Welcome to Expiscor! All sorts of discoveries… at your fingertips.
- So much hype about deadly spiders in the UK – thankfully BUG GIRL TO THE RESCUE. Go read her post, folks.
- Here’s another measured and rational post about false widow spiders in the UK.
- Monstrous verminous – some thinking about why we fear bugs.
- The Entomological Society’s annual meeting ended last week – here’s Sean McCann’s wrap-up post (and photos)
- Here’s Crystal Ernst’s take on post-conference excitement, and an honest portrayal of struggles in grad school. An important read (you’re not alone).
- At that conference, David Shorthouse put together a really amazing tool – a twitter capture tool that links bugs to literature.
- Just prior to that conference there was a photo workshop hosted by Alex Wild. Here are some of the stunning images from that workshop.
- Speaking of images from that workshop, here’s a black widow for you, taken by Alex (thanks for the permission to use your photos here, Alex!)
- Neat paper by Nash Turley et al. Habitat patch shape determines herbivory and fruit production in an annual plant.
- Tick collector – expect the unexpected... up your nose.
- Comic Ant-thology. Very awesome.
- Roll that poo. Dung beetle game awaits…
- You wil BEE amazed at these SEM images from the Smithsonian magazine blog.
- A must-have t-shirt for Entomologist – Eat. Sleep. Collect.
- A clew of worms. A clutter of spiders. A murder of crows. Here’s an amazing site with a rather impressive list of collective nouns.
- Pronunciation of biological latin names. Wow – I make a lot of mistakes. (thanks, Ted for that link)
- The latin name discussion came in part from the best hashtag I’ve seen in a while – #ReplaceWordsWithBugs. This also made it difficult to highlight a tweet of the week. Even though there is debate about how to pronounce “…..dae” at the end of family names, this is still a winner, from Adrian Tchaikovsky:
- VRAK. How to sound like a frog in 10 languages. (thanks Heidi for that link!)
- Creepy and cool science art: Trilobite boy.
- Heat a house or a body? My colleague and friend Murray Humphries recently published a paper about city-scale human thermoregulation – bottom line: put on a sweater!
- I love this post by Derek Hennen about the value of twitter to a young scientist. Well said, Derek.
- Liz Neely writes about ‘warmth’ in scientists and in science communication – very thought provoking.
- In the spirit of Halloween… BLOODY FINGERS! Yum yum.
- Students text a lot during class. In my opinion, this means there’s also a problem with the content and/or instructor. Students need to engage, but Profs must also adapt. Right -so I will have to write blog post on this (stay tuned)
- McGill is entering the world of MOOCs —> first up, Food for Thought.
- How professors are using social media – nifty infographic.
- Speaking of nifty – turn your i-phone into a microscope!
- Darwin’s son draws some pretty lovely pictures!
- Here’s a Halloween-themed “Simon’s Cat”, featuring a spider:
Arthropod Ecology 