Chelicerates (scorpions, horseshoe crabs, spiders, mites and ticks) are the second largest group of arthropods and are of immense importance for fundamental and applied science. They occupy a basal phylogenetic position within the phylum Arthropoda, and are of crucial significance for understanding the evolution of various arthropod lineages. Chelicerates are vectors of human diseases, such as ticks, and major agricultural pests, such as spider mites, thus this group is also of importance for both medicine and agriculture. The developmental genetics of (...) chelicerates is poorly understood and a challenge for the future progress for many aspects of chelicerate biology is the development of a model organism for this group. Toward this end, we are developing a chelicerate genetic model: the two‐spotted spider mite Tetranychus urticae. T. urticae has the smallest genome of any arthropod determined so far (75 Mbp, 60% of the size of the Drosophila genome), undergoes rapid development and is easy to maintain in the laboratory. These features make T. urticae a promising reference organism for the economically important, poorly studied and species‐rich chelicerate lineage. BioEssays 29:489–496, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In modern academic article repositories, we find many papers on what Heidegger thought, but few papers that attempt to decipher how Heidegger thought. This article purports to show one aspect of the “how?” question of Heidegger’s thought. In the works of interpreters, historians of philosophy and thinkers, the prevailing view is that the question of being is the central question of the “what?” of Heidegger’s thought. Since the question of “how?” is more original than the question of “what?”, and since (...) the history of thought indicates that the content of thought is always thought according to a given system of thought, this paper aims to prove the hypothesis of a more original, primal, present, and continuous phenomenon than the question of being in Heidegger’s work; a phenomenon on which the question of battle itself is based. We can call this phenomenon “the dialectic of confrontations”. The task is to prove that the answer to the question “How?” is given by Heidegger’s thought in the dialectic of confrontation, by which the “shepherd of being” becomes the “shepherd of confrontations”. (shrink)