pests

Lasers can already track and hopefully shoot down missiles, so perhaps it was inevitable that humans would turn that power against the airborne bloodsucker threat. Scientists from the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory showed their lasers tracking mosquitoes live during the TED 2010 conference, and also unveiled the awesome laser pew-pew effect in a new video. See the smoking hot results for yourself.

Bark beetles plague the forests of Canada so furiously you'd think rivers of blood and the death of the firstborn would follow hot on their heels. So far, no one has stopped the beetle rampage that has destroyed 33 million acres of trees in British Columbia. However, scientists at Northern Arizona University (NAU) may have devised a way to turn back the beetle tide using sound recordings.

Normally, the worst thing one of Germany's wild boars will do is ruin a field of corn, which is one of their favorite foods. Lately, however, as their population has exploded --  scientists estimate that it increased by 320 percent in Germany in the last year alone -- the pigs have been having more and more encounters with humans.

Food-borne illness frequently grabs headlines: tomatoes, peanut butter and, most recently, pistachios have all made people sick from salmonella and caused headaches for grocers across the United States.

Now, another food illness of sorts is popping up on the international radar screen -- only this one makes the food itself ill. Well, one of the plants that turns into much of our food, in any case. Scientists from 40 countries on six continents are fighting a virulent form of an old wheat disease that some fear could threaten 90 percent of the world's wheat crop. They aim to fight the fungus on the genetic level, hoping to prevent it from spreading to North America by replacing much of the world's wheat varieties with tougher plants.

“When we added the enzyme to a holding dam filled with run-off contaminated with atrazine, more than 90 per cent of it was removed in less than four hours,” says CSIRO Entomology’s Dr Colin Scott.

“Atrazine is a widely used and extremely useful herbicide but, depending on its use, can lead to residues that persist in water for sometime after application. Undesirable residues in water have led to restrictions on the use of atrazine in the EU and USA.

Researchers from the Universities of Sydney, Oxford and Cambridge have pinpointed a single neurochemical - serotonin - as the cause of swarming behaviour in locusts, in work published as the cover story in the prestigious journal Science on 30 January.

Locusts are one of the world's most destructive insect pests, affecting the livelihoods of one in ten people on Earth. However, whether or not a locust joins a devastating swarm depends entirely on its environment.

Dear EarthTalk: What green-friendly lawn and garden pesticides are available today? I'm particularly interested in options that won't harm my cats.
-- Nancy Blanchard, via email

Pesticides have greatly boosted agricultural yields over the last half-century, so it is no wonder, given the commercial availability of many of these synthetic chemicals, that American homeowners apply 100 million pounds of the stuff each year to make their own gardens grow bigger and faster, too.

The Brits are murdering pigeons. Unable to prevent the pests from pooping on the stuffy spectators and sweater-vested tennis players at the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (aka Wimbledon), officials have hired marksmen and instructed them to shoot to kill. Previous attempts to control the pigeons by releasing hawks were unsuccessful. PETA argues that shooting the birds is "cruel and illegal."