Word: insects
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...collections manager at London's Natural History Museum, Max Barclay has traveled the world in search of rare and previously undiscovered insects. So when his five-year-old son took a break from a picnic lunch last year in the Museum's garden and returned with an insect in hand, Barclay could not have guessed that his question - "Daddy, what's this"? - would lead to a global detective hunt that has so far stumped Barclay and the world's other entomologists...
...Despite working with an insect collection of over 28 million specimens, Barclay and his colleagues at the Natural History Museum have been unable to identify the almond-shaped insect, about the size of a grain of rice, that has in the past year made itself at home in the sycamores trees on the 19th-century museum's grounds in central London...
...Several months of research led Barclay to discover that the insect, which resembles the common North American box elder bug, is actually most closely related to to Arocatus roeselii. But that European bug is also associated with alder trees rather than sycamores. An insect specimen found in Nice on France's Mediterranean coast, which is now in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History in Prague, turned out to be identical to the mystery London bug. But that specimen, it turned out, had been misidentified as Arocatus roeselii...
...rethinking and transcending of a schlock source, The Dark Knight is up there with David Cronenberg's 1986 version of The Fly. It turns pulp into dark poetry. Just as that movie found metaphors of cancer, AIDS and death in the story of a man devolving into an insect, so this one plumbs the nature of identity. Who are we? Has Bruce lost himself in the myth of the hero? Is his Batman persona a mission or an affliction? Can crusading Dent live down the nickname (Two-Face) some rancorous cops have pinned on him? Only the Joker seems unconflicted...
...Health regulations allow for a certain amount of insect material in the food we eat. This suggests that most of us consume various bugs unwittingly throughout our lives. Even vegetarians must accept that they've probably eaten bits of insects in their salads. The sheer mass of insects on our planet makes them an ideal source of food. Certain insects are specified as kosher in the Bible. The term ant farm could one day take on a whole new meaning. Barbara Harwood, Auckland...