August 15, 2016 at 03:26AM

Today I Learned: 1) Here's an interesting bit of experimental new tech: http://ift.tt/2bwW219 (or, for a non-paywalled digest, http://ift.tt/2aX8PX0). In short, a joint team out of Bangor and Fudan University have figured out a way to lay own lenses made out of bazillions of titanium dioxide nanoparticles, which each act as a tiny little microlens. The net effect is a lens which can provide images with resolution down to 45 nanometers -- about a tenth the size of the wavelength of light, or about 1/25th the diameter of a bacteria. 2) Crickets can really chew through stuff if they need to! I have a box full of crickets right now for feeding my mantis, covered by a plastic mesh and an attached paper towel. Today I discovered that some enterprising cricket had chewed a hole through both the paper towel and the plastic mesh! This explains why I've been finding crickets around the house.... 3) I just had a rather unusual experience with a moth, from which I may have learned an adaptive behavior. I had just put a moth in my mantis's cage, and poured in a bit of water to soak some paper towels in the cage and keep it moist. The moth got hit with some water, and panicked for a bit, fluttering around. When it came to rest, I... you know how it is when you show a dog or a cat something really outside its previous experience? Like a roomba, or a mirror for the first time? And it just... can't seem to get it in its head what it's seeing? I think that's what I experienced. The moth landed, and stopped moving, but its wings were... blurred. It looked like nothing so much as a video of a moth just starting to take off, stuck in mid-frame. Or perhaps a glitch in the matrix. Eventually it did actually take off and flittered around several times. Each time it landed, it kept doing the same thing with its wings. What was it doing? Maybe its wings were damaged somehow, but it didn't seem to have any trouble flying when it did fly. I'm betting it got its wings wet, and was humming them to dry them. What do you think?