News

Deadly years ago, your usual news writer fended off critics of her housekeeping who wanted to know why she did not kill spiders. Well, the only explanation she could think of was the obvious one, they kill a bunch of stuff we don’t appreciate particularly, so we don’t have to. Here’s how:

So they say here: “Despite great interest in the ecology and behavior of these insects, their evolutionary relationships have never been fully clarified. In particular, it has been uncertain how ants—the world’s most successful social insects—are related to bees and wasps,” Ward said. “We were able to resolve this question by employing next-generation sequencing technology and advances in bioinformatics. This phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, provides a new framework for understanding the evolution of nesting, feeding and social behavior in Hymenoptera.” That suggest that “most” classifications are a mess. But why?

Here: The findings, say the authors, show that scientists are unreliable judges of the importance of a scientific publication: they rarely agree on the importance of a particular paper and are strongly influenced by where the paper is published, over-rating science published in high-profile scientific journals. Furthermore, the authors show that the number of times a paper is subsequently referred to by other scientists bears little relation to the underlying merit of the science.