Cicadas are the soundtrack of summer, but their pee is more special than their music. Rather than sprinkling droplets, they emit jets of urine from their small frames. For years, Georgia Tech researchers have wanted to understand the cicada's unique urination.
Got to say it: “understanding cicada piss is key for greener tech” is not something I’d expect.
But I digress. A cool thing about studying biological systems is that nature already spent millions of years weeding out systems that don’t work; if cicadas still jet urine instead of dropping it, they got some “trick” to do it in an energy-efficient way that we don’t know yet.