🔖GLOSSARY

pesky🦠

making someone annoyed or irritated

potential

likely to develop into a particular type of person or thing in the future

sensor📟

a piece of equipment used for discovering the presence of light, heat, movement etc

tune

to make small changes to (something) in order to make it work better

prolong

to make (something) last or continue for a longer time

deploy

to organize and send out (people or things) to be used for a particular purposeto fly in the opposite direction

📚 COCKROACH TO THE RESCUE

We begin with cockroaches🦠, which are usually extremely unwelcome💢 in most buildings🏡. But a team of engineers👨‍🔬 in Singapore has turned these pesky 💀insects that can squeeze🔃 through the tiniest gaps into potential life savers💪 at disaster sites🚧. The idea is to attach a tiny backpack🎒 to the bug loaded with sensors 📟 that could possibly detect if someone👩‍👩‍👦 is inside a collapse building🏚️ for example, or could warn📢 at the presence of dangerous gases⚡⛽ like carbon dioxide.

TRY THE cluES:

🦠💢🏡, but👨‍🔬💨💀.

With 🎒and📟, 🦠🔃🚧; 🦠💪👩‍👩‍👦; 🦠📢⚡⛽.

However, the engineers can’t just use any garden variety of cockroach🦠 for this type of work. They need the Madagascar Hissing cockroach✅, because it’s two and a third inches long, about 20 percent longer than the average one. There are still work to be done to find to tune this effort, including ways to prolong ⏩ the battery life🔋 of the sensors.
But the team hopes to be able to deploy these cy-board bugs🤳 in the field within the next five years.

TRY THE cluES: If 🦠✅， If 🔋⏩，🦠🤳.