Roach rescue

Are women more afraid of snakes than men? Not so in the case of a 31-year-old Chinese resident of Guilin surnamed Qin.

Two years after graduating from university, Qin returned to her village in Guangxi province, southern China, to help her father raise snakes, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.

She now manages more than 60,000 reptiles, including over 50,000 five-step snakes, a highly venomous species of pit viper that she has to force feed with prepared food, and nearly 10,000 cobras.

Qin’s father knew that raising snakes would be dangerous for his daughter, but he could no longer handle the growing business by himself. With the reptiles, they produce dried snake, snake gall bladders, and snake oil for use in traditional medicine, while extracted venom is used in medical research.

If Qin has no fear of venomous snakes, another woman braves one of the scariest insects on earth.

Aw Rui Huan, a 28-year-old engineer, works at the Singaporean technology firm Robotics, Automation and Unmanned Systems Centre of Expertise, which conducts projects that enhance public safety.

In 2021, Huan told the Straits Times she was assigned to a team that was building a search and rescue robot.

She thought the device would look like a cockroach, but it turned out she would be fitting circuitry and sensors on live Madagascar hissing cockroaches so they could scuttle through disaster zones in search of survivors, Straits Times reports.

The circuitry works by sending electrical signals to the cockroach’s neuromuscular system to direct its movements, and cameras and sensors gather information processed by a machine-learning algorithm to determine if there are signs of life beneath the rubble.

Aw had no choice but to overcome her phobia of the disgusting bugs.

“I had to keep telling myself that the project was not as scary as I thought, that it would be very useful in the future,” Aw told Straits Times.

The insect-hybrid robot that Aw was working on was deployed in earthquake-hit Myanmar in 2025 to search for survivors in tight spaces that rescuers and larger machines may not be able to access, according to Straits Times.