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Cryo-electron microscopy: A prime example of a tool-driven scientific revolution
Last week I had the immense pleasure again of having lunch with Freeman Dyson in Princeton. One of the myriad topics on the platter of intellectual treats on the table was the idea of science as a...
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Dear Flat-landers
Hello, flat-landers. TPP here in British Columbia, Whistler to be exact. The weather has taken a turn to the sunny side, and right now it's hard to say how much sunshine, clear air, alpine hiking, and...
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Learning abstracts: from mathematics, to the neural trasnformation machines
A coulpe of abstracts about e-learning: This paper presents a new framework for adding semantics into e-learning system. The proposed approach relies on two principles. The first principle is the...
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Warming at 10 degrees an hour
Today dawned bright and clear in the mountains, and at dawn the temperature was 46 F. And hour later it was 55 F. In another hour it will be 65 F and so on until topping out in the mid-80s. Such are...
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Hints of physics behind standard model?
The LHCb collaboration is studying the decay of mesons $B$ in order to find some violations in standard model rules. In particular LHCb has measured a particular ratio, named $R (D^*)$, between two...
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Ducking out the back way
Our visit to Whistler ended today, and it was a bit complicated because no one told us about the Vancouver to Whistler bike race today, or what that might mean for people who wanted to got the other...
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Book report on apples
Frazz is one of TPP's favorite comic strips, and today's strip (Sept. 13, 2015) was a classic because it hit TPP right in the wheel house. Caulfield presents a report on apples, and nails it,...
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Alexander Gerst's timelapse
Watch Earth roll by through the perspective of ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst in this six-minute timelapse video from space. Combining 12 500 images taken by Alexander during his six-month Blue Dot...
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Peter Thiel on biotechnology again: "Get rid of the randomness"
Peter Thiel has some provocative thoughts on biotechnology again, this time in an interview for Technology Review. I had a post earlier about Thiel's view of biotechnology which included some...
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From the portals of hell to built-in fire protection: intumescents
A friend posted the link to this demonstration, wondering if it was safe. (Do listen to the children in the background - their cries of "kraken" at 1:02 are worth it. Science is great fun!)The caption...
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Jellyfish proteins: modern snake oil for brain health
Watching ABC's World News Tonight this week, I saw an impressive-looking ad for a pill that claimed to improve memory and cognition. The ad showed several adults, all looking very happy, presumably...
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Amphiascus: Can a Copepod be a Friend of Mine?
Amphiascus sp., copyright Alexandra.The animal shown in the image above is a member of Amphiascus, a cosmopolitan genus of about thirty known species of benthic harpacticoid copepods. Amphiascus is a...
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The 92 Nobel Prize nominations of Robert Burns Woodward
As Nobel season dawns upon us, Stu Cantrill points me to an endlessly interesting link on the Nobel website which lists nominating information for various scientists up to 1964 (names of nominees and...
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Cox's Orange Pippin
Perhaps you have never heard of or seen this apple: Cox's Orange Pippin. TPP just finished eating one, the first in a great many years and it did not disappoint. The orange pippin is simply one great...
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Pretty, but toxic, mushroom
This is an easy mushroom to identify, Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric. They are big (the cap can easily be 15 cm in diam when spread) and very handsome, and a large number of them were arising in a...
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Fear of cloning: time to stop stalling and just do it!
For several months I've been stalling on a relatively simple project whose completion would let us submit a nice paper. This is the missing step in an undergraduate Honours student's project; I wrote...
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Building scientists #istandwithahmed #kierawilmot
So what's this kid doing in the high school auditorium after school? He's drilled holes and put pipes into a cooler, there's some kind of heating device or trigger. Wires. And it looks like a boat...
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FieldNotes: Homo naledi, #IStandWithAhmed and NatGeo Fox
There Is No Theory of Everything by Simon Critchley at Opinionator: Over the years, I have had the good fortune to teach a lot of graduate students, mostly in philosophy, and have noticed a recurring...
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Prof. Erland Stevens's edX med chem class
Just as he did previously, Prof. Erland Stevens of Davidson College is teaching a comprehensive med chem edX class that would be useful for anyone wanting to dive into the field. The course attracted...
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Hyperbolic Pascal triangles and other stories
A new set of mathematical abstracs. We start with the hyperbolic Pascal trianlges: Fibonacci and Pell sequences in the hyperbolic Pascal triangleIn this paper, we introduce a new generalization of...
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Donald Trump shows his anti-vaccine craziness, and Ben Carson's response is...
Donald Trump used the latest Republican debate as an opportunity to express wildly inaccurate anti-vaccine claims, embracing the thoroughly discredited position that vaccines cause autism. This claim...
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Brand spanking new botanical research articles
TPP is catching up, or trying to, on lots of things. Here's a link to some research summaries for the latest issue of the American Journal of Botany. The very first article is pretty interesting...
