Just for Fun

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Quote of the Week

Enjoying insects is much the same whether you do it in your own garden or in a distant country. The rule is to watch, and interfere as little as possible.

- H. Oldroyd in The Insects in Your Garden (1976, Penguin Books Ltd; England)

Trendy Science? Acai Berries & Fruit Flies

Even Drosophila research is being influenced by the trends--here's a paper on the effects of acai berries in the context of a high-fat diet. Sun et al. (2010) Açai Palm Fruit (Euterpe oleracea Mart.) Pulp Improves Survival of Flies on a High Fat Diet. Exp Gerontol. PubMed PMID: 20080168.

RNAi in 30 Insect Species and Counting

On my desk today? A recently e-published review by Xavier Belles in the upcoming 2010 edition of Annual Reviews in Entomology, Beyond Drosophila: RNAi in vivo and functional genomics in insects.

Quote of the Week: Halloween Horrors

The name 'coffin-fly' has been applied to Conicera tibiais of the family Phoridae, because this fly is able to maintain itself through many successive generations in coffined bodies that have been interred for a year or more. The fact has long been known, but even today no one really knows how the fly gets there. It seems unlikely, for a variety of reasons, that the eggs are laid on the body before burial, and so either the adult fly or the larva must find its way down through several feet of soil. This seems a difficult feat when we think of its being performed by each larva or each adult fly, but, as in many problems to do with animals, time and continuity make most things possible.

from The Natural History of Flies by Harold Oldroyd

New on the DRSC Bookshelf

Two new things on the DRSC bookshelves these days. One practical. One just for fun.

(1) The Practical -- we have compiled a set of protocol & methods papers from the DRSC and other groups and organized them into a three-ring binder, so that people can take a look through and quickly find relevant protocols for cell culture, assays, transfection and so on. We have a digital folder of the PDFs as well.

(2) The Fun -- on my office bookshelf is a copy of the 2009 release Pictorial Webster's: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities by John M. Carrera (Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA, USA). Carrera compiled the images largely from 19th century dictionaries. The result is a quirky and interesting compendium of small engravings, many with the same kind of look I am used to from seeing (and appreciating) engraved and hand-drawn figures in older science texts and journals.

Breaking Report: RNAi Saves Chocolate!?

Caribe dos Santos et al. (2009) dsRNA-induced gene silencing in Moniliophthora perniciosa, the causal agent of witches' broom disease of cacao. In Fungal Genetics & Biology.

Presidential Smackdown

The New York Times asks "What has 132 Rooms and Flies?"  And answers: the White House. Video clip also on YouTube.

All that and the American Wandering Spider, too

Seeing an announcement for CSHL Press's Emerging Model Organisms: A Laboratory Manual, Volume 1 (link) has made me consider adding a new feature to the blog, "Books I wish I Owned." But would just owning this book be enough? Glancing at the list of emerging models, I am taken by two things. First, I was amused to see Dictyostelium discoideum on the table of contents. PubMed records on Dicty go back as far as the 1930s. Poor Dicty, still "emerging" after all these years! And second, would someone please set up a tank of comb jellies (Ctenophora), a colony of snails (Ilyanassa), or even a small terrarium of moss (Physcomitrella patens) in my office? These sound like fun critters to have around.

Quote of the Week: Making Friends

In rural sections of the southern United States, many people believe that if one removes a fly from a spider's web he will gain a friend.

from Wonders of the Fly World, Sigmund A. Lane (1970) Dodd, Mead & Co. New York.

Quote of the Week: Beach Colors

The insect-species confined to the sea-coasts, as every collector knows, are often brassy or lurid.

from Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species.

Make Way for Ducklings

It's not all research, all the time here at the DRSC. Thanks to all who joined us for spring fun on Friday.

Quote of the Week: Flu & Flying

What I recommend people [in airplanes] do is turn the overhead air releaser on to a low stream and position it so the flow goes in front of your face. That will increase the ventilation, at minimal, create a turbulence of air in front of your face. If a particle is coming by, that might be enough to push it out of the way.

M. Gendreau, Tufts University & Lahey Clinic

in When Flu Flies (Newsweek) April 27, 2009

Quote of the Week: Spring is for Gardening

Have you a pond in your garden? If not, why not think about making one? ... If you do this you won't have to spend much time gardening, and you will have so much more time to watch insects! ... You will not need to find insects to put in your pond; they will come by themselves.

From The Insects in Your Garden, Harold Oldroyd, 1976, Kestrel Books

Quote of the Week: If only ...

I recently overheard a now familiar conversation, one fly biologist lamenting to another that there is no feasible way to cryopreserve flies the way one can do with C. elegans, mammalian cells and (thankfully for the DRSC) cultured fly cell lines. But perhaps--given what some other flies can do--there is still hope for some solution to endless stock flipping?

... the larvae of Polypedilum vanderplanki can be completely dehydrated, and will enter into a state of 'cryptobiosis' during which all metabolic processes apparently cease ... The larva consumes no oxygen--it will survive in an atmosphere of pure nitrogen and it can withstand injuries that in normal life would set up a chain of disturbances that would kill the larva. When it is put back into water it quickly swells to normal size, and quietly resumes its breathing and feeding.

H. Oldryod, The Natural History of Flies

Web Wednesday--Distractions

Looking to be entertained? Tired of explaining why genetics is relevant to your relatives? Today's Web Wednesday focus is the Routes site out of the UK. It's genetics updated, with reality-style drama videos and a game that lets you create a creature, send it out into the ether and find out how well your genes fare in the population.