I'm in the process of exhuming myself from under a mountain of work, that's why the posting's been ultra-light. My last link to cool pictures of bugs went over well, so I'm giving you a few more pictures. These come from a friend's website -- be sure to check out the bee and its hitchhiker.
More like this
Tomorrow's NOVA on PBS covers the great orange butterflies on their migration to Mexico:
I think this is my favorite newspaper headline yet: Priest attached to party balloons vanishes in Brazil.
A research group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has produced ultrastiff ultralowdensity metamaterials by 3D printing of microarchitected microlattices.
Tougher than steel and Kevlar, the silk of the black widow spider has long been coveted by manufacturing companies, defense contractors and comic-book reading nerds as a possible material of the future.
If you like these things, there's a great book called "The Smaller Majority" of photographs by zoologist Piotr Naskrecki. Apparently, he didn't stage the photos, but waited in the muck outside until he got the shots he wanted (how brave!).
There was a brief interview with him on Science Friday last fall:
http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2005/Nov/hour2_110405.html
Wonderful pictures. I did flit on over and comment on the hitchhiker. Is not a parasitic wasp but another bee, not of the same species as the bumble bee,