Archive for April, 2010

Ants on Télé-Québec

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 | Ants, Ontogeny, Personalities | 1 Comment

Télé-Québec, Canada, aired on March 23 a small documentary of the ant research done by the laboratory of Ehab Abouheif, from McGill University. Abouheif lab looks at ant evolution from a still unusual developmental perspective.

It is worth watching, even thought I can’t embed it here, so you will have to watch it on their site (together with the advertisements, of course). And, if you don’t speak French, don’t worry, you’re not alone…

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Blogging runs in families

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 | Metablogging | 5 Comments

Families of closely related topics that is. Morgan D. Jackson set out to reconstruct the phylogeny of insect blogs:

You will think that a blog with the name of Archetype would be very close to the root of the tree, if not being the root itself. Oh well, this blog seems to be well nested in a clade “higher up”. But look at the bright side, Archetype’s sister blog is excellent and the one that lead me into blogging in the first place.

From the archive

The gang-of-four ready to take over the ant world. From left: Philip Ward, Seán Brady, Ted Schultz and Brian Fisher at the IUSSI congress in Sapporo, Japan.

It was at the XIV international meeting of the International Union for the Study of Social Insects in 2002 that the “gang of four” decided to join forces to reconstruct the phylogenetic history of ants using molecular data.  Four years later Brady et al. 2006 was published.

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The oldest known [cough… African… cough] ant

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 | Ants, Metablogging, Publishing, Science, Web | 8 Comments

Here’s a perfect example of what I like about blogs becoming an integral communication tool for the scientific community and interested folks alike:

Cretaceous African ant in amber (Courtesy of Vincent Perrichot via http://myrmecos.wordpress.com)

  1. A peer-review paper gets published;
  2. The media gets hold on the story;
  3. The blogs react: scientists and general public fill the comments section (in the genuine tone of the internets);
  4. The authors of the original paper join in the discussion.

Discussion may get heated, comments may get bitter, but the results are always rewarding for all.

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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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