Article: The lessons of the ants; Students' path to knowledge crosses trail of the real-life Borg.(NEWS)

Several of the students at Carleton College were hunched over microscopes, while others paged through dense scientific guides. The class was Insects and Angiosperms and the bugs the students gathered in warmer months now had to be identified, skewered with pins and mounted in homemade display cases.

Most of the neurons firing in the room were involved in a complex mental game called "keying," in which students try to figure out the family, genus, and then the species of the creature under the microscope. It involved such questions as are there hairs on the back legs? Do the mouth parts look like "this" or like "that"?

Roaming through the lab were the ...

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