Defending public investment in entomology

Watch beetle guru Anthony Cognato trying to deal with Fox News ignoramus Tucker Carlson: It isn’t news that Fox News isn’t, um, news. Nor is it news that Fox can’t grasp the benefits of public investment in knowledge creation- perhaps because actual knowledge is anathema to their business model. But I digress. I’m going to [...]

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How did ant science get into the stimulus bill?

In reading various web reactions to news that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contained nearly 1 million dollars for ant research at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, it seems there’s a lot of confusion about how something like ant behavior winds up getting a stimulus check.  Here’s an explanation.

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Republicans target myrmecology as “pure waste”

The Republican Party speaks: GOP senators on Tuesday highlighted “pure waste” in the billions of stimulus funds spent this year, including money for fossil research in Argentina, puppet shows and to protect cruise ships from terrorist attacks… What does the Republican Party consider wasteful? Science, apparently:

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Health Care Reform and Photography

Every year my part-time photography business does a little better than the year before.  A few new clients, a few new venues, a few more visitors to my web sites.  It’s not a meteoric rise by any measure, but considering the current economic situation I am counting my blessings. Naturally, of course, when business is [...]

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Blagojevich and the Ants

I can’t help but feel gleeful at this morning’s news.   Back in January I had landed, I thought, a postdoctoral position at the Illinois Natural History Survey.  It was a dream job.  I’ve been itching for years to figure out what’s really going on with the evolutionary history of Camponotus, a hugely important ant genus [...]

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Dear Australia,

While you’re at it, why not just have a good old-fashioned book-burning?

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In line at the polling place…

…and the woman behind me was holding a tearful and very disappointed three year old girl. “She thought we were going ‘boating’,” she explained.

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Public Service Announcement: Drosophila is not a Fruit Fly

Fruit flies are a family, Tephritidae, containing about 5,000 species of often strikingly colored insects.  As the name implies, these flies are frugivores.  Many, such as the mediterranean fruit fly, are agricultural pests. Drosophila melanogaster, the insect that has been so important in genetic research, is not a true fruit fly.  Drosophila is a member [...]

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