Forget shark week — it’s shark season in New England. The first great white sighting of the season was confirmed May 11 when a seal with a shark bite washed ashore on Nantucket in Massachusetts, and for the second year in a row, researchers in the state will be using an innovative method to help […]
Our planet is home to around 1 million known insect species, and about 1%-3% of them are considered pests, per the National Pesticide Information Center. But which one has been bugging humans the longest? A team of scientists led by two Virginia Tech researchers think they’ve figured it out: In a study published Wednesday, they suggest that bed bugs were the first human pest. The bugs began their pesky relationship with people when they hopped off a bat and attached themselves to a Neanderthal around 60,000 years ago, the authors say — and they’ve stuck around their human hosts ever since. But according to the researchers, the populations of bed bugs that stayed with bats have been declining since the Ice Age, also known as the Last Glacial Maximum, around 20,000 years ago.
