maintain proper flight attitude and control"), but with artificial light they end up just constantly flying around the light source?
> Insects use the moon as a celestial compass cue to navigate, and mistakenly use artificial light sources instead
I always wondered: isn't there a light color that we human see and that minimizes the impact on the insects? Say if we only used red light in the cities, would it help?
Similar how the environment conditions after a rain can be the catalyst for ants nuptial flight [2].
Considering that insects don't have our fancy inner ear and can sense touch/pressure on a surface but cannot use this in flight, I guess it does make sense that they'd need some other way to orientate themselves; why grow another organ/sense when eyes already do the job! (Until humans come along and ruin it by discovering fire).
Like for example an outdoor dining terrace?
Making a road trip in the light polluted northeast america, I was looking for stars in the darkest of forested of environments, and I could not find any stars anywhere. I am not sure if the clouds were there. But I realize I have not seen stars in a long time.
I am sure there was enough webs that you could stuff several pillows with them.
seems there should be alternative navigation ways..
The methodology and resulting graphics are interesting, but the underlying geometry of the effect is not really new or surprising.
And there's this moth outside my kitchen door
She's bonkers for that bare bulb
Flying round in circles
Bashing in her exoskull
And out in the woods she navigates fine by the moon
But get her around a light bulb and she's doomed
She is trying to evolve
She's just trying to evolve
Gunnin for high score in the land of dreams
Morbid bluish-white consumers ogling luminous screens
On the trail of forgetting
Cruising without a care
The jet set won't abide by that pesky jet lag
And our lives boil down to an hour or two
When someone pulls a camera out of a bag
And i am trying to evolve
Trying to evolveGoogle says dorsum is "back or top (dorsal) side". Kinda makes sense that they'd assume light means up.
The paper states that it is the general brightness of the sky, even at night, compared to the ground that is the point of reference. So insect point top side at diffuse bright area and bottom side will be parallel to ground.
The way I thought about this before was that normally an insect would ‘keep the moon’ on one side to navigate straight, but artificial light messes that up and they end up spiraling around those light sources.
Which seems exactly the behavior that they have demonstrated in the research.
"In both field and lab conditions, insects rarely head directly towards, but consistently fly orthogonal to the light source. This refutes the fundamental premise of an escape response."
"An insect should keep a light source at a fixed visual location for maintaining its heading. Switching light position (Supplementary Fig. 5) shows that insects readily hold the light source on either side of the body."
It makes sense to me. Imagine you were an insect and you would use the moon for navigation. Would you really be flying directly towards moon? No, right? Then how could someone think that insects flying directly towards artificial light source is the basis for the theory that insects use moon as navigational aid?
I think that was one of the theories being investigated by this research. The paper demonstrates that it is the actual light (of the moon or stars or sun or artificial source) they use to orientate themselves in the horizontal plain BUT that is not navigation. With a "tilt" in their orientation they will fly in circles around the light but this tilt also causes inefficiencies in their actual flight mechanism so will cause erratic directional stability as their flight path rapidly changes their spacial relationship to the light source. Whatever their navigation imperative (heat, cold pheromones,smell, sight, sound) will be affected by this spacial relationship instability.
But is it correct to assume that, if something is naturally possible (e.g., bioluminescence), and provides significant evolutionary advantage, the species will evolve it?
If so, why are we the only intelligent ones (so far)? Why didn't chimpanzees, sharing a common ancestor with us 7 million years ago, evolve intelligence?
John said, “Listen, you can hear the jammer.” The what? “The jammer,” he said, “Watch the moths.” It turns out the moths, through evolution, had developed their own electronic countermeasures to jam the bat radar.
https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told-you-i%e2%80%99d-...
Might be an urban myth, though it seems like it might just work.
One fun thing you can do is relocate small swarms of bugs with a torch to another light source. So if you're being pestered, turn on a torch... and slowly walk the bugs to a different light source (a distant lamp for example). Then turn off the torch and walk back to where you were. The light will keep them there.
