Mid-Life Chrysalis

I will be offline for several days, starting this evening, as I make the trek east to my new job. I’m still frantically stuffing things in boxes, but I am getting close to finished.

It’s a big transition from a research station to a main campus student-services-oriented job, but the folks I’m going to work with seem pretty cool. They also seem to see an online presence as a plus, rather than a negative, so while I’ll still be using my pseudonym for the foreseeable future, perhaps I’ll eventually be able to have a personal opinion in public.

(For those of you that missed the 2009 drama, my boss decided an anti-lobbying law applied to me since I had budgetary power over state funds. The outcome of this was that I was ordered not to speak about any policies or politics as my real self. And, for a while, not as an anonymous teal broad with antennae on the internet either.)

Until I get past that 6 month probation period, though, don’t expect any big reveals!  I hope that when I finally emerge from this midlife chrysalis that I look like Dr. Girlfriend from the Venture Brothers.

Here’s hoping for an uneventful move, and an exciting new chapter in my career.  And, I’m really happy to have landed a full time job with benefits.

Also? OMG check out these Monarch shoes.

Fruit Fly Pun-ishment

Two scientists met at the coffee pot.  The first scientist complained with a sigh that his colony of fruit flies never mated in his glass test enclosure. Given that his experiment required several generations to complete, this was a major problem.

The visiting scientist told him that she had experienced a similar problem at her lab, and it was caused by the slick glass walls of the mating arena. The flies of this particular strain of Drosophila keep sliding off and can’t mate. “Your glass is too slick,” she told him, “but I have just the remedy!”

The second scientist asked for a bottle of table salt and some flour and water. She mixed the concoction and brushed it on the glass walls. The flies began crawling along the surface and mated immediately.

“My problem is solved,” exclaimed the first scientist. “If only I had known that flies need monosodium glue to mate!!”

Pretty Hairs and Ant Egg Oil

All hail the internet, which has once again delivered something strange and wonderful to my virtual doorstep:

Ant Egg Oil Cream.

It is, as best I can tell, a traditional hair removal remedy from the middle east–Iran and Turkey, specifically.

You get all the common pitches in the marketing playbook:

“Tala Ant Egg Oil effect was proven in laboratory experiments with doctors. “

Of course, what exactly the doctors were actually experimenting with or about, who knows.  My experiment on human subjects with this product produced a nearly 100% response rate of “WTF.”  And I just showed them a picture.

We also can be sure it’s safe, because it’s:

“100% natural”

Of course, it’s actually “100% natural ANT EGG OIL, but hey, it’s natural so it must be safe!  Like…Hemlock! Or tetrodotoxin!

You are also warned to beware of substitutes:

“There are lots of fake ant egg oil products so you should buy original Tala Ant Egg Oil.”

Also, this is probably my most favoritest FAQ on the internet:

Q: Is this ant egg oil smell like ant ?

A: No. It doesn’t smell like ant.

Here is the thing that is marketing genius.  The way this stuff works? You remove all your hair FIRST.  Then you put the ant egg oil on and massage it in for about 10 minutes.  So, basically:

1. Shave or wax all your hair off
2. Apply Ant Egg Oil
3. Excelsior! Enjoy not having hair!

Part of the marketing pitch is that it is safe for babies.  In fact, putting it on babies specifically to prevent growth of hair is part of how this product is promoted.  Which, I suppose, is quite effective for about 14 years.

Lest you think that I am just making fun of an internet site put up by someone whose first language is clearly not English, I want to point out this much more upscale version, that pretty much repeats all the same marketing lines, with the same lack of evidence. Although they use numbers and percentages to make it look even more sciencey!

The breakthrough GUTTO Ant Egg Oil Cream reduces the amount of hair in the applied area by 65%, delays the re-growth by 75% and weakens by 46%. It is a completely natural product found as a result of scientific and dermatological tests.

It’s fascinating that on the same page where this company claims scientific testing found the product, they also use an Appeal to Antiquity/Argumentum ad Populum by telling us this stuff is derived from “widespread traditional usage of ant egg oil of Ottoman women.”

What I really want to know, but can’t find anywhere, is information on the manufacturing. What kind of ant eggs? And how do they get the eggs???

If, indeed, their claim that a protein in the ant eggs destroys the root of the hair is true, you are going to need a LOT of ant eggs in order to have enough to sell in creams.  Also, in general, my experience is that ants can get quite cranky about you taking their eggs.

Inquiring minds want to know.  If anyone happens to find more info, please send it along.

The mystery of sexual nomenclature

I have been cleaning frantically as I try to get ready for my last day of work. This means I have uncovered a huge array of strange and fascinating items, which I will now share for your edification (or horror).  Today’s exhibit: the collection of misspellings and mistakes on a freshman biology human sexuality exam I gave in 1998.

