It’s going to be another day delving deep into more spidery domains, and then I see this news about another threat, a new species of tick invading the US.

Testing in New York identified the tick as an Asian longhorned tick nymph, with genetic sequencing adding more evidence affirming the finding. The National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, further confirmed the finding.

Tick sampling using corduroy drag cloths found Asian longhorned ticks on the patient’s manicured lawn, some of them in direct sun. More were found in the park across the street from the patient’s house, both in open, cut grass exposed to direct sun and in taller, shaded grass next to the woods. Testing also found ticks on a nearby public trail, in mowed short and midlength grass near the trail edge, both in full sun and partial shade. The discovery of the ticks near the man’s house were the first known collections in New York state.

The authors wrote that finding the ticks on manicured lawns and in open sun may be significant, because public education efforts often stress that Ixodes scapularis ticks—the most common biting tick in New York state—are found in wooded areas or shaded grass.

At least my area of interest right now is dark, shadowy, dusty, cobwebby, and hot, so I’m not going to panic. My long-term plans include expanding into lawns and gardens, though, so I’ll keep this in mind for next year.

My big spider survey project launches tomorrow. I’ve got a long list of people who have volunteered their residences, and starting at noon, we start cruising the mean streets of Morris, Minnesota, seeking spider-haunted garages, and plunging into them to count and classify arachnids. This will be painless if they’re sparsely occupied, but judging by the surge in the spider population at my house this week, it may be a grueling task with hundreds of eight-legged freaks clamoring for our attention. Thousands? Oh god, may die. The price we pay for Science.

I’m estimating a week spent on this first phase. Then another week a month from now. Then another week a month after that. Then some spot checking as fall and cool weather descends. In between, we’ll be culturing spider embryos in the lab — my colony is currently about 20, 25 strong, and I plan to triple that in short order, and then at last, the spiderlings will be pumped out assembly line fashion, and there will be no limit to my aspirations!

I remember my wild man days, when I might have as much as 5 or 6 cups of coffee during the day — to be honest, I was never particularly wild, but I would get the caffeine shakes and feel a bit edgy. I’m now down to one cup in the morning, and if I’m feeling crazy, two. But never have I consumed the equivalent of 300 cups of coffee in one sitting, like these unfortunate students.

The students had volunteered to take part in a test in March 2015 aimed at measuring the effect of caffeine on exercise.

They were given 30g of caffeine instead of 0.3g, Mr Farrer said.

Death had previously been reported after consumption of just 18g, he told the court.

The university had switched from using caffeine tablets to powder, he said.

“The staff were not experienced or competent enough and they had never done it on their own before,” he said.

“The university took no steps to make sure the staff knew how to do it.”

The calculation had been done on a mobile phone, with the decimal point in the wrong place, and there was no risk assessment.

Caffeine is a potentially dangerous drug, and anyone working with it needs to be aware of that fact. I’ve had students experiment with it in our cell biology lab, and I always preface providing the purified drug to students with the warning that it is almost certainly the most dangerous chemical in the lab at that time, that they shouldn’t let familiarity with it as an ingredient in coffee and soft drinks let them be casual with playing with it.

I probably looked like a gaffed fish while I was reading that. It was appallingly sloppy practice.

• They were dosing students with this drug, not mice or some other animal model.
• They didn’t have competently trained staff monitoring every step.
• They changed the reagent from over-the-counter pills to purified powder, which ought to have had everyone triple-checking the concentration.
• They didn’t have their protocol vetted by an experienced pharmacologist.
• They relied on a calculator.GIGO. I’ve been nagging my students to do more estimation, because I’ve noticed that calculator-dependent students easily make errors that are many orders of magnitude off, and they are completely unaware.

In our introductory labs, when we have students calculate concentrations, we have a little check box in the write-up — they have to get a TA or instructor to sign off on the calculations, and that’s for safe procedures, like adding an indicator dye to a tube of yeast. Every year when I’m grading lab reports, I keep an eye open for egregious errors in concentrations. One year the record was set by someone being off by 31 orders of magnitude.

I know students are easily capable of bone-headed errors in arithmetic that they aren’t experienced enough to notice, and to do it in an experiment in which students are the subjects…no. Just no. Now I’m going to have nightmares.

At least in this case the two poisoned students survived, and the university was fined £400,000. They all got off easy.