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If you travel to central London tomorrow or Sunday, you may very well see them for yourself; just make sure you practice your most regal bow for you may meet the Sultan himself...

Quite how they achieved this feat was long unknown. Boys are haploid, they carry only one set of their chromosomes; whereas girls get the usual two copies. One thing that is usually thought to be derived exclusively from the sperm (not present in the egg) is a wonderous structure called the centrosome, critical in the ability of cells to divide. The current research shows that, at least in the parasitic wasp studied (pictured above is Muscidifurax uniraptor, one of those studied), anomolous organelles called accesory nuclei (that bud off the main nucleus) can be crafted into a centrosome. It takes a lot of cellular energy to do so, and thus sperm are still more efficient for making the bulk of the useful female population (though Queens often store sperm so males are needed yet for but seconds of their life). This feat of construction means that the social insects, unique among the kingdoms of life, could dispense with lazy, good for nothing men until needed in the ultimate quest for efficient civilisation.

Insects that produce males from unfertilized eggs reveal a surprising cellular feat

Beautiful. More than half a million people demonstrated against H.R. 4437 in Los Angeles recently. H.R. 4437, aka "The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005", is a sadly hysterical bigoted bill that makes small immigration offenses "federal crimes". And most shockingly, that applies to people who know of others who may not have 'legal' status. Thus non-governmental organizations and support groups become accessories to commiting federal crime. The US, above all, was and is built on the vibrant incessant motor of immigration, it is the essential heft of its being. Sadly bigotry and hatred is an ingrained crease on our human being, and politicians play brutally callous games, using fear of the "other" to win support as tough do'ers. Facist Germany knew this well, playing on anti-semitism to unify society using hysterical fear of the other.

Remember , remember always, that all of us... are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

For me, the current abuse of fear to gain favour with voters, both in the US and here in the UK, is a pathetically brutal tragedy. The human cost is hidden by flag waving and unfounded fear of alien invasion.

Alien: An American sovereign in his probationary state.
Ambrose Bierce

Immigration has been shown time and time again to be beneficial. Financially it hugely stimulates the economy; immigrants use less public funds and pay more tax. Western companies drop their costs drastically using 'illegal' labour and thus further stimulate the economy.

Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.
John F. Kennedy

Vastly more important for me (the clear economic advantages frankly disturb me; manipulation of human misfortune to further profit) are the cultural benefits. It is wonderful to live in a community where you can share human experience, no matter where it came from. It is challenging and rewarding to live amongst the huge diverse plethora of fellow humans. Music, food, art and experience all melt in the fermenting stew of our culture. My culture is partly Indian, Caribbean, African, Persian, Latin American, East European, Arab and Asian.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Emma Larzarus

I am happy to see current American immigrants organising and working to get their voice heard; a voice calling for humanity, compassion and fairness. I wish them all the best in their struggle.

Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations.
Walt Whitman

More Than 500,000 Rally in L.A. for Immigrants' Rights - Los Angeles Times

Some of the stories are tragic. A friend of a friend jumped from a high building and hit a parked car several stories below. She broke most of her bones and punctured several of her inner organs, but didn't die. Instead she was wheeled, conscious, to the local emergency rom, her most privately conceived act announced to the world by the ambulance siren. She spent the next year in bed, much of it in a hospital ward allocated to critically ill victims of violence, her still suicidal mind the only functioning part of her body.

They also collate a series of suicide notes here ...

... appreciation of “insects in art and the art of being an insect”, the Pestival aims to create positive PR for this 400-million-year-old, highly evolved taxon that has had thousands of years of bad press.

is happening soon in London. With a humourous title of Pestival the programme includes:

• Dr. Mark Benecke: Adventures in Forensic Entomology — Benecke will enlighten us with his knowledge and understanding of maggot behaviour, illustrating his talk with fresh and juicy demonstrations.
• Dr. Claire Preston: The Art and Allure of the Bee — Claire Preston follows the natural and cultural history of our relationship with the bee and the development of these legends, from ancient political descriptions of the bee to Renaissance debates about monarchy, and the accompanying scientific discoveries about insects, to the modern conversion of the virtuous, civil bee into the dangerous swarm of the Hollywood horror flick.
• Prof. David Rothenberg: Why Do Insects Sing? — Crickets, cicadas, katydids, cecropia moths. They're the original polyrhythmacists, jammers in the dark, trance tuners of the dark soundwaves of night. Music is at the center of their lives, as they sing to find each other, to celebrate the warming of the seasons, their sonic place in the ecology. Science knows the reasons, but not the grooves. Why do insects synchronize across species lines? Why do they produce sounds we can enjoy, which they are sometimes unable to hear themselves?
• Films including Ladislaw Starewicz’s The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912) and Phase IV, a mesmerising, thoughtful 1974 eco-science fiction film, directed by Saul Bass.
• Insect inspired music.

