The impossible flight of mosquitoes

It may be hard to imagine the pesky little vampires that like to ruin summertime fun as examples of God’s design, but it turns out mosquitoes are more complex than they appear.

Until recently, scientists had been unable to figure out how mosquitoes fly. Most flying insects are able to lift off because of what scientists refer to as the Bernoulli effect, an aerodynamic principle that when air movement speeds up, air pressure decreases. Airplane wings generate lift because air goes faster over the top of the wing, creating an area of low pressure. The difference in pressure between the top and bottom of the wing pushes the airplane upward. Birds and most flying insects use this principle, Jerry Bergman, a biologist and professor at the University of Toledo, explains on the blog Creation Evolution Headlines.

But mosquitoes can move their long, slender wings only in a very limited arc and cannot take advantage of the Bernoulli effect. Now researchers have discovered the mosquitoes’ secret: they use a mechanism “unlike any previously described for a flying animal,” according to an article in the journal Nature.

The researchers found mosquitoes use three different properties of aerodynamic motion, two of which are unique to the insects.

“For this complex system to function requires not only the hardware, including the wing and neuromuscular design, but also the software, in this case, the brain,” Bergman wrote.

The complex system shows the weaknesses of Darwin’s theory of evolution. If mosquitoes evolved through random mutations, they would not have been able to fly until the entire system was in place. Mosquitoes would not have been able to access the plant nectar that provides their food nor the proteins and lipids female mosquitoes need to breed and lay their eggs.

“The design of just the system that allows a small insect to fly is a wonder to behold. It took some of our brightest Oxford University scientists, and the latest technology, to unlock its secret,” Bergman said.

Stable by design

A new study published in Applied Physics Letters answers the question: Why don’t spiders themselves spin out of control when dangling from their webs?

Unlike conventional materials such as human hair, metal wires, or synthetic fibers, spiders spin a silk that has a unique ability to partially yield and then snap back when it is twisted, creating a dragline from the web that hardly twists at all.

“This spider silk is displaying a property that we simply don’t know how to recreate ourselves, and that is fascinating,” said David Dunstan of Queen Mary University of London. Biologists said understanding how spider silk resists spinning could help them learn how to manufacture similar materials for things such as violin strings, helicopter rescue ladders, and parachute cords.

The non-spinning property of the silk is due to its complex physical structure, the researchers said, a structure they credited to “millions of years of evolution.”

Intelligent design experts said non-spinning spider silk could not have evolved by chance. “For that to be true, every spider that didn’t accidentally get the unique properties of silk just right had to die off in the struggle for existence,” they wrote on Discovery Institute’s blog, Evolution News & Science Today. —J.B.

With age could come wisdom on climate change

Television science guy Bill Nye offered a novel idea during a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times for getting everyone to embrace man-made climate change: Just wait for all the old deniers to die off. “Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. It’s generational. So we’re just going to have to wait for those people to ‘age out,’” he said.

Cal Beisner, writer and founder of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, said Nye and other climate alarmists would do well to listen to those aging scientists.

According to Beisner, in the 1970s and 1980s, a major change in the process of scientific education took place. Computer models began to replace real world observations achieved by working with physical objects. “The result was a high risk of neglecting the need to test hypotheses against observations,” Beisner wrote on his organization’s website. “Like kids (and all too many adults) trapped in the virtual realities of their computer games, these scientists, too, inhabit a virtual reality that must not be mistaken for the real thing.”

Older scientists are the ones who keep pointing out that computer models cannot show what global temperatures were in the past without a large number of adjustments, and their predictions of future temperatures often prove to be inaccurate, Beisner said.

Beisner thinks Nye’s solution might backfire. “Some of those young alarmists might, with age, gain enough humility … to dig deeply into their elders’ critiques and discover their own errors, becoming climate skeptics in the process,” he wrote. —J.B.

Who taught fire ants to follow the rules?

Fire ants can deliver a painful bite, but researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have learned they are also pretty amazing architects. Craig Tovey, a biologist and systems engineer reported the findings in a recent article for The Conversation.

If someone dumps 5,000 ants in a pond of water, within minutes the clump will form itself into a floating pancake. The ants can float on water for weeks. But a similar clump of ants on the ground near a plant stalk will swarm together and build themselves into a tower that is narrow at the top and wide at the bottom, like the Eiffel Tower.

The researchers found the ants appear to follow three simple rules: If an ant above is moving, they remain in place; if ants above are not moving, they move randomly; and they stop if they come to an unoccupied space adjacent to at least one stationary ant. After the ants have completed the tower, they move freely throughout it, and its shape is still maintained.

Tovey credited the fire ants’ abilities to evolution. “Understanding how simple rules can lead to elaborate and varied structures increases our respect for the power of evolution and gives us ideas for how to design multifunctional, self-assembling robot teams,” he wrote.

So the robots will need a designer, but the ants’ abilities just happened by chance? —J.B.

Inconvenient and unbelievable

In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore became a global warming crusader with the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth. Now, undaunted, he has released An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Gore hopes to push the Paris climate accord even though the United States has pulled out. “I really think, and the scientists think now, as well, that we have an excellent chance of meeting the commitments that former President Obama made in the Paris agreement regardless of what Donald Trump says,” he told NPR.

In 2006, WORLD’s Mark Bergin said of An Inconvenient Truth: “In what amounts to a filmed slideshow, interspersed with indulgent autobiographical footage and voiceovers, Mr. Gore employs stage tricks, straw men, and well-rehearsed rhetoric to contend that opposition views on climate change are rooted in callous profiteering. … Such vague platitudes may play on Oscar night. But the Oscars, Joes, and Brians of Middle America are bound to remain unconvinced.” —J.B.