A Florida high schooler got anxiety meds from tarantua venom.
Relax, the spider is here to soothe you. Tampa Bay Times reported on Daniel Park, who won a state-wide science competition by using his computers […]
entomology
The Earliest Emperor Butterfly
IFL Science reports on the (beautiful) discovery of a (well-preserved) butterfly from 34 million years ago … a specimen with visible, identifiable wing patterns and […]
SONG: We Ate Each Other’s Wings
SONG: “We Ate Each Other’s Wings”. (OGG version here.) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “These roaches form exclusive long-term relationships after eating each other’s wings”, […]
Science Art: Eyes of Epeira conica x30, 1884
A spider’s face seen at 30-times magnification, from the February 1884 issue of Science Gossip. This is illustrating a sort of study, or perhaps prose […]
Cockroaches bond by eating each other’s wings.
NPR shares romance among the insects with research that shows at least one species of cockroach, Salganea taiwanensis, forms long-term pair-bonds. And, poetically, these cockroach […]
Honey bees navigate VERY precisely.
PhysOrg considers the flight paths of honeybees in three dimensions and finds that the insects are even more precise than anyone imagined: A team from […]
Science Art: Plate LXXXI from A natural history of British moths, 1872.
These are English moths, of the geni Rhodophaea, Oncocera, Aphomia, Galleria, Melliphora, Halias and Sarrothripa. Each species in this book has a description like: The […]
A cave full of 111,000 spiders in the dark.
Live Science goes into the brimstone of the underworld — a sulfuric cave literally named “Sulfur Cave” — on the border of Greece and Albania, […]
Hungry caterpillars eat plastic pollution
IFL Science introduces us to “plastivores” — a species of waxworm caterpillars (often thought of as beehive pests) that get fat gorging themselves on plastic […]
USDA finds what caused America’s biggest bee die-off.
Science shares research that identifies a massive killer of honeybees — a virus that’s carried by pesticide-resistant mites: U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between […]
Science Art: Pterophorus pentadactyla MHNT, by Didier Descouens
This is an image of a white plume moth, a photograph taken of a specimen in the Muséum de Toulouse in August of 2011. The […]
Science Art: Hoplocampa minuta, Plommonstekel Ugglan, 1920.
“A kind of sawfly living on plum trees,” according to the Wikimedia Commons gallery of images from Nordisk familjebok. They’re considered a pest — the […]
Farewell, murder hornets. We got you.
AP News reports that a particularly dramatic “invasive exotic” species – Vespa mandarinia, the Asian giant hornet, better known as the “murder hornet” – has […]
Hyper-sexual zombie cicadas… on speed.
That’s how the CBS headline starts, and I can only improve upon it by adding the drugs in the interest of accuracy. The story is […]
Science Art: Four Phymata species from “Notas Sobre Phymatidae Neotropicales II,” October 1951.
An illustration of four ambush bugs from Anales de la Sociedad Científica Argentina, found in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Or parts of ambush bugs. At […]