The Wood Spider ... stoned

This is a good one for your 8th grade biology class...

... or maybe not...

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.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it's early in the term. A student, on the way out after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about "carbon dating." This usually happens around the…
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yeah...Nnnnot 8th grade, I agree. I used it, though, with college (mostly) sophomores in an intro diversity course when I got to arachnids--totally set it up with spinneret anatomy & silk chemistry, then the real* research on drugged spiders' webs. It was great.

*yeah, it's NS. article ref: Noever, R., J. Cronise, and R. A. Relwani. 1995. Using spider-web patterns to determine toxicity. NASA Tech Briefs 19(4):82

By Sven DiMilo (not verified) on 12 Dec 2007 #permalink

Okay, I used to have those Time-Life books when I was a kid, and one of the books had pictures of such webs, and I remember the LSD web was really symmetrical and didn't look "impaired" at all. And yeah, the caffeine web was the worst.

Even at the time, though, I was a little skeptical about what this said about toxicology of those compounds in humans....