Statins are also prescribed after heart operations such as angioplasties.

When I had my angioplasty performed, there were 22 people (including myself) being operated on that day. That's in just one hospital in the UK. Which means that the hospital in question performed 8,030 angioplasty operations in a single year, if that figure of 22 people is a typical average. Multiply that by the number of hospitals with cardiac surgery units in the UK, and you're into six figures with ease in just one year. If you assume by hypothesis that, say, 100,000 such operations are performed each year, and multiply that by the number of years during which combined angioplasty/post-operative statin prescriptions have been deployed, that's easily over a million people, and the number is growing. Multiply that by similar figures over the developed world, and we're probably looking at 80 million people worldwide taking statins.

Now, my understanding is that a drug only moves off-patent and becomes a generic drug, able to be manufactured without licence and royalties to the original company inventing the drug, after 20 years have elapsed. Atorvastatin has been a generic drug ever since I started taking it, which means that it has been in circulation for revascularisation treatment for 25 years or more. Over that time, while it was still on-patent, it earned the parent company a whopping $125 billion in global sales over that 20 year patent period, and over that patent period, was the world's best-selling medication.

Plus, here in the UK, some tabloid newspapers were publishing front page articles on statins for years. One or two still are.

With that level of widespread clinical use, I contend that the word 'statin' indeed belongs in the common words list.

Birdy, if you're in touch with people seeking IDs for insects in North America, then this website is a valuable resource to share with those people. Covers all insect Orders with distribution maps where the data is known.

If those people are trying to track down moth IDs, then point them here. This site covers almost all the 'Hodges numbers' - these are the numbers assigned to moth species in North America by the experts, as listed in the Hodges Catalogue. That site has images of both set specimens and living specimens, and distribution maps.

Want to track down a butterfly in North America? This website will come in handy, as will this website, which covers both butterflies and moths on a state by state basis.

If your friends have trouble tracking down their species of interest even with those websites available, then they're probably found something that requires expert attention. Basically, whilst butterflies and moths are among the friendlier insects from an ID standpoint, with many identifiable by visual inspection of the colour pattern alone, be aware that even among these insects, there are troublesome species that can only be identified conclusively by dissection. The situation becomes a lot worse if you move into beetles, ants, caddis flies, and various 'minor Orders' such as the Psyllids, where you're dealing with organisms that are frequently identifiable only by dissection. There are visually identifiable species, of course, but when you move into more specialist insect groupings, they're very definitely in the minority.

The "gold standard" for insect identification, is, of course, genital dissection. The reason this has become the "gold standard", is because entomologists made an interesting discovery in the early history of the discipline. Namely, that the chitinous parts of insect genitalia are frequently as valuable for identification, as fingerprints have been to the forensic scientist. Of course, to make use of this technique, one has to immerse oneself in the minutiae of insect genital anatomy, which is a lifetime's study in its own right, but thanks to those who have gone before and exerted decades of diligent labour on the matter, the data available is now voluminous, at least for the major Orders. The Lepidoptera in particular has been subject to intensive study in this regard, courtesy of the fact that Lepidoptera genitalia happen to be some of the most morphologically diverse among the insects, with only the Fleas exhibiting greater diversity. Indeed, the Rabbit Flea is regarded as having possibly the most complex genitalia known to science, the male genitalia in particular boasting a positively rococo array of attachments that make the parts look like a Swiss Army knife under the microscope, but there are Lepidoptera genitalia boasting some impressive looking adornments too.

Basically, if you peruse the literature, and you see the legend "gen. det." associated with a specimen, said specimen has been identified conclusively using genital dissection, and the better quality handbooks on various insect groupings will usually annotate a species entry with "gen. det. required" if said dissection is the only way to identify the species in question properly.

A similar situation applies to spiders - the usual method of choice is examination of the morphology of the male palp (used in reproduction) or the female epigyne. Which is one of the reasons why spiders tend to be a specialised field of study, especially in locations where the fauna has dozens, if not hundreds, of similar looking species that can only be separated out by such methods. Modern arachnology has now reached the point where descriptions of newly discovered species are accompanied by scanning electron micrographs of the parts in question - I suspect the typical amateur naturalist won't have access to this level of sophistication, but it's an indication of the level of precision that now applies in invertebrate zoology. Indeed, some researchers are looking into the possibility of CT scanning temporarily anaesthetised insects, so that a 3D model of the genitalia can be obtained without requiring the specimen to be dead. The vision for the future in entomology and other branches of invertebrate zoology, is to have a portable piece of kit to perform this operation in the field - our very own version of the Star Trek tricorder - but that's a long way off becoming reality at the moment, and current CT scanners tend not to be cheap. You're looking at about £10 million for a good quality one at the moment, and that buys you about 40 tons of hardware - only "portable" if you mount it inside a decent sized ship.

Basically, point your friends from that FB group at this post, and this should alert them to the fun and games that await them in the world of insect identification.

Oh good grief. Fulgorid planthoppers are another one of those groups that even experts have trouble with, when identifying to species level. They're notorious for this.

Just by way of a change, here's a photo of a moth. It's perfectly beautiful and beautifully perfect.

If that's from Peru, then it's Pachydota nervosa. It's a cloud forest species.

Science fiction? Look up James Blish. Whose writing was both individual and imbued with a finely crafted vision.

Just lately, I've been finding it easier to discover the Challenge nine-letter word than the Standard one! The rosette puzzle was an exception - I found the nine-letter word for that as my first answer, a rare occurrence over the past month or so!

I've been wondering for some time if there's a subtle bug lurking in the system, courtesy of the fact that when I play the game on my laptop, all entries I submit are faithfully recorded, but this sometimes appears not to be the case on my Android tablet.

However, confirming this will require me to conduct a careful experiment, and this will take time both to do, and to yield any fruit.

EDIT: this may be speeded up by somewhat by a tip I've just learned. If you're using an Android device, you can take a screenshot by holding down the power and volume down buttons simultaneously for about 5 seconds. Don't know if the same procedure works on iPads, or if they have their own mechanism.