Lab website

After much prompting and haranguing from yours truly, my supervisor has finally given in and set up a website. This means that the lab now has some online presence that isn’t just me going on about insect humping. The site is in its infancy just now, but head on over to lucbussiere.com to read about our research and various activities (most of which seem to involve going to the pub, but maybe this is a good way to attract future lab members?!). One of our latest ventures is to cover relevant classic papers in lab meetings (which are held in the pub, because SCOTLAND), then write up summaries for the website – if you’re interested in sexual selection and life history evolution, it might well be worth keeping an eye on that…

Breaking Bio

Breaking Bio, the podcast that I co-host with a bunch of other similarly misguided fools, now has a Facebook page! You can ‘like’ us on there to keep up to date with new episodes and other fun stuff, or you can just follow us on Twitter if ‘liking’ implies a preference that you may not have. I’m trying to get stuck into the signalling reliability literature, so don’t make this harder for me.

Speaking of the podcast, we recently achieved the milestone of our 50th episode, and managed to attract a pretty incredible guest to come and speak to us: award-winning author and science journalist, David Quammen! We recorded a special double-length episode, which I’ll pretend was what we meant to do and not just that we forgot to check the time because David is super-interesting and incredibly nice. He is a delight. You can get the podcast on iTunes, or watch these episodes embedded below:

What the fox says

Since hearing the awesome ‘What Does the Fox Say?’ track by Ylvis, I have been planning to make time to investigate the literature and write a post on communication in Vulpes vulpes. Of course, having a thesis to write has got in the way a little, so I was relieved to find that the folks over at Popular Science are on it.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should probably watch this:

Bizarre social media list

For some reason, my Google+ page has been featured on the ‘99 Google+ pages every PhD candidate should follow‘ list, compiled by OnlinePhDProgram.org. I very rarely post anything there, mainly due to the fact that it was another thing to take care of and resulted in pretty much no links to my blog ever. Now I feel like I should post stuff to it. I don’t know. It’s weird.

I will celebrate with the very topical ‘Plus Ones’ by Okkervil River:

I have new pets

First up is our new Extatosoma tiaratum stick insect, named Lieutenant Commander CHOMP!

I also just came into possession of four Creobroter gemmatus mantis nymphs, which are making short work of my Drosophila supplies…

In other animal-photo news, I think I’ve pretty much completed my Borneo collection! Have a look at them here, and feel free to ID anything (especially insects / spiders) in the comments…

I have had a moustache

I should probably mention that this wasn’t just for making Freddie Mercury lookalike photos, but for Movember (raising money for research into and awareness of men’s health problems, including prostate and testicular cancer). Our moustachioed team at Stirling Uni raised over £400 through sponsorship and manly things like bake sales.