First Book Of The Year

This is the first book I'm reading this year! I'm already 50 pages into it, and loving it. I'm a huge fan of anything with more than four legs, and so this book is right up my alley! Here's three things I've learned so far:

1) Fairy wasps spend their entire larval stage within the eggs of other insects

2) Male honeybees have no fathers, as they come only from unfertilized eggs, while the females are from the fertilized eggs.

3) Praying Mantises eat and kill their mates less often in their natural habitat than they do in laboratory settings.

I'm excited to keep reading! Also, if you have any book recommendations, let me know! Especially if it'll help me get buggy with it!

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

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buggybugblog

1 month ago

From now until May 1, 50% of proceeds from sales of the Re: Dracula Audiobook and Re: Carmilla Supercut will be going to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund!

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buggybugblog

1 year ago

Is the fur on some bugs (like bees or caterpillars or moths) an example of convergent evolution with mammals or is the fur on those bugs not fur but something else?

I suppose any fibrous body coating like bird feathers, mammalian fur, or arthropod setae used for protection/insulation/sensation etc could be considered convergence on a functional level, but insect “hair” is an entirely different material!

arthropod setae are made of chitin (a polysaccharide), while your hair is made of keratin (a protein). setae can have many different forms, such as stiff bristles, sensory hairs, or the scales on butterflies, moths, and other arthropods. here is a good resource if you’d like to read about the various types of setae and their functions: