zapporian
zapporian t1_ivhrbs9 wrote
Reply to comment by okgusto in English company Oxitec has released a simple, easy to distribute commercial product they say cuts Dengue Fever spreading mosquito populations by 96%. By just adding water, genetically modified mosquito eggs mature into males whose sperm cannot result in viable female larvae. by lughnasadh
Bats and birds eat them. And the males are pollinators (and ofc don't suck animal blood; only the females do, for egg-laying)
And there's probably more cascading elements that I'm not aware of, but at a minimum they (and their larvae) are a fairly abundant food source for all kinds of small animals (incl amphibians, fish, etc)
There isn't really any animal in the natural world that doesn't have some kind of a supportive role somewhere, outside of pure internal parasites and the like.
zapporian t1_je42qr7 wrote
Reply to comment by Narwhalbaconguy in Ukraine Defense intelligence shows insides of Shahed drones, which Russia uses to attack by DoremusJessup
Sans the explosive warheads, literally all of the fairly new, revolutionary drone tech being used in ukraine right now is civilian tech, and can be improvised pretty trivially by any small group of people with some kind of engineering background.
It's a damn good thing that terrorists and pissed off political agitators have apparently not realized – just yet – that you can just strap an IED to a cheap FPV drone off of alibaba and start running around assassinating politicians from concealed positions 1km away or whatever. Or just drop pipe bombs from a heavier hexa / octa copter a la Ukraine: heck, the designs and release mechanisms that Ukraine is using for their jury rigged grenade / mortar shell delivery drones is practically open source at this point.
Anyways the Shahed isn't even 21st century drone tech; that thing is just (more or less) a mid-sized hobbyist RC plane kit, packed with explosives, that uses GPS to navigate towards a preselected geographic target. Literally just an ad hoc WW2 V1 (and with a similarly terrible accuracy rate), but built with mostly off the shelf parts that anyone in the west (or in iran, apparently) could acquire and build given sufficient time and engineering resources.
No two bit terrorist is gonna engineer and build a shahed though: much, much easier to just build (and test) pipe bombs or whatever. And the issue, again, is that you could literally just strap a pipe bomb to an FPV, and have a fairly accurate guided munition that any idiot off the street could use.
Technically speaking, yes, just about any sufficiently motivated individual could probably build and launch a shahed by themselves – but you'd have to be a pretty particular kind of terrorist wierdo to want to and be capable of doing that.