The rights to name an Osedax species is up for grabs for $25,000.
To set the prices, Scripps researchers considered several factors, including rarity, the species' importance to science and how expensive and difficult it was to collect. Also for $25,000, one's name can be on a deep sea worm affectionately called the green bomber, which drops luminescent green particles to distract predators.
Not that I have the answers and I make no comment on ramifications of such, but what are you thoughts on auctioning off species names? More at the San Diego Union Tribune.
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Excessive warmth attributable to global warming and a stalled weather system, also attributable to global warming, have caused a weather system in over southeast China to dump rain since May 12th.
The current Wikipedia entry for Climate Change has about 7000 words on that one page (including notes, all the other words that show up on Wikipedia pages).
This is a press release from the Center for Inquiry:
Or something. David Wescott brings a strong dose of reality to the myth of overpaid public sector workers:
Osedax, eh? This must be Adrian Glover theme week! I think this selling species name thing might be a good mechanism for raising funds for the Beagle project...
A little dated, but see also the Auction of the Blue.
Jason, I thought of you when I read this, remembering your earlier post.
Karen, ahem...*wink wink nudge nudge*
On some level, I get it, but personally, I don't like it - I blogged about this and had a nice little discussion started in the comments a few months back.
I think they might get more money at auction if they offered to name a zombie bone-eating worm after someone's ex-spouse. Yet more controversy there of course.