Seriously. Homemade wings. He starts by running away from the camera. Just when you think it is a joke, he is airborne you learn that it is really is a joke. Even if i It is a hoax, it is not worth watching.
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However, now that it has been revealed to be an elaborate hoax, eight months in the making, and now that our dreams have been thusly dashed, let’s examine a scientific red flag in the video…
via “Jarno Smeets” and the Physics of True Human Flight | Popular Science.
“Who knows, maybe they can teach us something about how to fight off our own parasites.”
via To kill off parasites, an insect self-medicates with alcohol.
Researchers at Emory University are guessing that fruit flies are being driven to drink by the threat of (yike!) parasitic wasps.
Seriously. Still think you got problems?
It’s true. The scientists, who published their research in Current Biology, have found that fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) may be moderating their intake of alcohol — usually by eating rotten fruit — based on whether they are infected by the eggs of freeloading wasps. As one scientist put it, fruit flies “use alcohol as an antiwasp medicine.”
It isn’t pretty. After hatching, the wasps (gulp) eat their way out. Apparently, eons of living with this unappetizing possibility has induced the flies to become hardened drinkers. As for the wasps, they seem intuitively to know what any long-suffering wife can tell you: Drunks are not good homemakers. It seems that exposure to ethanol “discourages wasps from laying their eggs” in the first place.
“Who knows,” one scientist chirped, “maybe they can teach us something about how to fight off our own parasites.”
