Word of the Week - 6-16-2008

Word of the Week
BLASÉ
Pronunciation: \blah-ˈzay\
Function: adjective
Etymology: French
Date: 1819
1 : apathetic to pleasure or excitement as a result of excessive indulgence or enjoyment : world-weary
2 : sophisticated, worldly-wise
3 : unconcerned


Interesting Fact
Caterpillars actually turn to soup before becoming moths and butterflies.
When the caterpillar has eaten enough it turns into a pupa, more about this later on because it is different for different groups of Lepidoptera. To do this it stops eating and finds somewhere safe, here it becomes very still (pupa never eat and seldom move at all) it then molts its skin the same as it does when it is growing only instead of another larval skin it secretes a pupal skin, (inside its old larval skin) that is much thicker and stronger. Generally this pupa then breaks out of the old larval skin, though in many moths the pupa remains inside the old larval skin, you can often find the remains of the caterpillar skin around the tail of a Butterfly pupa. All that is fairly straight forward, where it gets tricky is how the caterpillar inside its new pupal case changes itself into a Butterfly or Moth.
The first thing that happens is that a lot of the caterpillar’s old body dies. It is attacked by the same sort of juices the caterpillar used in its earlier life to digest its food. It would not be far wrong to say the caterpillar digests itself from the inside out. This process is called 'histolysis'. Not all the tissue is destroyed however, some of the insects old tissue passes on to its new self, and is not very much. There is one other sort of tissue left, in a number of places in the insect’s body are collections of special formative cells, which have played no part in the insects larval life, and have stayed hidden or protected during this partial death, each of these groups of cells is called an 'imaginal bud' or a 'histoblast'.
The job of these histoblasts is to supervise the building of a new body out of the soup that the insect’s digestive juices have made of the old larval body. This they do using the same biochemical processes that all insects use to turn their food into part of their bodies. This rebuilding process is called 'histogenesis'. During this time the insect is very vulnerable because it cannot run away, and this is why insects try to choose somewhere safe to hide away in when they are going through this incredible change, and also explains why it is harder to find pupae than it is to find adult insects.

Trivial Pursuit
Here are the questions:
Global View (Geography):
What city-state’s residents speak a language called Singlish, a mix of English, Malay and Hokkien?

Entertainment:
What Latino hip-hoppers were well-known for going “insane in the membrane”?

News:
What rental company got free publicity in 2000 from endless TV news shots of its van lugging ballots from Miami to Tallahassee?

Written Word:
What seldom-seen author appears as a character in W.P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe?

Life & Science: What type of vegetable is the Sharpshooter, the result of crossbreeding prolific El Toro with rot-resistant Montello and mildew-proof Alpha?

Games & Sports:
What once-mighty NBA team opened three straight seasons with a 1-12 record, starting in 1999?

Here are last week’s answers:
Global View (Geography):
What U.S. state’s town of Fairfax churned out every U.S. and Canadian Scrabble tile, until 1998? Vermont

Entertainment:
What glockenspiel-laden album did Bjork call “a love affair with a laptop”? Vespertine

News:
What U.S. congressman from Modesto, California began his 2001 web site bio with: “Life in politics has been anything but dull”? Gary Condit

Written Word:
What “oldest comic strip still in circulation” celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1997? The Katzenjammer Kids

Life & Science: How many seconds does the average patient get to speak before being interrupted by a doctor, according to a David Boyle book – 8, 16, or 32? 8 seconds

Games & Sports:
What sport served up a 134 – 0 British rout over Romania before 61,000 delirious fans, in 2001? Rugby