Welcome to the Kotky Ride Home for Tuesday, October 12th, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird today. What is it that makes spiders so frightening to us? And why do most of us kill them without sparing a second thought? Plus, a Scottish nightclub that's using the body heat of their dancing patrons to heat

and cool the venue.

And Prince Charles, trying to out British everyone else, fuels up his Aston Martin with

England's finest wine and cheese byproducts.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

You might remember me recently talking about the spotted lanternflies that have been taken over the east coast of the U.S.

or you've encountered local warnings about them. The invasive

species have evoked kill-on-site orders from local governments and ecologists due to their

potential to massively disrupt trees and crops. But part of why the strict messaging had to go out

was because the spotted lanternflies are actually

really cool looking, kind of nice. You know, they don't look like the kind of bug you'd want to

immediately squash to death, so officials knew that people would need the extra push to get the job

done. But one pest that we humans seem to have no trouble killing as soon as we see them,

spiders.

The BBC recently dug into why it is that so many of us are what they call casual spider murderers.

First, they share some interesting background about spiders, quoting the BBC.

Though our evolutionary paths diverged at least 530 million years ago, we share many of the same organs and body parts, such as kneecaps and similar brain chemicals from dopamine to adrenaline. No one has ever studied spider emotions directly, but it's easy to imagine that they might be more relatable than you would think. End quote.

In some smaller species, their brains are actually in their legs, but regardless of where it's

located, spiders appear to be super smart. They're able to plan ahead to outwit their prey and are, of course,

able to make those intricate webs. Some of them can even spell out messages in their webs.

Okay, probably not really, unless the spider's name is Charlotte, and she's working hard to save some pig named Wilbur.

But spiders can live for a really long time, when we humans aren't flattening them with a rolled-up magazine, that is.

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