Ok, this little device has been covered by USA Today (1, 2) and the Discovery channel last year. But it just fits so well into the theme of how basic science on invertebrates can have completely unforseeable applications.
But let's start from the beginning: For the last couple of decades, people have been training bees and wasps to recognize odors. Researchers did this to study how the brain learns. The reason to study bees and wasps was that they learn well and have a much simpler brain than humans.
Glen Rains at the University of Georgia puts trained wasps into a computerized device that automatically reads the behavior of the wasps and tells the user if the wasps are smelling the odor thay have been trained to (for example the odor of plastic explosives or of a dangerous fungal infection of a crop). He called this device "WaspHound" and I just got the PubMed abstract in (full text, requires subscription). With this device, a lot of money can be saved on training and maintenance of expensive dogs.
People should realize that basic research, even if it is only concerned with the lowly invertebrates, is worthy of public funding, because there's no telling what spectacular and/or useful applications might develop out of it one day.