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Beetles can survive their entire lives without drinking any liquid water whatsoever. Instead, they suck water from the air with their rear ends.
Insect pests eat their way through thousands of tons of food around the world every year. Food security in developing nations is particularly affected by animal species like the grain weevil and red flour beetle which have specialized in surviving in extremely dry environments, granaries included, for thousands of years.
For a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers investigated the molecular and physiological processes underlying how beetles stay hydrated.
Indeed, beetles can open their rectums and take up water from moist air and convert it into fluid, which they can then absorb into their bodies. This novel approach to consuming water has been known for more than a century within scientific circles around the world, but never fully clarified until now.
“We have shed new light on the molecular mechanisms that allow beetles to absorb water rectally. Insects are particularly sensitive to changes in their water balance. As such, this knowledge can be used to develop more targeted methods to combat beetle species which destroy our food production, without killing other animals or harming humans and nature,” says lead author Kenneth Veland Halberg, associate professor in the biology department at the University of Copenhagen.
The researchers studied the internal organs of red flour beetles to learn more about their ability to absorb water through the rectum. Red flour beetles are used as so-called model organisms, which means that they are offer tools that make them easy to work with and that their biology is similar to that found in other beetles.
Here, the researchers identified a gene that is expressed 60 times more in the beetle’s rectum compared to the rest of the animal, which is higher than any other gene they found. This led them to a unique group of cells known as leptophragmata cells. Upon closer inspection, they could see that these cells play a crucial role when the beetle absorbs water through its rear end.
“Leptophragmata cells are tiny cells situated like windows between the beetle’s kidneys and the insect circulatory system, or blood. As the beetle’s kidneys encircle its hindgut, the leptophragmata cells function by pumping salts into the kidneys so that they are able to harvest water from moist air through their rectums and from here into their bodies,” Veland Halberg says. “The gene we have discovered is essential to this process, which is new knowledge for us.”
Besides being able to suck water out of the air, beetles are also extremely effective at extracting liquid from food. Even dry grain, which may consist of 1-2% water, can contribute to a beetle’s fluid balance.
“A beetle can go through an entire life cycle without drinking liquid water. This is because of their modified rectum and closely applied kidneys, which together make a multi-organ system that is highly specialized in extracting water from the food that they eat and from the air around them. In fact, it happens so effectively that the stool samples we have examined were completely dry and without any trace of water,” Veland Halberg says.
Over the past 500 million years, beetles have successfully spread across the planet. Today, one in five animal species on Earth is a beetle. Unfortunately, they are also among the pests that have a devastating impact on our food security. The red flour beetle, grain weevil, confused flour beetle, Colorado potato beetle, and other types of beetles make their way into up to 25% of the global food supply every year.
We use approximately $100 billion in pesticides worldwide every year to keep insects out of our food. However, traditional pesticides harm other living organisms and destroy the environment.
Therefore, according to Veland Halberg, it is important to develop more specific and “eco-friendly” insecticides, which only targets insect pests while leaving more beneficial insects, such as bees, alone. This is where a new and better understanding of beetles’ anatomy and physiology could become key.
“Now we understand exactly which genes, cells, and molecules are at play in the beetle when it absorbs water in its rectum. This means that we suddenly have a grip on how to disrupt these very efficient processes by, for example, developing insecticides that target this function and in doing so, kill the beetle,” he says.
“There is twenty times as much insect biomass on Earth than that of humans. They play key roles in most food webs have a huge impact on virtually all ecosystems and on human health. So, we need to understand them better.”
Additional coauthors are from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Copenhagen.
Source: University of Copenhagen
The post How beetles use their butts to suck water from the air appeared first on Futurity.
Researchers report the ability to control two quantum light sources rather than one.
For years, researchers around the world have strived to develop stable quantum light sources and achieve the phenomenon known as quantum mechanical entanglement—a phenomenon, with nearly sci-fi-like properties, where two light sources can affect each other instantly and potentially across large geographic distances. Entanglement is the very basis of quantum networks and central to the development of an efficient quantum computer.
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute report the feat in the journal Science. According to professor Peter Lodahl, it is a crucial step in the effort to take the development of quantum technology to the next level and to “quantize” computers, encryption, and the internet.
“We can now control two quantum light sources and connect them to each other. It might not sound like much, but it’s a major advancement and builds upon the past 20 years of work. By doing so, we’ve revealed the key to scaling up the technology, which is crucial for the most ground-breaking of quantum hardware applications,” says Lodahl.
The magic all happens in a so-called nanochip not much larger than the diameter of a human hair.
Lodahl’s group has only been able to control one light source until now because light sources are extraordinarily sensitive to outside “noise,” making them very difficult to copy. In their new result, the research group succeeded in creating two identical quantum light sources rather than just one.
“Entanglement means that by controlling one light source, you immediately affect the other. This makes it possible to create a whole network of entangled quantum light sources, all of which interact with one another, and which you can get to perform quantum bit operations in the same way as bits in a regular computer, only much more powerfully,” explains postdoc Alexey Tiranov, the article’s lead author.
This is because a quantum bit can be both a 1 and 0 at the same time, which results in processing power that is unattainable using today’s computer technology. According to Lodahl, just 100 photons emitted from a single quantum light source will contain more information than the world’s largest supercomputer can process.
By using 20-30 entangled quantum light sources, there is the potential to build a universal error-corrected quantum computer—the ultimate “holy grail” for quantum technology, that large IT companies are now pumping many billions into.
With the new research breakthrough, the fundamental quantum physics research is now in place. Now it’s time for others to take the researchers’ work and use it in their quests to deploy quantum physics in a range of technologies.
“It is too expensive for a university to build a setup where we control 15-20 quantum light sources. So, now that we have contributed to understanding the fundamental quantum physics and taken the first step along the way, scaling up further is very much a technological task,” says Lodahl.
The research took place at the Danish National Research Foundation’s “Center of Excellence for Hybrid Quantum Networks (Hy-Q)” and is a collaboration with the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.
Source: University of Copenhagen
The post Team controls two quantum light sources appeared first on Futurity.
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