I taught freshman biology for about 17 years before I completely burned out. (I started having dreams about photosynthesis where chloroplasts were threatening to knee-cap me. I took that as a sign it was time for a job change.)

Each semester we would drag the kids through a human sexuality unit in hopes of encouraging them to practice safe sex, as well as understand their hormone-raddled bodies better.

It was actually a lot of fun; I demonstrated that you can actually put over 2 liters of fluid inside a condom, so complaints they were ‘too tight’ was suspect.  I made up “body fluids” which they could then exchange with other students (in paper cups!) to model sexually transmitted diseases.  I explained that oral herpes could become genital herpes.

Yep, they liked those classes. And each year, that exam was consistently the one on which students would score the worst.

Was it because they thought they knew it all? Was it because the topic was too mortifying? I don’t know.

The question on the exam that destroyed them was the same each year: Here’s a diagram of the human male and female reproductive tract. Label some parts.  The answers were just as hilarious as they were tragic:

Name two parts of the female external genitalia:  clavicle and clitorium.

This gave rise to a behind-the-scenes plans among the instructors to start a sex shop called the Clitorium Emporium, BTW. If anyone registers that domain name, I expect a cut of the action.

Some of the other answers were a bit disturbing; the scrotum was labled as “sodom” fairly often.

Someone labeled the bladder on the male diagram as the uterus, even though there was a rather conspicuous dangly bit in front!  It also was called the “Bilbo gland” once, which made me wonder if hobbits also had hairy…no, never mind about that.

I suspect that this is simply a symptom of our uptight high school system and fear of teen sexuality. I know that I would not have passed this exam as a freshman. Hell, I didn’t learn that hermaphrodite, bisexual, and homosexual were not the same until I was at least a sophomore in college.  Thanks Texas.

Was forcing these students to learn the names for the parts of their body worthwhile?  Does using the proper names really matter?

I think so, even if it made some students very uncomfortable. I feel like we should at least give students an owner’s manual to their body, and make them learn the parts.

When did you learn all this stuff? How did you learn it?

Aliens of the Amazon!

I was so excited to discover that there is actually a documentary about Membracids!  I don’t have television, so somehow missed this when it originally aired on the Science Channel in 2010. And best of all, some of the folks in it are people I went to grad school with.

I’ve always loved Membracids, and once you watch this you’ll be hooked too!

Part 1

Part 2: Climb into the canopy of the rainforest with some entomologists!

A beetle of a different sort

Just discovered this–it’s an ad for the new VW Beetle which ran during the Superbowl. For those of you that, like me, were not watching–I give you the 2011 VW Bug.

There is a different version of this video (warning; autoplay) which hilariously destroys YouTube, and also a “Making of” video. Enjoy.

How-to Taxonomic FAIL

I can’t remember who pointed this out to me, but it made me laugh. I present:  The photo of a “wasp nest” that is actually a mantis ootheca.

Ootheca is a fancy way of saying “egg case.” Both roaches and mantids create egg cases, which is one of the reasons they are sometimes grouped together.

Check out this fascinating video of a mantis creating an egg case.  (Interestingly, mantid egg cases are used in Chinese traditional medicine to treat urinary system problems. I have no idea how that connection came about.)

A mantis ootheca is not in any way like a wasp nest. The maximum size is about 1 inch in length (2.5cm).  Yellowjacket and hornet nests can get very big–this one was about 6ft by 5 foot.

That’s hardly average–the nests I tend to get on my house seem to be about a foot or so before I clue in they are there–but big enough that using this photo deserves a bit of mockery.

Spider Disco

The jumping spiders have always been one of my favorite groups. Even the most hardened arachnophobe usually will admit they are kinda cute. And now there is wonderful footage of some jumping spiders gettin’ it on down under.  (In Australia, you pervs!)

This wonderful video of the Australian peacock spider (Maratus volans) was created by Jurgen Otto.

At 3:01, suddenly everything goes disco and FABULOUS. Dance, little dudes! Dance!

You can also see a photo set of these spiders at Flickr.

Apparently, my site looks like crap on the iPad

Huh. I was just alerted by a reader that for reasons I know nothing about, my site is rendered completely differently on an iPad. Please accept my apology!

I will see what I can find out about that.  It’s a mystery to me.

Can eating insects prevent malnutrition?

A wonderful symposium on Entomophagy from the 2010 Entomological Society of America National Meeting is now (mostly) online in a series of videos.

I think one of the most interesting was from a a pediatric nutrition specialist (not an entomologist.)  It’s a bit long, and the video quality is dismal, but he tells a really fascinating story of how using insects in supplemental infant feed in Africa can produce great results.  It does not, regrettably, have a transcript available. *Cough*

M&Ms are Mealworms and Mopane worms