I speculate that the flies rely on a phenomenon called "optic flow" for navigating around obstacles. Basically the rate of feature movement perceived on each side of their head/compound eyes determines proximity to objects. Their vision is very blurred, so features need to be quite large, or at least contrasting. If you have a dimly lit room, with white walls, the whole space will appear mostly featureless to the fly, until they get close enough to the wall, and thus fly around in circles.
Perhaps they also use a fixed contrasting object as a reference point, like the light fixture (turned off) and return to it if they veer off too far into the "featureless void". If you turn on the light, the perceived illumination in the space is inverted. The light makes previously invisible objects around the room more contrasting for them to navigate about and to fly closer, even land.
>Only one experiment that we know of has tracked moth trajectories to lights over long distances, and found only 2 of 50 individuals released 85 m from a light source ended their flight their flight there
I realize this is a small sample, but seems to suggest that if you placed a lamp in a field that 4% of all bugs within a ~football field in every direction would end up near it. I feel like that may mean placing a lamp 10 feet from where you are going to eat (or whatever) may actually attract more insects to that general area.
But I'm having trouble understanding some of their methods
Do insects desire food, or does the intensity of certain smells simply compel their mouth parts to start moving in a certain way?
Might also explain why they don’t go directly to the light but eventually end up there circling it erratically, increased odds of bumping into a mate.
What I'm struggling to understand is how the insects then reach so close to the artificial light. Why don't they spiral the artificial light from a great distance like 1 metre or 2 metres away? I see the insects hovering like millimetres or centimetres away from artificial light.
This definitely refutes the theory that insects are trying to escape towards the light, because, as the article shows, insects don't head directly for the light, but instead move orthogonal to it.
But this doesn't mean they can't use moonlight to help with flying. The theory, as I understand it, is that they use a distant light source -- e.g. the daytime sky -- to maintain altitude. There's no reason they couldn't use the moon to do this too.
Again, they would not be flying towards the moon, they'd be keeping the brightest light to their dorsal side. Since the moon is distant, unlike a lamp, this would result in steady flight.
I'm not sure that it confirms whether they use the moon or not, but it seems like a possibility.
If you're flying parallel to the ground (horizontally), you'd want the moon to be where your back is and you'd have a good change of flying straight. It's like when the kids say that the moon seems to "follow" them.
"Dorsal" means where the top part is, the insect's back, as it were.
Depending on your precise navigation logic, you'll either end up with an increasing or decreasing orbit radius. If it decreases, you'll eventually crash into the light source.
If that's case the behaviors relying on it have been quite fucked up for some time.
> The wavelength of our orange LEDs is 610nm, putting them outside of the spectrum visible to must bugs, but still well inside the boundaries of human vision. As a result, most bugs will not congregate around our orange light because they simply don’t know it is there.
That colour also feels reminiscent of a camp fire, which I've often thought could be related — a bug wouldn't survive long if it flew into fires.
But then if we know it, why don't we engineer the street lights to not attract insects?
"If you peel a banana, take a bite off the top, and then poke your index finger in to the middle of it, it will split in to perfect thirds".
Upon trying this, I discovered it was not true, and my friend just wanted to see me stick my finger in a banana...
I think it might be what other commenters are pointing out. That flies consider the brightest direction to be the sky, but if it's to the side (with respect to gravity) it messes up their navigation.
I see this mostly with one particular type of fly that just loves going around light fixtures, maybe they're sensitive to the EM spectrum rather than visible light?
The insects you see are the ones that happen to get too close and thus their nav gets 'jammed'.
It's similar to planes navigating by compass. Works great, until you go up to the arctic circle, then you better have another nav source or you too will be flying in circles.
When the moon's directly overhead, this makes lots of sense. Fly goes around wherever. But if the moon's low on the eastern horizon, would we expect flies to mostly be facing upwards, and mostly flying west?
