Earlier this week my friends from Harvard, Caitlin and Chris, passed through Berkeley. On Tuesday afternoon, the three of us and Jennifer took a walk through the picturesque Berkeley hills, along winding streets lined with quaint houses and front gardens pouring over with exotic succulents and bright flowering shrubs. In many of the gardens, huge spiny brown spiders had spun orb webs between branches, and we got to watch one sucking the juices out of an insect it had caught and wrapped in silk. After about an hour and a half we arrived up at Tilden Park and took a much needed rest, walked to a nearby pond and back, and continued back down the hill to Berkeley. On the way back we stopped at Indian Rock Park, a couple of massive rock outcroppings that were left behind after the suburbanization of the Berkeley Hills. They got their name from the Ohlone mortars, once used for grinding acorns, that remain around the base of one of the rocks. The top of one outcropping gave a great view of the Units (the Berkeley undergraduate dorms) and Oakland to the south, and a large cloud obliterating our view of San Francisco to the west. We reminisced about our undergraduate days in OEBUG (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Undergraduates), and then headed back to campus. I hadn't really been to North Berkeley before, and I had never suspected any of that stuff was up there.

This evening I went to hear Sir David King, the chief science advisor to Tony Blair, in Wheeler Hall. He had gained a lot of notoriety for stating in a Science article that climate change was a greater threat than terrorism, after which he was told by Ivan Rodgers (a superior in the UK government, although I forget his exact position) to not speak to the American media. He was extremely forthright about the threat of global warming and the science behind it, although he conveyed his disappointment with Bush without stating any direct criticism. I had to be rather amused by the spectacle of a bunch of American academics relying on a UK government official to teach them about science, but as a former chemist he was an impressively well-informed and articulate.

A fellow first-year in our department, Kevin, has passed on to me a pair of giant water bugs (Leptocerus) that he caught up near Mt. Lassen recently. I set them up today in a plastic tank in my office and there is now a constant, low humming noise from the air pump. Both are about 7 cm (3 inches) long and catch small fish and insects with a pair of hooked forelegs, after which they pierce their prey with tubelike mouthparts and suck out the juices. We haven't fed them yet, but I expect there will be a crowd of grad students in my office when the time comes. Something about insects that eat vertebrates...