Eideard

My kind of geek

A York University doctoral student who discovered a new species of bee on his way to the lab one morning has completed a study that examines 84 species of sweat bees in Canada. Nineteen of these species – including the one Jason Gibbs found in downtown Toronto − are new to science because they have never been identified or described before.

Gibbs’ expansive study will help scientists track bee diversity, understand pollination biology and study the evolution of social behaviour in insects. It is also much anticipated by bee taxonomists who, like Gibbs, painstakingly examine the anatomy (morphology) of bees to distinguish one type of bee from another…

Sweat bees − named for their attraction to perspiration − can be smaller than 4 mm in length, often have metallic markings, and make up one-third to one-half of bees collected in biodiversity surveys in North America. Complete species descriptions of 84 metallic sweat bees in Canada are included in Gibbs’ monumental study, “Revision of the metallic species of Lasioglossum (Dialictus) in Canada.” It was published by the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa as a single issue.

Despite their numbers and their importance as pollinators, sweat bees remain among the most challenging bees to identify to species, perhaps because they evolved so rapidly when they first appeared about 20 million years ago. Gibbs’ research significantly improves upon all other available tools for the identification of these bees…

Among the 19 new species of sweat bee identified by Gibbs is one that he collected on his commute from downtown Toronto to York University. When he arrived at his York lab and examined it, he knew he had found a new species, never before identified by science but, as it turns out, quite common in Toronto and throughout eastern Canada and the USA. He also identified and described 18 other species from Canada that are new to science including a cuckoo bee: like a cuckoo bird, it doesn’t build a nest or collect food but it has big mandibles for fighting. This cuckoo sweat bee is believed to invade the nest of another sweat bee species to lay its eggs on the pollen and nectar collected by its host.

Bravo!

And then there’s Phallus Drewsii

The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University and an international committee of taxonomists – scientists responsible for species exploration and classification – announce the top 10 new species described in 2009.

On the list are a minnow with fangs, golden orb spider and carnivorous sponge. The top 10 new species also include a deep-sea worm that when threatened releases green luminescent “bombs,” a sea slug that eats insects, a flat-faced frogfish with an unusual psychedelic pattern, and a two-inch mushroom that was the subject of a “Bluff the Listener” segment on the National Public Radio quiz show “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.” Rounding out the top 10 list are a banded knifefish, a charismatic plant that produces insect-trapping pitchers the size of an American football, and an edible yam that uncharacteristically sports multiple lobes instead of just one.

The top 10 new species come from around the world, including Africa, Indonesia, Madagascar, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, the United States and Uruguay. The announcement of the top 10 new species list coincides with International Day of Biodiversity being marked May 22 by the United Nations.

Here’s a gallery of these glorious critters. Don’t let them overwhelm your curiosity.

Kosmix, a well-financed Silicon Valley start-up, is often described on blogs and news sites as a search engine that may someday rival Google.

As flattering as that notion may sound, it rankles Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, the co-founders of Kosmix. And that is not because other start-ups making similar assertions have fallen laughably short of the mark. It is because Kosmix is trying to do something that is quite different from traditional Web search.

Kosmix, he said, is not about finding the best set of documents for a specific keyword or phrase. Instead, its goal is to “tell me more about something,” he said.

For a keyword or topic that a user enters, Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly. For many queries, the results are pretty satisfying and look as if they have been compiled by a human editor, not a computer.

If Kosmix succeeds in attracting a large following, it may well be the latest challenge, not to Google, but to a long string of old and new media companies struggling to hold on to their audiences and make a living on the Web…

Late in 2007, a year before it released the Kosmix service to the public, the company put the same technology to the test on a more narrow service called RightHealth, which focuses on health information. A year later, RightHealth would be the second-most-visited health site, behind WebMD.

RTFA. An interesting approach to different issues than plain vanilla search.

They certainly hit a home run with RightHealth.

Newspaper style books discourage italics, which is why, when taxonomists see the words Tyrannosaurus rex or Escherichia coli in a roman typeface, they wince.

The conventions of biological nomenclature insist that the generic name begins with a capital, the specific with lower case and both should be in italics.

Taxonomists are the experts who have named and described 1.4 million of the planet’s living and extinct creatures, and who have themselves been celebrating an anniversary in 2008. The great biologist, Linnaeus, published the definitive edition of his Systema Naturae in 1758, and to this day all biologists rely on his simple, universal rules to identify the living things around them, and their evolutionary relationships.

Taxonomists are, like the gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) and the Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris), a threatened species within the scientific genus. One authority estimates their number at a trifling 6,000. But these specialists are not just the last word on ants or aardvarks, they are the also the first word: they dream up the names. They are the last living Latin (and occasionally Greek) poets, composing precise and sometimes brilliant little plays upon words for each new species.

So just for once let us salute – in italics – the professionals who named a Brazilian pterosaur Arthurdactylus conandoylensis, who discovered an alga fossilised in the sex act 1.2bn years ago and called it Bangiomorpha pubescens, and who on the Fijian island of Mba, spotted a new snail and named it Ba humbugi.

No commentary needed. From me.