The article talks about the ‘dorsal flight response’ being more about the overall alignment to the sky hemisphere, not the moon specifically.
“the brightest part of the visual field has been the sky, and thus it is a robust indicator of which way is up. This is true even at night, especially at short wavelengths (<450 nm)”
> Wait, so it could be a parallax thing?
> The moon is in practical terms infinitely far away, and no matter how far the insect flies it won't budge and stay as a stationary feature to localize by.
> But do the same with a lamp that's only 3 m away, and keeping it in the same spot can only mean flying around it in circles, towards, or away from it, otherwise it'll move around a lot relative to the insect observer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39195508
Seems a reasonable explanation to me :)
Isn't the takeaway from this study that they aren't really, but rather that once they happen to come close to it they cannot get away from it anymore?
What is more scientific than testing the hypothesis yourself? That's science; that's its essential joy and spirit and nature.
Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
:)
Haven't seen flying insects since last summer but if I think they kind of lose altitude the closer they get to the light source, which would be when their torso is less horizontally oriented.
Also this is just a guess but I imagine the closer they're to the light source and the larger the contrast between bright and dark is, the stronger is their tendency to get locked into the orbiting path as opposed to flying randomly.
The moon is in practical terms infinitely far away, and no matter how far the insect flies it won't budge and stay as a stationary feature to localize by.
But do the same with a lamp that's only 3 m away, and keeping it in the same spot can only mean flying around it in circles, towards, or away from it, otherwise it'll move around a lot relative to the insect observer.
All this time I thought this was him being silly!
(For the record, the banana did NOT split nicely)
It's still technically possible it's a hoax but, boy, that's a lot of effort to provide fake content to support the hoax.
a bug zapper is a lot easier
At least I'm more scared of rabies than any government fine. By the time you know something is wrong, you're already a corpse that's about to remember to stop moving.
I'm still going to shake my keys at the next swarm I passby.
The introduction of this paper lists some other explanations that you may or may not have seen in the past and it says some have been disproven and some have not yet been tested.
I don't think those circles are exactly perpendicular to the vertical direction. I think most of them are skewed.
Professionals doing it? Who know how to do it properly better than laymen?
Since we're to imagine the grandparent flying around like an insect. I imagined them as person flying but with insect wings. Since we're mammals with eyes pointing straight ahead, as opposed with them being on the side of our heads, we'd need some light sensor on our back to ensure we're flying straight at night and keeping the moon above, as opposed to having to look behind every so often to ensure the moon is still there :-)
I have actually been looking for literature about that, and I don't know (maybe I missed a lot) but it did not really feel like there was a definitive answer to that.
Nice. Maybe GP got the wrong end, or it is a test of ripeness, or perhaps 'bite off the end' ruined it (it at least didn't seem to be necessary in the linked video).
"The incubation period is typically 1–3 months, but can vary from a few days to more than 1 year [1,4]. Cases of up to 6 years incubation period have been discussed[5]."
And this is specifically in humans, not in animals in general.
There is no test that I know of, but vaccine is very effective even after you got it (but before actual symptoms show up), so if you suspect you're infected, you go and get the shots. Thing is, AFAIK those are quite painful, so it's not something you want to take as prophylaptic unless you're at high risk (e.g. working as a vet).
All this adds up to what I wrote earlier: you get random bat or squirrel bite, tiny enough that you forget about it in moments, and a few months later, you suddenly die.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies
[1] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1586/14760584.2015.1...
You don't have to publish in Nature to be a scientist. Really, I mean that in the best way. I am a scientist every day. It's powerful, it's joyful, it's curious and exploratory (very important parts of your brain to work out, per research by professional scientists), it's extraordinarily practical: Science, by me, has reduced my energy consumption and bill by around (very roughly) 70%.
Umm, no.
Reading is still research.
Time spent reading may lead directly to more science, but it's not always the most prominent path, plus you have to put down the books occasionally and get into action or the research will stagnate because of a thing called no progress whatsoever.
