The Mystery of the Indestructible Beetle
Jesus Rivera liked to scan Craigslist for crashed motorcycles. The first one he ever took home was a totaled green Suzuki GSX-R. It took him about a year, tinkering with wires, cutting metal, and forging new parts in the subterranean machine shop of the engineering building at UC Irvine, but he and a small group of fellow grad students in the materials science program eventually turned the motorcycle into a Formula One–style race car. … The first eerie thing Rivera read about the diabolical ironclad beetle, or Phloeodes diabolicus, was the pushpin thing.