The overlords are fast approaching. All hail our insect masters...

Igor is extirpated, and the hefty fabric of reality sighs briefly. Yet his creases, delicate but sharp, remain.

Let us have some fun and read Igor's obituaries. Let us compare them and then categorise them:

Independent gushes at celebrity links

Guardian effuses at famous people connections

blah blah blah from the Times with celebrity roll call

Who wins? Well, I put the Independent in a box of spoons, while the Guardian sits on the bottom shelf, under a pile of other obituaries. The Times, well, it is not even fit for lining the cutlery draw is it? Funny how tedious you can make someone just by writing an obituary about them. For Igor, that is doubly the case.

Let us ponder, ideally thoughtfully yet directionlessly; and let some of the word combinations he formulated and their effects on our reality live on...

When I do die I shall be glad to get away from loud pop music and motor cars, but I shall miss, insofar as when one is dead one can miss anything, the beautiful kindnesses of those people to whom courtesy comes naturally.

Baby Bush Toys | Simple Products for Simple Minds

PERSPECTIVE: EVOLUTION'S STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE IN AMERICA'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Before the advent of anaesthesia, medical surgery was a terrifying prospect. Its victims could suffer indescribable agony. The utopian prospect of surgery without pain was a nameless fantasy - a notion as fanciful as the abolitionist project of life without suffering still seems today.
The introduction of diethyl ether CH₃CH₂OCH₂CH₃ (1846) and chloroform CHCl₃ (1847) as general anaesthetics in surgery and delivery rooms from the mid-19th century offered patients hope of merciful relief. Surgeons were grateful as well: within a few decades, controllable anaesthesia would at last give them the chance to perform long, delicate operations. So it might be supposed that the adoption of painless surgery would have been uniformly welcomed too by theologians, moral philosophers and medical scientists alike. Yet this was not always the case. Advocates of the "healing power of pain" put up fierce if disorganised resistance.

Utopian surgery? The case against anaesthesia in surgery, dentistry and childbirth

Opera is tiny yet extrememly powerful. It has a feature set envied by most other browsers, but the true key is not the features themselves, but their integration. One designer, making sure everything flows together. Because of that shared tight codebase, they can add features for very little cost. For example their future bittorrent support (currently available in a technology preview) is 24kb! And they have a very neat system where if you don't use, for example, the mail module, then just the browser core is used.

The killer features: mouse gestures, serious security, true window tabbed interface, spatial navigation, blazingly fast rendering, search-based mail, password manager, RSS support, full configurability (rewrite your UI with >500 commands), hierarchical notes and many others are all blended together with style; they are built to interoperate perfectly.

If you are using IE, well, apart from the appaling security record and abysmal feature set; politically Microsoft have tried to propritise the web. The web should remain free to all, irrespective of access method, and so the sooner you stop using IE (which has been a wrecking ball of interoperability) the better. It's slow, it doesn't support standards (and wont properly with future IE 7) and hasn't evolved since the last century (again the yet—to—be released IE 7's feature set is still 5 years behind others). Time to try something new and fresh. Time to discover the benefits of modern technology, of active craftsmanship in your tool you use to access that wonderful thing called the web.

Opera V8.5 Web Browser

The tongue-eating isopod [Cymothoa exigua] causes degeneration of the tongue [through siphoning and consuming the arterial blood supply] of its host fish, the rose snapper, Lutjanus guttatus, and it then attaches to the remaining tongue stub and floor of the fish's mouth by hook-like pereopods. In this position the isopod superficially resembles its host's missing tongue. Brusca & Gilligan (1983) hypothesize that these isopods serve as a mechanical replacement for the fish's tongue and represent the first known case in animals of functional replacement of a host structure by a parasite. This relationship is so-far known only from the Gulf of California.

Amazing! This parasite structurally replaces the organ it removes from its host. This thing first hooks into the fishes artery supplying the tongue, which seems to be the cause of the tongue's atrophy (rather than it physically eating the hosts tongue); then basically takes over. I wonder if the host can still enjoy its food?

I think I'm not going to French Kiss (especially not fish) for a while; and remember, never open your mouth while swimming in California!

The Isopoda page on Tree of Life
Practical Fishkeeping News Story

According to a recent report by the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, a contingent was also sent by the Pakistani government, then led by Benazir Bhutto, at the request of the Clinton administration. This contingent was formed from the Harkat-ul- Ansar (HUA) terrorist group and trained by the ISI. The report estimates that about 200 Pakistani Muslims living in the UK went to Pakistan, trained in HUA camps and joined the HUA's contingent in Bosnia. Most significantly, this was "with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American intelligence agencies".

Guardian Unlimited | Britain now faces its own blowback

There is even a report that a food centre photo-op was staged for his visit then torn down again.