Science is the part that may lead to future publications. Maybe, maybe not.
Often best conducted with the hands, eyes and mind not overly bound or preoccupied with materials previously published.
Remember the default, especially in hard science, is no progress whatsoever, with gradual loss of technology developed during previous lifetimes.
So reading can be most essential to keep previous progress from being forgotten or lost completely.
I say don't stop reading altogether but get into action as much as possible.
-note not my downvote, corrective upvote actually
Yes, of course. Please don't mistake my enthusiasm for some imperative or criticism. I was just taking the opportunity to make a point in HN generally. I look up the existing literature all the time. What a waste of all that effort otherwise!
Probably have to dig through the "literature" ;)
And that is not the first step. The first step is to have a curious thought, to seize on it, to rush out to test it. And only then, maybe, you do a lit review, do it more formally, and write it up.
I just was starting to eat Gumbalaya, and I paused. ... I remembered the leftover bit of gochujang chili oil in the fridge from a restaurant, the one I've been trying to find a use for. Surely no! Bayou creole with this already a bit-too-far Korean-Chinese fusion? I couldn't imagine it. And surely then, for science, I had to try ... (it was incredible, but could have been awful - no way to know without trying it). I suppose I should review lit and write it up ...
> Rabies virus travels through the nerves to the spinal cord and brain. This process can last approximately 3 to 12 weeks. The animal has no signs of illness during this time.[^1]
> Several tests are necessary to diagnose rabies ante-mortem (before death) in humans; no single test is sufficient. Tests are performed on samples of saliva, serum, spinal fluid, and skin biopsies of hair follicles at the nape of the neck.[^2]
> Once clinical signs of rabies appear, the disease is nearly always fatal, and treatment is typically supportive. Less than 20 cases of human survival from clinical rabies have been documented.[^3]
[^1]: https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/transmission/body.html
[^2]: https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/diagnosis/animals-humans.html
The work here represents many thousands if not millions of hours of accumulated scientific skill in building experiments that are likely to produce useful conclusions, rather than falsely rejecting the null hypothesis.
I've worked in citizen science and I have even done some exciting stuff in my garage, which attracted the world's leading researcher in my area of interest. The first thing I'd need to do with my tech is to bring it to his lab and reproduce it on science-grade equipment. then we would need to come up with good hypotheses we could test, and spend an enormous amount of time designing protocols, and debugging lab details. All of that comes before even thinking about writing a manuscript that would be accepted in nature, which is one of the most prestigious journals with enormous readership.
I don't want to discourage young folks who want to get into science, but the reality is that the vast majority of real science is dull work, such as requesting money, writing presentations to convince people you're right, and debugging experiments. I'm not defending this as the way it should be, but observing the reality of the situation. I have actually met a very small number of people who managed to turn citizen science into Big Science and get published, but they are a much smaller group than the folks who do bad citizen science in their garages and get attention on sites like Hackaday.
The most ambitious did both at the same time.
What do you mean by that? Are you referring to something like the Middle Ages?
That's what you are describing. If you read my comments, I am not talking about that (though I don't object to it), and my main point is that science is not defined by the type of work that gets published in journals, or by whatever qualifies as 'citizen science'.
One of my favorites!
That's why I was confident it wouldn't be a difficult search ;)
>Leaves of Grass
The exact literature I was talking about.
Seriously though, I appreciate your posting the abstract (and attribution) and I'm sure a lot of other visitors have enjoyed it.
Some concepts really stand the test of time a lot more than others.
More like vacuum tube technology and those kinds of things where only a few decades ago there was orders of magnitude more widespread capabilities which are steadily declining now.
⸻
1. Likely inaccurate description of the plot based on 45-year-old memories of reading the story in a library collection.
Richard Feynman at 67, partaking in an inquiry into the space shuttle challenger disaster, dunked some pieces of rubber, taken from a model of the challenger, in ice cold water and observed that they lacked springiness. The full story is fascinating. Other simple, non-rigorous experiments he performed also had meaning and whether they were “non-trivial” is nothing to do with science, that’s political nonsense.
There’s a lot of examples of individuals performing simple experiments that are meaningful.
——- https://lithub.com/how-legendary-physicist-richard-feynman-h...
This is a very dominant attitude but that in itself gives guidance for more alternatives than there would be otherwise.
Naturally some people are better prepared and/or more promising on their own than others having the overwhelming support and encouragement of an established institution.
It's just plain "Nature" after all, naturally.
A certain number of the very most promising individuals are simply not ready for an institution.
That's just plain statistics.
Sometimes the individual themself is not suitable for institutionalization, other times the institution is not suitable for the individual.
>Can you give us some examples of what you mean?
ASTM contains some of the most repeatable & reproducible science published. Repeatability & Reproducibility statements are required before the vast majority of material will even be considered for publication. Mainly a committee of leading scientists will carefully conduct the proposed procedures in all of their individual laboratories, before using the data to arrive at an agreed-upon consensus. This has always been a significant effort that would be impossible without highly co-ordinated dispersed team effort. But that's just the publication. Now to some people almost everything in ASTM will always be considered more reliable on the whole than the bulk of everything in Nature, for others it's vice versa. To each his own, I would consider both publications to be equally prestigious even though ASTM almost never names contributors in the pages of its volumes. ASTM scientists participate on a volunteer basis anyway. Publication wouldn't be possible without the bureaucracy, but so many of the actual proven scientific ASTM procedures were completely originated by individuals whether or not they were working in their home institution basically alone, or using their own resources in the equivalent of their own "home".
With the dangerous chemicals I worked with, I always recommended "don't try this at home" myself.
Regardless, some of the most outstanding scientific minds and experimentalists just aren't going to limit themsleves to what is recommended no matter what you say.
But that's besides the point, IIRC since I was a toddler, publication is over-rated.
Plus there are more kinds of industrious people than there are institutions or industries to accept them.
Any attitude which reduces acceptance further can only be expected to reduce chances for overall scientic progress proportionally.
I assume you mean non-trivial and meaningful to society and to the progress of human knowledge. My whole point is that those properties are not necessary to doing 'science'.
What I do is non-trivial and meaningful to me and sometimes to people I know, to a few people on the Internet, and/or to my community or co-workers. Though sometimes the data is trivial even to me, and still it's a joy, the joy of exploration and curiosity. Also, there are infinite questions beneath the threshold of professional science costs that can be investigated (and some of those are just hyper-local questions).
Science doesn't have to be big and globally meaningful. That stuff is very important, but that's not all there is - not nearly. Just do science - just do it and stop debating if and the semantics - do some experimentation, with some hacked objectivity, controls, etc. It's a powerful tool: what you discover when you actually try it, whatever it is, will change your perspective, will raise new questions, and will lift up your mind and spirits, guaranteed. I know so much more about the world than many people, simply by doing a bit of exploration through experimentation.
He would call what wolverine above is describing as similar to cargo cult science.
But regarding the first two as being “real science” and claiming authority on where Feynman’s comments about cargo cult science would be directed? You must acknowledge the hypocritical stance you’ve taken.
You’ve co-mingled the initial statements that Wolverine made with your disdain for people who write hackaday articles and are written up in the media. You’ve introduced that notion and then derided human curiosity and informal experiments as being “not science” or being “engineering” (and somehow mutually exclusive from science) or “citizen science”.
All of these different ways to deride something that you introduced to the conversation - the perils of bad science journalism.
You’ve stated
“ I've worked in citizen science and I have even done some exciting stuff in my garage, which attracted the world's leading researcher in my area of interest. The first thing I'd need to do with my tech is to bring it to his lab and…”
That’s where you’ve made your off-by-one error. You’ve said “the first thing I’d need to do” when you meant “the next thing I’d need to do” — as if the Real Science had not already begun.
“Real Science” starts a lot sooner than you claim.