2007 TED prize given to EO Wilson

EO Wilson has just received the 2007 TED Prize, a prestigious award given annually at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference. Also honored were former President Bill Clinton and the photographer James Nachtwey.

From the TED website:

For the past 20 years, members of the TED community have gathered together to share ideas and passions that are big enough to change the world.

In this spirit, we created... the TED Prize.

Each year we will honor a maximum of three individuals who have shown that they can, in some way, positively impact life on this planet.

We are looking for inventors and entrepreneurs, designers and artists, visionaries and mavericks, protectors and persuaders. Our goal is to honor and empower these people by connecting them to the formidable resources of the TED community. Our prize-winners may be very different, but they will have this in common: They will be doing something that has extraordinary potential. Something whose positive influence could spread, transcending borders. Something that can contribute to the future of life on earth.

Rather than simply receiving financial support, winners of the TED Prize will be granted something extraordinary: something which children dream about, but which adults assume is merely the stuff of fairy-tales.

They will be granted a WISH to change the world.

They may wish for anything. And we will seek to make their wish come true.

We will allow our winners several months in which to formulate their wish. We want them to think big, and we want them to fully understand the range of resources the TED Community may be able to offer them. We are willing to spend -- in hard cash -- $100,000 on each winner. And our goal is to convert this into received value that is an order of magnitude greater. How?

• By connecting our winners into the heart of the TED community
• By tapping into the enthusiastic support of our team of sponsors and partners
• By working with our winners to deliver something creative and big and bold and wonderful.

EO Wilson's wish:

"I wish that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth's biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life."

More details here.

An interesting commentary on biodivcontext.

What do you think?

Links Updated

I have finally updated my "Links" site which has been an awful mess for quite sometime. I hope folks will find it more useful now (and prettier).

The Ant Room gets kudos in Boston University blog contest

So apparently I was a finalist in the Boston University Show Us Your Blogs contest. I didn't win anything, but look: a list of finalists, and there I am. Whoohoo! This image has nothing to do with blogs, but it seems somewhat appropriate -- a self-reflective ant?

Myrmicocrypta

Just received the identifications for my Mymicocrypta specimens from Jeffrey Sosa-Calvo. They are:

• Myrmicocrypta longinoda
• Myrmicocrypta cf. longinoda
• Myrmicocrypta cf. rudiscapa

I have updated the genus page, as well as the main page, with the new IDs.

The photo above is from the Ants of Costa Rica site, and is probably M. ednaella.

Darwin's "Origin of Species" free audio download

Darwin's "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" is now available free to download, copy, and share. It's unabridged and over twenty-four hours long! It can be found at Librivox. via BoingBoing

I just took a look at Librivox's web page and although they are rather light on science, did find a few gems for the science-minded:

• For the environmentalist: Walden by Henry David Thoreau (also Nature, Smoke, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, and Woof of the Sun)
• For the chemist: Familiar Letters on Chemistry by Justus Liebig (don't miss Letter 14 - Nature and Effects of Manures) (in progress)
  
• For the physicist: Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein (Check out the understated Part III: Considerations on the Universe as a Whole) (in progress)
  
• For the child in all of us: The Fairy-Land of Science by Arabella B. Buckley (Arabella Buckley worked as secretary to Charles Lyell -- Darwin's mentor -- and in later years lectured and wrote about science and evolution. Although written for children, it has solid foundations in scientific thought. I haven't read it but it looks awesome. There are even two chapters on bees, my second favorite social insect!) (in progress)
  
• For the conservationist (with a sense of humor): A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
• For the philosopher: Has a Frog a Soul? by Thomas H. Huxley (also known as Darwin's bulldog)
  

Mystery Ants -- Solved!

So thank you to everyone who emailed me with help on those mystery ants. You were all very helpful.

Mystery Ant #1 has been identified as Cylindromyrmex godmani. I have been unable to compare my sample with an actual specimen (no godmani males at MCZ and the only one at NMNH was covered in gold and a little hard to compare) but after reviewing the key (de Andrade 1998) I am fairly confident that it is godmani due to the strongly converging frontal carinae, the size, and the petiole with only traces of striae.

Mystery Ant #2 is a Hypoponera male and probably unidentifiable to species. It was good to know, though, cause I have a bunch of these buggers. I sent them all to Shawn Dash who may or may not be able to do something useful with them.

Mystery Ant #3 is a Gigantiops destructor male, which is what I thought it was but I was finally able to find a specimen to compare it to at NMNH.

I will work on adding new mystery ants soon!

New website design II

So instead of working on the revision of my probe paper (which has just been accepted to be published -- Yay!!), I spent yesterday working on the new web design of my web page. I did some editing on the Tranopelta page, then overhauled the Acanthostichus page, and then extended the new design to all of the species pages for those two genera. I'm pretty pleased with them, but it is very time consuming and I have a lot of other things I really ought to be doing instead, so I may not do much more on that front for a little while. We'll see. I also updated my "collaborators" page to include all the new people who have been helping me out.