Predicting a global insect apocalypse

Apocalypse soon?

When the Lord smote the Philistines with emerods in their secret parts he left it to historians to debate the nature of this lethal affliction. Literally translated, emerods are haemorrhoids, but it is surely unlikely that so hardy a race would have succumbed to an epidemic of piles. Scholarly opinion seems to concur that the emerods were buboes in the groin, one of the agonising manifestations...

APOCALYPSE SOON † by

Based upon a simple vacuum Lagrangian, comprising cosmological and quadratic scalar field terms, a cosmological model is presented whose history is indistinguishable from that of an innocuous low-density cold dark matter (CDM) universe, but whose future is very much shorter. For sensible values of the deceleration parameter (0 < q 0 < 1), its age is greater than 85% of the Hubble time, thus res...

Predicting forest insect flight activity: A Bayesian network approach

Daily flight activity patterns of forest insects are influenced by temporal and meteorological conditions. Temperature and time of day are frequently cited as key drivers of activity; however, complex interactions between multiple contributing factors have also been proposed. Here, we report individual Bayesian network models to assess the probability of flight activity of three exotic insects,...

Ecomusicology between Apocalypse and Nostalgia

The Apocalypse of Napoleon Bonaparte

www.ums.ac.uk deals with commonly used and abused drugs. They describe socially acceptable drugs such as alcohol, nicotine and caffeine; abused prescription drugs, such as steroids and analgesics and sedatives; and illicit substances, such as, Ecstasy, cocaine and hallucinogens. The drugs are discussed in terms of pharmacological class, common slang names, pharmacological effect (“The Buzz”), r...