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Moller, who now works at high-ranked Paris-Saclay University, said he began studying birds — and the insects they eat — in the late 1960s. In the mid-1990s, he got it in his head that counting windshield splatters might help track difficult-to-measure insect populations. He couldn’t persuade a graduate student to take up the observations, so he hit the roads himself.
Every summer, despite serious health issues that have kept him in and out of hospitals for the past decade, he and his assistants return to Denmark to drive battered budget vehicles back and forth, hundreds of times, along the same rural routes studded with farms in the north of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula.
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A tip of the hat to Bjarne who notes this may be worthy of an Ignoble Prize
And then there's this about insect swarms and electric fields.
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"We always looked at how physics influenced biology, but at some point, we realized that biology might also be influencing physics," says first author Ellard Hunting, a biologist at the University of Bristol. "We're interested in how different organisms use the static electric fields that are virtually everywhere in the environment."
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