I even tried honey that was still pretty fresh from the hive when I visited a bee farm a couple of years ago. But imagine being able to get the freshest honey ever with your very own beehive that you can mount, right in your very own kitchen.

The Urban Beehive is a design by Clive van Heerden and Jack Mama. It’s part of a new project by Philips called the “Microbial Home.” Through the project, Philips envisions a future where the waste from one household might become fuel for another.

Philips also says that there are more benefits to the Urban Beehive than meets the eye. Aside from providing people with fresh honey, the Urban Beehive can also boost pollination and provide some sort of therapeutic value to the owners by just watching the bees hard at work.

But my only question now is: what’s in it for the bees?

[via Daily Mail]

Okay here’s the real deal (via Missouri State University):

That’s a fire ant on the left, looking just fine and fiery, ready to bite your little toe off. And here’s what could happen after the phorid fly’s Brain Buster attack: (via USDA-SABCL)

Ouch. Rob Plowes of the University of Texas summarizes the epic battle thusly: “…as the maggot eats a fire ant’s brain the ant begins to rove around mindlessly. After about two weeks, the ant’s head falls off, allowing the fly to emerge, seeking another fire ant to begin the cycle again.” The plan won’t eradicate the ants totally, just control the annoying ant’s population. And that’s good, because 20th Century Fox just got a hold of representatives from the warring insects and signed them on for a trilogy.

Developed by a team of DARPA-funded engineers – led by Michael Maharbiz – at the University of Skynet California at Berkeley, the beetle Borg is assimilated at its pupal stage; as the beetle matures, the “neural electrodes” implanted into its nervous and muscular systems become one with its body. Awesome. I meant poor beetle. tsk tsk tsk.

A microcontroller and microbattery are then mounted on the adult beetle, allowing that disembodied hand controlling that laptop in the image below to control the movement of the beetle, as in “initiation, cessation, elevation and left/right turns of the beetle flight.” Note to self: Possible weakness: beetle cannot be told to go backwards. Must tweet this to the Resistance.

Insects are already capable of awesome things despite their size. For example, the beetle is strong enough to carry a “small payload”, such as a camera or a tiny tiny nuke, perhaps strong enough to cause an outbreak of zits at Ground Zero. Okay that last one was my idea. Still scary though.

The UC team are planning on working on more cyborg insects, such as cyborg butterflies for long-distance missions, cyborg dragonflies for high-speed missions, cyborg moths with a 10-inch wingspan for carrying cargo, and cyborg grasshoppas for awesome Kung-Fu lessons. I made that last one up but you never know. You never know.

[Discover Magazine via Neatorama]