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Everyone wants to be called a Moss
There are plants that we call mosses that are not really mosses. Spanish moss (in the pineapple family), clubmosses (a fern friend), and carrageen moss (a red alga that is used in foods as a thickening...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Ragwort
Ragwort - not a very impressive name, and not at all certain why it's called ragwort; maybe the sort of torn/worn margins of the upper leaves. Senecio has 1000-1500 species ranging from herbs like this...
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Baseball Players Make Worse and Worse Decisions as the Season Goes On
If their goal were to frustrate fans, they couldn't plan it any better. Major-league baseball players reach a low point in their decision making in September, just in time for playoffs. Across all...
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TMI Friday: Perfume, is there anything it can't do ?
We've all been there (I assume). You've caught the eye of someone at a party, or some other social gathering, and you've felt that instant attraction. And before you know it you've both drank...
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How does your garden grow?
The Phactors are busy assessing the condition of their garden prior to opening our garden grounds to a few hundred visitors. The drought of 2012, which continued right through the winter, did a lot of...
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Supreme Court bungles the science in DNA patent decision
[This is slightly modified from my post 2 days ago at Forbes.] The Supreme Court ruled this week that Myriad Genetics doesn't own your DNA after all. Myriad holds patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes,...
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Woody weeds - the bane of shade gardens
The biggest problem with shade gardens are the tree seedlings, woody weeds. Red bud are the worst because their roots go so deep so soon. A six inch seedling can be impossible to pull by hand with...
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Ask the professor: What do you do with yourself over the summer?
Yeah! That just makes my morning! What do us lazy professors do with our 3 month long summer vacation? Well, let TPP offer a couple of answers. First, we don't get paid. Maybe you think we aren't...
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Eyewitness testimony - illusions of movement
These are very interesting illusions. Most of them work on me especially the one shown here, as long as my eyes keep scanning. You can stop them by concentrating on one point. Some of them don't...
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People reminded of religion become intolerant of ambiguity
Around the world, religion is often linked to conservative attitudes. In fact, religion is famous for being socially ossified - the last bastion of the social and sexual mores of the...
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Keeping up to date
Recently, we've added several methods of keeping up to date on GamesWithWords.org projects (finding out when results of old studies are available, when new studies are posted, etc.). In addition to...
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Antibiotics & Agriculture Part 4: The Transfer of Antibiotic Resistance
The patient was in dire condition. A forty year old woman from Michigan, she had suffered badly from diabetes, kidney failure and a number of complications related to those diseases. Two years after...
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Bradybaenids: The Little Freaks
Just a quick one this week, as I'm busy preparing for the International Conference of Arachnology in Taipei next week. The wonderful assembly in the photograph above (by B. Frank) is a congregation of...
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Garden spruce up & rain paradox
Our garden/yard spruce up is going well and things are looking pretty nice. A new patio area and a flagstone pathway were finished up on Monday and look very nice. Mrs. Phactor's perennial flower...
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Compost Program Could Bring Dangerous Fungus into NYC Homes
If Mayor Bloomberg's wildest decay-related fantasies are realized, New Yorkers will soon be sparing their food scraps from the garbage. A new composting program would encourage (or possibly require)...
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Overview of the Aetosaurs
Desojo, J. B., Heckert, A. B., Martz, J. W., Parker, W. G., Schoch, R. R., Small, B. J., and T. Sulej. 2013. Aetosauria: a clade of armoured pseudosuchians from the Upper Triassic continental beds;...
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Oversharing and zero point energy wands: pseudoscience in the NY Times
While poking around the other day for some general reading material on the zero point energy, I discovered zero point energy wands (which claim to access not my favorite flavor of zero point energy...
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Aging, Maturation and Growth of Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs
Griebeler, E. M., Klein, N., and P. M. Sander. 2013. Aging, Maturation and Growth of Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs as Deduced from Growth Curves Using Long Bone Histological Data: An Assessment of...
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Antibiotics & Agriculture part 5: Stokstad's Genie
When Robert Stokstad discovered antibiotic growth promoters, he was operating in industrial farming's nascent era. In the 1920's, farmers realised that with the right levels of vitamin supplements,...
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How to Detune Someone with Perfect Pitch
Granted, it's a prank you can play on only 1 in 10,000 people. But if you find one of those rare individuals who can name any note they hear, with just a brief manipulation you can set that power...
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