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Archive for January, 2010

Sunday Night Movie: Frontier Psychiatrist (The Avalanches)

Posted in fun, tagged avalanches on January 10, 2010 | 7 Comments »

From Australia’s The Avalanches, a song and video even more delightfully bizarre than last week’s movie. (via gtcaz)

Paratrechina is so 2009 – Nylanderia is back in

Posted in Ants, Science, Taxonomy, tagged Ants, Evolution, myrmecology, Paratrechina, Taxonomy on January 9, 2010 | 8 Comments »

What are ant taxonomists buzzing about this week?* Well. A hot new paper by John LaPolla, Seán Brady, and Steve Shattuck in Systematic Entomology has killed Paratrechina as we know it.

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Saturday links

Posted in Ants, Insect Links, Science, tagged Insects on January 9, 2010 | Comments Off

Benoit Guenard notes that 2009 was a busy year for new ant genera The NCSU insect blog has moved to a new URL: http://blog.insectmuseum.org/ Bug Girl blogs snow fleas This is an amazing wasp xkcd shows the difference between movie science and real science Also, this:

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Ant Course 2010: Borneo

Posted in Ants, Science, Taxonomy, tagged Ant Course, borneo, myrmecology on January 8, 2010 | 2 Comments »

ANT COURSE 2010 Danum Valley Field Centre, Sabah Borneo, August 16 – 26 DEADLINE FOR APPLICATION: April 1, 2010 click here for application form COURSE OBJECTIVES. – ANT COURSE is designed for systematists, ecologists, behaviorists, conservation biologists, and other biologists whose research responsibilities require a greater understanding of ant taxonomy and field research techniques. Emphasis [...]

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More Ice Abstracts

Posted in illinois, Nature, tagged ICE, macro photography, Photography, winter on January 5, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Yesterday afternoon, perhaps tired of keeping up with the subzero temps, our furnace up and quit. We were able to keep the house somewhat above freezing until the repair guy installed the replacement bits this morning. We’re all fixed now. But the outage wasn’t without a bright side: the ice crystals on the windows grew [...]

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Rare amber ants on ebay

Posted in Ants, Insect Links, Science, tagged Ants, ebay, Evolution, fossils on January 4, 2010 | 12 Comments »

Here’s something unusual for the well-financed collector: Paraneuretus, an extinct genus from a nearly extinct subfamily of ants. This pair of fossilized worker ants is selling on ebay today for over $400. Out of my budget for these sorts of things. Most amber ants up for auction belong to common extinct species: Azteca, Tapinoma, Camponotus [...]

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Sunday Night Movie: She Blinded Me with Science

Posted in fun, Science, tagged 1980s, Thomas Dolby on January 3, 2010 | 5 Comments »

The classic ’80s video from Thomas Dolby: I’m still not sure what it means. But I do hope they keep a room for me at the Home for Deranged Scientists.

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