The Kaspari Lab
Monthly Archives: February 2015
Marty’s World: the tragedy of pre-zygotic isolation
Happy Friday. (Click on image to see full size.) Marty’s World is Brittany Bensons’s view from the world below. © 2015
Read MoreThermal Diversity: the importance of a community perspective
In a Figure that Jon Shik says used a “shocking” color choice–but that the lead author (who is color blind) finds pleasant and peaceful–we plot the distribution of thermal maxima (or, CTmax, or “death temp”) of an assemblage of 87…
Read MoreNew Paper in Insectes Sociaux on Ants in Flight
Ant life cycles are complicated and varied, but in almost all species the queens have wings and fly through the atmosphere to mate and find new places to live. Drawing by Brittany Benson. Text by Jackson Helms. Go the publications…
Read MoreIntroducing “Marty’s World”
Marty’s World is Brittany Bensons’s view from the world below. © 2015
Read MoreThe joy of click
Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called these moments “mathematical experiences.” What I didn’t know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an…
Read MoreLitter Critters: Intro to the Mites and the ancestral group, the Opilioacarida
The greatest diversity of soil invertebrates is going to be found in the Acari, or, the mites. At the mention of the word ‘mite’, plenty of folks will instantly think of ticks – those specialized, blood-thirsty mites in the suborder…
Read MoreOh, snap!, molecular biology
I know, I know. Molecular biologists are an easy target for us field types. Just the other day Dr. Corrie Moreau, ant systematist extraordinaire, repeated an old joke with gusto over a Friday Skype: So a stranger comes up to a sheepherder and…
Read MoreAn achilles heel for bionic plants?
Cool news on the renewable energy front from Joseph Torella and colleagues published in a recent PNAS. The upshot: use photovolatic cells to provide electicity to a cobalt-phosphate catalyst that splits water into O’s and H’s, then feed those split-off H’s to an engineered soil…
Read MorePatton Oswalt on Grad School
Does anyone act more like an overserious senior citizen with time running out on their chance for immortality than someone in their twenties? Sounds like grad school to me. from Silver Screen Fiend, a memoir
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