For those of you who came here from the Science Blogs this is ancient history, but it might be new for the rest of you. It comes courtesy of the consistently enjoyable Zooillogix, whose taste for the neutral zone where the shores of reason fade into the hinterland of the grotesque exactly mirrors my own.

It's the 5 most horrifying bugs in the world. And they kick off with the best. The Japanese giant hornet.

The Japanese giant hornet does have a sting, like other hornets, and if sufficiently riled they can sting you to death. Unfortunately, that's not its worst of it. It can also spray flesh-melting poison at you. Oh yes, and it targets the eyes. And tags you with a pheromone, so all the others can come and have a go.

I wrote something on bees and hornets last summer, about the defence against hornets that honeybees have evolved. Because the hornet's skin is too thick for bee stings to penetrate, they mob the hornets and frottage them to death, as the ceaseless rubbing of hundreds of bees raises the hornet's temperature beyond all endurance. The video clip on the site ( I couldn't get it to work on YouTube, but it works fine on the page) shows the other side to the story, as a bee colony which has failed to grasp the trick is cut to shreds. They reckon 30 hornets can wipe out a colony of 30,000 bees in three hours, which by my calculations means a hornet in full on attack mode can kill one bee every 10.8 seconds, without pausing for breath. Which is handy, considering they don't have any lungs. Insects take in oxygen through the skin, which is one reason why they've never evolved to be big. This is definitely a good thing, otherwise we'd have to be constantly frottaging huge great hornets to death all the time.

And now, a tribute to the scientific mindset. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Schmidt Sting Pain Index.

Yes, if you're a scientist and you get stung, there's really only one viable response. You have to categorise your pain, in relation to all the other similar pains. In fact, if you're Justin Schmidt of the US Department of Agriculture, you can go around deliberately getting as many different kinds of insect to sting you as possible, so you can produce a proper index, based on valid research.

And he's produced a kind of Beaufort Scale of stings. It starts with the sweat bee (light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm), and passes through, among others, the yellowjacket (hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue), on its way to the Torquemada of the insect world, the bullet ant (pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel).

Doctor Schmidt, I salute you. I would say someone had to do it, but that would be a lie. Nobody had to not do it, and that's good enough for me.

And while we're bigging up the science guys, Finnish patient gets new jaw from own stem cells. There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn't use the patient's own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue, said Riitta Suuronen of the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Tampere.You go, girl. Thanks to Mrs Tilton for the link, and much of interest besides.