Archive for January, 2010

The good old days of entomological journals

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 | Ants, Humor | 1 Comment

Yes, the discrete logo appeared at the front of each research article.

The articles may have been long, descriptive and rather dull (although important), but boy did they made up for it with crazy typography in the journal’s logo!

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Blogging at its rawness

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 | Education, Science, Technique | Comments Off on Blogging at its rawness

Weirdbuglady stuffs a real animal for a change, and shows us the whole process with detail pictures.

Finger puppet!

I agree with her, preparing animals that have the skeleton on the outside is way easier and much more cleaner.

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Three legs (at any given time) are better than any other number

Friday, January 22nd, 2010 | Ants, Behavior | Comments Off on Three legs (at any given time) are better than any other number

Blogging has been at the bottom of my list of priorities as I adjust to my new research institution this month. Add a week away visiting colleagues in Paris [yeah, I’m adding this just for bragging purposes] and you will understand the lack of posts.

In the past couple of days I have been doing some background literature research on the topic of insect walking. What I did not know is how big this field is compared to other topics in entomology. The reason behind this popularity is, unsurprisingly, the fact that the results of such research have a direct technological application: robotics. In particular six legged robots or hexabots (they should be called something like hexapodbots, but I guess the shorter name is cooler).

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Ants, bees, wasps and everything nice

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 | Ants, Science, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Ants, bees, wasps and everything nice

The 7th International Congress of Hymenopterists will be held this year in Köszeg, Hungary, on June 20th to 26th. This meeting is organized by the International Society of Hymenopterists, which meets every four years to bring together the people doing research on sawflies, wasps, bees and ants around the globe. I’ll say these meetings are generally more heavily oriented towards systematic and ecological type of studies (is there anything else to know about?).

Now, the fact that the registration fee includes ethanol and ethyl acetate (for preserving the locally collected fauna) should tell you something about the level of geekiness of the crown that normally attends these meetings. But, it’s professional geekiness mind you.

You can find more information here (pdf).

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More on the insect cabinet on display at the AMNH

Friday, January 1st, 2010 | History of Science, Personalities, Uncategorized | Comments Off on More on the insect cabinet on display at the AMNH

I previously wrote about a beautiful insect cabinet currently on display at the American Museum of Natural History thought to belong to naturalists Alfred Russell Wallace. I also noted that George Beccaloni, from the the Natural History Museum in London, holds that the cabinet may not be Wallace’s on account of some pieces of evidence, including the differences in shape between the labels of the AMNH cabinet and that of known Wallace’s specimens at the NHM.

Now Beccaloni provides further evidence to back his opinion in the form of a letter written by Wallace to Walter Bates in 1846. Read for yourself and decide.

Oh, and a happy new year to all the readers of this blog!

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And as we discussed last semester, the Army Ants will leave nothing but your bones.
- Tom Waits

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