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Innovative bicycle wheel with built in springs
Oh, this is just too cool! Loop wheels with built in springs would look just great on TPP's bicycle and at my age, and another year was just chalked up, anything that makes the ride smoother is looked...
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Happy posts!
September is a nice time of year when you are not a student or faculty member for whom the month is quite hectic. Enjoying September is a great side benefit of retirement. And it includes TPP's...
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Just doing it
My inverse PCR reaction using the Q5 High Fidelity polymerase (creates blunt ends) worked on the first try! I now have the antitoxin-deletion fragment I can ligate to a SpecR cassette to create the...
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Agonists and antagonists, and why drug discovery is hard (again)
Here's a valuable and comprehensive review on one of the most glaring pieces of evidence for why drug discovery is so hard - the fact that very small structural changes in molecules can lead to drastic...
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Perils of lawn mowing
Our lawns need mowing in spite of the dry conditions interspersed with a couple of deluges. It's been nearly 3 weeks since they were last mowed, but the last thing a lawn needs in lolly-coddling. Crab...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - White butterfly ginger
It's been quite awhile since the last FFF. This plant may have been featured before, but so what? TPP knew the second he entered the greenhouse that this plant was in flower because of its fragrance,...
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Freedom and truth in mathematics
The very essence of #mathematics is its freedom. (Georg #Cantor)The way we deal with today's numbers in schools is essentially the same manner used by our ancestors Pythagoreans, who saw the numbers as...
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Troubleshooting
Yesterday I kinased my SpecR PCR fragment, ligated it to the inverse-PCR fragment and transformed this into E. coli DH5alpha. But my transformations gave only the same tiny colonies as the negative...
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Kitchen garden - late summer, early fall
In late September there isn't much to do with your kitchen garden except clean up and recap. On the whole it was an OK year, considering all the garden neglect, but why the zucchini stopped producing...
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What's the correct vintage for an apocalypse?
White wine with fish is a no brainer, but the assembled dinner party was largely drinking red wine in honor, no doubt, of the evenings' entertainment, the appearance of a "blood moon". The party took...
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Water on Mars
"Our quest on Mars has been to 'follow the water', in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we've long suspected. This is a significant...
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Fearful things!
Fear is a powerful motivator and so its use in political rhetoric is so common, but unfortunately people can come to fear the wrong or even imaginary things. Tom Tomorrow explains what fears keep...
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3 Quarks Daily annual science writing prize
I am honored and frankly a bit stunned to hear that my post on the "fundamental philosophical dilemma" of chemistry was awarded first place in the annual 3 Quarks Daily science writing prize contest. I...
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2015 Nobel Prize predictions
The nice thing about Nobel Prizes is that it gets easier to predict them every year, simply because most of the people you nominate don't win and automatically become candidates for the next year (note...
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Cichlids are Not the Only Radiation
The Congo River catfish Chrysichthys brevibarbis, copyright John P. Sullivan.With their long barbels around the mouth and lack of scales, the catfish of the Siluriformes are one of most instantly...
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Fall fell, so autumn
Today really felt like the first real autumn day, cool, crisp, dry (too dry!), and cool enough over night to require a light blanket with the optional two black kitty-girl warmer, but only for Mrs....
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Botanical art - Van Gogh's Olive trees
TPP loves botanical art, and this is just freaking amazing! An artist plants a 1.2 acre plot to recreate a Van Gogh painting. This is simply wonderful! Mrs. Phactor adds a "Wow! Van Gogh would be...
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FieldNotes: Circadian Rhythms in the brain, body and sea
Tracking the Ocean’s Circadian Rhythm by Christina Reed at Simons Foundation: To a distant observer on the Pacific waters north of the island of Oahu, Hawai’i, two ships seemed to be engaged in an odd...
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FieldNotes: water on Mars, less in California.
The Economic Ornithology of Sunflower Seeds by Ben Young Landis at See. Food. Write.: Under the yellow pallor of a smoke-filled sky, I walked along the edge of an underworld of sunflowers. I was...
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Bye, bye styrafoam! Hello, mealworm brownies!
Some things decompose readily; some things decompose slowly; some thing essentially decompose so slowly that they essentially don't decompose; a very few things are forever. Waxes decompose very...
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Positive control problem solved
I did the test experiment described in the previous post, and then spent the past few days figuring out why my positive control transformation didn't work any more.The test experiment was to kinase,...
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Some geometrical aspects of 3- and 4-spaces
A couple of abstracts about the geomtery of space: Historically, there have been many attempts to produce the appropriate mathematical formalism for modeling the nature of physical space, such as...
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Identical ligands, unrelated proteins, similar energies - When language...
Recognition of aromatic rings by two very differentmechanisms but through similar binding energiesOver the years chemists have come up with many different ways to talk about the structure and...
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