Another way to alarm aphids
A new paper in Current Biology shows that aphids drop off their host plant when breathed on by an animal that's about to eat the plant: Mammalian herbivore breath alerts aphids to flee host plant.
Last week I discussed a paper about transgenic plants that make aphid alarm signals, scaring them away (at least for a generation or two). This latest paper suggests a related approach. Getting crops to release hot, humid "breath" might be hard, but could we make a machine to blast crops with artificial breath, maybe in greenhouses?