Volume 8, Number 2: The Spring 2009 issue of Washington State Magazine
Friday, March 13, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Science marches on
University of California researchers, on a Pentagon contract, announced in January success at rigging a live flower beetle with electrodes and a radio receiver to enable scientists to control the insect's flight remotely. Pulses sent to the bug's muscles or optic lobes can command it to take off, turn left or right, or hover, according to a report in MIT Technology Review, and the insect's "large" size (up to a whopping four inches in length) would enable it to also carry a camera, giving the beetle military uses such as surveillance or search and rescue. The researchers admired the native flight-control ability of the beetle so much that they abandoned developing robot beetles (which required trying to mimic nature). [MIT Technology Review, 1-29-09, via newsoftheweird.com]
and:
Doctoral student Daniel Bennett filed a lawsuit against Britain's Leeds University in February because custodians had mistakenly thrown out research that he had been working with for the last seven years. Bennett is studying the rare Butaan lizard of the Philippines and over the years, to examine its diet, had painstakingly sifted through jungle dirt to gather over 70 pounds of its feces, which Bennett believes is worth far more than the ($720) Leeds has offered him. [Daily Telegraph, 2-5-09, via newsoftheweird.com]
and:
"Reproduction is no fun if you're a squid," said a biologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, referring especially to the deep-sea squid. Finding a mate a mile down in pitch-darkness is hard enough, but the combination of males that are smaller and fearful of being overpowered and females whose reception of sperm involves being stabbed makes the insemination process especially traumatic. Sperm deposits can be extensive and burdensome to the female and are delivered by the reckless slashing of the skin by the male. In fact, according to a December report in Germany's Der Spiegel, in the darkness the male sometimes misses the female altogether and inseminates himself. [Spiegel Online, 12-23-08, via newsoftheweird.com]
and:
Princeton University scientists, reporting in January on research in Peru, said they observed aggressive, carnivorous behavior for the first time among dung beetles, which decapitated and ate millipedes. Dung beetles were not known previously to be fussy eaters (except for a 2006 study in which they seemed to prefer horse dung to camel dung or sheep dung). [Daily Telegraph (London), 1-21-09, via newsoftheweird.com]
Friday, March 6, 2009
Friday coffee break: Eggcorns
If you can answer yes to any of the following questions, then you may have to check your own nest for eggcorns: When you really care about a cause, do you try to strum up support? Are you a perfectionist who hates to do things half-hazardly? Do complex moral issues fill you with a paralyzing cognitive dissidence? And finally, are you tired of paying exuberant prices?
Friday coffee break: Soda, Pop, or Coke?
The Dictionary of American Regional English, a comprehensive lexicon of local language quirks, nears completion
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Time Traveler's Phrasebook
Research from the University of Reading suggests that anybody who was catapulted back in time to Ice Age Europe would stand a good chance of being intelligible to the locals by using words such as "I", "who," and "thou," and the numbers "two", "three," and "five."
From the Times Online.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
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