The genera and species of New World stiletto flies (Diptera: Therevidae) are listed, with annotated references to nomenclature, synonymies and generic combinations, type localities, the primary type depositories, distribution, and citations for the most recent revisions. The genus Cyclotelus Walker, 1850 (along with its synonyms Furcifera Kröber, 1911, and Epomyia Cole, 1923a) is synonymized un...

The editorial board lost a real soul mate when Maclyn McCarty passed away on January 2nd at age 93. While attending the theater with friends, one of the many activities that he enjoyed, he collapsed. “Dr. Mac” was revered worldwide for his remarkable experiments that led to the identification of DNA as the genetic material. This totally unanticipated discovery, and the revolutionary 1944 paper ...

Sir Francis Galton [5] was a British science writer and amateur researcher of the late nineteenth century. He contributed greatly to the fields of statistics, experimental psychology and biometry. In the history of biology, Galton is widely regarded as the originator of the early twentieth century eugenics movement [6]. Galton published influential writings on nature versus nurturein human pers...

It is presumptuous for any one person to claim to know another. It is especially so for me to claim to have known, in any total sense of the word, Henry Bunting. For, as I look around this assembly of friends or recall the variety of those who have spoken to me about him during the last few days, I realize how deep, yet how widely-ranging, was his power of friendship. I grew up with him, amid t...

While identifying Pisauridae from Laos and checking various genera of this family from Southeast Asia, two monotypic genera were striking: Hesydrimorpha Strand 1911 and Papakula Strand 1911. Both were described by Strand (1911) from Eastern Indonesia and the type material was deposited in the Senckenberg Museum (SMF). They were recorded from the same island (Kobroor) and the same locality (Papa...

Jane Marion Oppenheimer [5], embryologist and historian of science and medicine, was born on 19 September 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Sylvia Stern and James H. Oppenheimer. After studying zoology at Bryn Mawr College [6], Oppenheimer received her AB degree in 1932. Oppenheimer received her PhD in embryology [7] at Yale University [8] in 1935 and worked as a research fellow from 1935?...

At the beginning of our careers, each of us has the dream of someday making a discovery that will change the way our respective disciplines regard something we now regard as fact. Denis Parsons Burkitt was able to change the course of our thinking twice in his career. More remarkably, the two discov eries were, to the casual observer, in widely different fields of study, i.e., the elucidation o...