A slow day at the Guardian

The Observer | World | Smelly yet highly sociable mini-robot proves fatally attractive to cockroaches

The Guardian website has a story about robot cockroaches, but no photo.

The first story appears to have run on the Discovery channel, a few weeks ago, and it does feature a picture. The robot looks a little like a tiny car to me. Maybe cockroaches are just all rev-heads who like checking out new cars in the neighbourhood.

That cockroaches have favourite hiding places, presumably marked by a smell, seemed clear to me some years ago when I lived in a townhouse. There was a particular place in the courtyard (a crack under a high beam on the wall), where I could always be assured that a squirt of flyspray would flush out one or two big roaches. Night after night, they just never got sick of going there, even though it was not an obvious source of food.

To have a robot to use to flush them out sounds sort of fun. Better than watching most TV these days anyway.