It seems to be a bad week

for re-entries.

Cleo DOA

Neffie dies after 4 days

Playmonaut MIA

Sad times.

Damnit!!!

Now we will never know if spiders can be made to sort tiny screws in space!!

(With apologies to a certain animated TV comedy)

This year's Xmas pressie for Smithsonian: a sense of perspective

"The loss of this special animal that inspired so many imaginations will be felt throughout the museum community"

For sure an interesting experiment, but really? Throughout the community? Are we to imagine the Generaldirektor of the Museum für Naturkunde sitting disconsolately at his desk with the email still open, coffee growing cold, moustachios slowly wilting? It's one common spider that was a subject of a relatively minor experiment and was going to die soon anyway (unless the mourning is really for it's not coming back stimulated by cosmic rays into an unstoppable city-ravaging monster?)

And not kidding about those moustachios:

http://www.naturkundemuseum-berlin.de/index.php

Britain needs to look to its boffinry laurels pronto - once that man levels up with the polka-dot bow tie section of C&A he'll be the unstoppable monster.

They'd put her on the web site...

...but it's configured to reject spiders.

Peter Parker

I wonder if she bit anyone before her untimely demise?

Mine's the one with the web spinners up the sleeves.

I'm not sure that I see the point of this experiment...

As animals get smaller, they are working at a lower Reynolds Number. At very small sizes, inertia starts to become meaningless, and your movements are dominated by things like air viscosity. So a small animal won't notice gravity to anything like the extent that we do - it's unsurprising that there was no great change in its feeding behaviour...

Spelling

"slipped the surly bounds of Earth"

Should be "slipped the surly bonds of Earth"

From High Flight by

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee

No 412 squadron, RCAF

Killed 11 December 1941

A fine poem that was quoted by Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster.

The flying flies were funny to watch.

We of course in Australia, had squillions of the little sticky black bastards - covered in them.

Every time we got a hot northerly wind, it blew billions of them southwards into the city.

One lunch time in Australia, I sat in the playground and killed about 72 of them.... in half an hour.

Then the CSIRO had to introduce dung beetles from Egypt, that could handle the billions of tons of wet aussie cowshit that the flies bred in... and sort of rooned my plan to spend the rest of my life angrily squishing hundreds of millions of sticky black bush flies.....

So seeing the fruit flies buzzing around in microgravity - it's a funny thing.

Pity there was no vid of the spider making a cross cage jump onto one.

That would have been good to see.