is maybe to get a drink ( Read more... )

I'd drive it to work...except I'd need a team of minions to do so. I could park it on the roof!
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/la_princesse_in_liverpool.html

This seems to be some further analysis of the earlies known spider fossils; apparently attercopus could produce silk, but not spin webs (although, I'd been under the impression that this was always the prevalent opinion, especially given that there were no flying insects at that time, and so no reason to spin webs). Plenty of modern spiders don't ( Read more... )

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Actually, it's been a couple of weeks, and I finally got the picture off the camera to post it!
Here's my new ink; right between my shoulder blades:


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There is a spider with the somewhat whimsical name Bhageera kiplingi that steals the little fat and protein plant bits that some acacia trees grow to feed their ant symbiotes. I always thought of spiders as obligate carnivores, though I suppose these plant bits are nutritionally similar to meat, so it isn't a tremendous adaptive stretch to be ( Read more... )

There is now a spider named for Neil Young. The extra cool part for me is that Jason Bond (the guy who named it) was a grad student with my former MS advisor. Last I'd heard he was studying brown recluse spiders in the Midwest, as a postdoc ( Read more... )