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Holometabolous When?
A few days ago, I asked you to guess the problem with this T-shirt (from here): 'Holometaboly' refers to the life-cycle found in insects belonging to the clade Holometabola (i.e. flies, moths, wasps,...
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Now Available: A Chastity Belt for Your Mouth
Is your main problem with dieting that you have a whorish mouth? Instead of saving itself for the truly worthy suitors—the poached lean proteins and steamed vegetables with dressing on the side—does it...
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TMI Friday: I'll tell you where you can stick that Bratz doll !
I missed the whole "Bratz" craze, on account of not being a pre-teen girl at the time it happened. But I am aware that it existed, and that there were some out there who disapproved of it. I heard that...
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Durian - Love it or leave it?
Experienced travelers in SE Asia would know what this sign means. No Durian! It would be displayed right outside your hotel along with similar no smoking, no pets, no solicitations, etc. The only...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - What is it?
Oh, it's been awhile since TPP has had a plant ID quiz. Now to be fair, much to the delight of our woody hort person,TPP himself failed this quiz being not only unable to guess the name of this...
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PNAS and the eHarmony dating site: a perfect match
Well, here's a shocker. eHarmony, the online dating service, commissioned a survey that found out that couples who get married after meeting online are more satisfied than other couples. I'm sure...
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Planting, re-planting, re-re-planting
Dear garden denizens, please allow me to explain. For gardeners and farmers, planting is a hopeful, optimistic activity. The outcome of those small beginnings captures our imagination so the effort...
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Death by crazy and willful ignorance
There's crazy, and then there's stupid crazy, and the latter can result in your death. Now you can be crazy and put a gun to your head, or you can be like this lady and kill yourself ever so slowly....
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#MicroTwJC : The Creation of a Superbug
The year was 2004. The patient was a 6 month old baby girl. She was about to enter thoracic surgery, when the doctors found that she was harbouring methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Now, in...
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All About Buris ensipes
Sunorfa, from here. The beetle pictured just above is not the intended subject of today's post. It is a related beetle found in Thailand, but I've used its photo instead of one of today's subject...
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As race day approaches, Oxford rowers increasingly turn to their faith in...
Regular readers will be familiar with the idea that people put into stressful situations often respond by ramping up their superstitious or religious beliefs. Now Miguel Farias, at Oxford University,...
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Moths Wait until Bats Lock On, Then Jam Their Sonar
If you are a human reader, you've probably never seen your lunch put up an invisibility shield and perform an evasive maneuver just as you reached for it. But spare a thought for the bats. If your...
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What makes a sentence ungrammatical?
This is the latest in a series of posts explaining the scientific motivations for the VerbCorner project. There are many sentences that are grammatical but don't make much sense, including Chomsky's...
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FFF plant ID quiz has readers stumped!
Well, it has been a long time since the plant hotshots who read this blog didn't score the right answer on a plant ID quiz in about 10 nanoseconds, but apparently this one has you stumped. It's not...
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Quantum quivering
One thing that still stuns me about quantum mechanics is the notion that all molecular motion does not cease at zero degrees Kelvin (despite what you might read in your intro chemistry book). Quantum...
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Two New Aetosaur Papers Including a New Taxon, Stenomyti huangae, from the...
Taborda, J. R. A., Cerda, I. A., and J. B. Desojo. 2013. Growth curve of Aetosauroides scagliai Casamiquela 1960 (Pseudosuchia: Aetosauria) inferred from osteoderm histology. From Nesbitt, S. J.,...
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Ants in your pants
Gardening and field biology have some common ground; both make you get outside and interact with nature. So TPP was replacing a rather sad juniper with a more shade tolerant shrub, and like most of...
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Citizen Science: Rinse & Repeat
One of the funny things about language is that everybody has their own. There is no "English" out there, existing independently of all its speakers. Instead, there are about one billion people out...
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Congratulations! A winner for the FFF plant ID Quiz!
Marek Michalski said...I've found this !!! I've found this !!!It's Alangium platanifolium, isn't it ? Very strange flowers and leaves...Yes, correct, and TPP knows how Marek feels. My first guess was...
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Antibiotics & Agriculture Part 3: The Spread of Resistant Bacteria
The application of antibiotics to livestock has provided a boon to the agricultural industry. Unfortunately an outbreak of Salmonella showed that this application could have some untoward side effects....
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