Harvard Gazette: Snaring secrets of the Venus flytrap
TMQ pointed out (or, more accurately, feared) that this was a federally funded study to determine exactly how the Venus flytrap was able to close, and found this a bad waste of money. I must disagree with him on two counts. First, it's the Venus flytrap... how incredibly cool! The PLANT EATS THINGS. That is badass no matter how you slice it. But second, and more importantly, nature has been developing cool things for about 4 billion years (or less if you're a intelligent design-ist; trust me, it knows how to do things. Like this amazing way of cooling chips that was inspired by the way that butterfly wings cool themselves. Sometimes I think we should spend MORE money figuring out how nature does the stuff it does... worst case: we have a detailed understanding of exactly how cool our world actually is.