Why Roaches Rule.The cockroach cockroach or roach, name applied to approximately 3,500 species of flat-bodied, oval insects forming the order Blattodea. Cockroaches have long antennae, long legs adapted to running, and a flat extension of the upper body wall that conceals the is one wily critter. Merely walk into a room, or try to swat one, and chances are the roach will race into a corner before you can say "Gotcha (jargon, programming) gotcha - A misfeature of a system, especially a programming language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it both enticingly easy to invoke and completely unexpected and/or unreasonable in its outcome. !" Until recently, experts didn't know what made the insect so crafty, but now scientists at the NEC (NEC Corporation, Tokyo, www.nec.com, www.necus.com) An electronics conglomerate known in the U.S. for its monitors. In Japan, it had the lion's share of the PC market until the late 1990s (see PC 98). NEC was founded in Tokyo in 1899 as Nippon Electric Company, Ltd. Research Institute in Princeton, N.J., think they have an answer: Roaches boast antenna-like sensors that detect tiny wind currents generated by potential predators. Intrigued by the insect's sophisticated warning system, physicist (scientist who studies energy and matter) Dima Rinberg wanted to know whether the common cockroach (Periplaneta americana) can distinguish between wind currents produced by the shutting of a door, for instance, and a predatory frog. "A cockroach doesn't jump at just any breeze," Rinberg says. To measure the insect's response to different wind currents, Rinberg glued a cockroach between two "wind tunnel wind tunnel, apparatus for studying the interaction between a solid body and an airstream. A wind tunnel simulates the conditions of an aircraft in flight by causing a high-speed stream of air to flow past a model of the aircraft (or part of an aircraft) being tested. " tubes, then attached electrodes (metal plates that measure electric current) to the roach's nerve cells nerve cell n. 1. See neuron. 2. The body of a neuron without its axon and dendrites. . When Rinberg bombarded the roach with different wind speeds from varying directions, he discovered its caused by nerve cells respond mostly to slow-moving currents. "That was surprising--you'd expect the roach to react to fast-moving wind currents," Rinberg says. Turns out, leisurely currents are just the kind the cockroach's natural predators--mainly frogs and wasps in the wild--produce before strike. Two spiked "tails," called cerci, on the end of a roach's body, are covered with nearly 200 tiny hairs that act like antennas. Nerve cells attached to each hair detect precise measurements in wind strength and direction--and tell the roach whether it should chill out chill out Informal Verb to relax, esp. after energetic dancing at a rave Adjective chill-out suitable for relaxation after energetic dancing: a chill-out area or scram scram Slang intr.v. scrammed, scram·ming, scrams 1. To leave a scene at once; go abruptly. 2. To shut down automatically. Used of a nuclear reactor. n. . Rinberg isn't surprised the agile insects are experts in evading danger: "They've been around for more than 300 million years-100 times longer than humans." FAST FACT: There are about 4,000 different roach species. FAST FACT: Roaches eat pretty much anything--food scraps, paper, clothing, dead insects and glue! |
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