* Astronomy

Insects could be as smart as mammals, say scientists
Insects with minuscule brains may be as intelligent as much bigger animals, it was claimed yesterday.
Having a brain the size of a pinhead does not necessarily make you less bright, say researchers.
Computer simulations show that even consciousness could be generated in neural circuits tiny enough to fit into an insect's brain, according to the scientists at Queen Mary, University of London and Cambridge University.

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Staying at home may have given the very first termite youngsters the best opportunity to rule the colony when their parents were killed by their neighbours. This is according to new research supported by the National Science Foundation and published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers say the incentive to remain home with siblings and inherit the parents' estate could be the missing link to a question posed nearly 150 years ago by evolution theorist Charles Darwin. He wondered how natural selection could favour traits that reduce reproductive success among worker offspring in highly social insects.

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The analysis of a termite entombed for 100 million years in an ancient piece of amber has revealed the oldest example of "mutualism" ever discovered between an animal and microorganism, and also shows the unusual biology that helped make this one of the most successful, although frequently despised insect groups in the world.
The findings were made by George Poinar, an Oregon State University researcher and international expert on life forms found in amber. It was just published in Parasites and Vectors, a professional journal.
This particular termite was probably flying around while mating in a wet, humid tropical forest in what is now Myanmar during the Early Cretaceous period the age of the dinosaurs. It may have been attacked by a bird or somehow torn open, and then it dropped into the sticky, oozing tree sap that would later become amber, providing an opportunity for the biology of this ancient insect to be revealed in a way that would otherwise have been impossible.

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Title: Description of an early Cretaceous termite (Isoptera: Kalotermitidae) and its associated intestinal protozoa, with comments on their co-evolution.
Authors: George Poinar

BACKGROUND: The findings were made by George Poinar, an Oregon State University researcher and international expert on life forms found in amber. It was just published in Parasites and Vectors, a professional journal.
The remarkable mutualistic associations between termites and protists are in large part responsible for the evolutionary success of these eusocial insects. It is unknown when this symbiosis was first established, but the present study shows that fossil termite protists existed in the Mesozoic. RESULTS: A new species of termite (Kalotermes burmensis n. sp.) in Early Cretaceous Burmese amber had part of its abdomen damaged, thus exposing trophic stages and cysts of diverse protists. Some protists were still attached to the gut intima while others were in the amber matrix adjacent to the damaged portion. Ten new fossil flagellate species in the Trichomonada, Hypermastigida and Oxymonadea are described in nine new genera assigned to 6 extant families. Systematic placement and names of the fossil flagellates are based on morphological similarities with extant genera associated with lower termites. The following new flagellate taxa are established: Foainites icelus n. gen. n. sp., Spiromastigites acanthodes n. gen. n. sp., Trichonymphites henis n. gen., n. sp., Teranymphites rhabdotis n. gen. n. sp., Oxymonas protus n. sp., Oxymonites gerus n. gen., n. sp., Microrhopalodites polynucleatis n. gen., n. sp., Sauromonites katatonis n. gen., n. sp., Dinenymphites spiris n. gen., n. sp., Pyrsonymphites cordylinis n. gen., n. sp. A new genus of fossil amoeba is also described as Endamoebites proterus n. gen., n. sp. Fourteen additional trophic and encystid protist stages are figured and briefly characterised.
CONCLUSION: This represents the earliest fossil record of mutualism between microorganisms and animals and the first descriptions of protists from a fossil termite. Discovering the same orders, families and possibly genera of protists that occur today in Early Cretaceous kalotermitids shows considerable behaviour and morphological stability of both host and protists. The possible significance of protist cysts associated with the fossil termite is discussed in regards the possibility that coprophagy, as well as proctodeal trophallaxis, was a method by which some termite protozoa were transferred intrastadially and intergenerationally at this time.

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Nearly the length of a human arm, a recently identified stick bug from the island of Borneo is the world's longest insect, British scientists said.
The specimen was found by a local villager and handed to Malaysian amateur naturalist Datuk Chan Chew Lun in 1989, according to Philip Bragg, who formally identified the insect in this month's issue of peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa. The insect was named Phobaeticus chani, or "Chan's megastick," in Chan's honour.waiting for the tide to turn and the current to help take them back to land.

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