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The luxury of driving
Not too many of you are old enough to remember when travel by air was quite nice, comfortable, convenient, decent food, good treatment. Now it's inconvenient, you're treated like a terrorist (by now...
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Exploring Calyptra Function: A dissertation saga in summary
In mosses, the calyptra is a small cap of maternal tissue (1N - gamtophyte) that covers the top of the offspring (2N - sporophyte) during development. A long-held old hypothesis (from 1884!) is that...
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Why a Lost Baby Seal May Soon Be at Your Doorstep
Every host knows when you run out of ice, the party's over. For young seals surviving on ice floes, the festivities are breaking up sooner than they used to. That sends vulnerable youngsters into the...
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Halticosaurus orbitoangulatus is a Pseudosuchian, Not a Dinosaur
Brian Switek has the details regarding this new study at his blog Laelaps.Sues, H.-D., and R. R. Schoch. 2013. Reassessment of cf. Halticosaurus orbitoangulatus from the Upper Triassic (Norian) of...
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Live coverage of Big Protist Conference (ICOP) in Vancouver, 28 Jul -- 02 Aug
There's a big protist meeting in Vancouver starting tomorrow, and I've been generously supported by ICOP and ISOP to attend as a reporter. I'd like to invite you all to follow us during and/or peruse...
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Redescription of the Middle Triassic Diapsid Megachirella wachtleri, an Early...
Renesto, S., and M. Bernardi. 2013. Redescription and phylogenetic relationships of Megachirella wachtleri Renesto et Posenato, 2003 (Reptilia, Diapsida). Paläontologische Zeitschrift. DOI:...
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Botanical meetings - New Orleans
Well, TPP is back in New Orleans for the annual botanical meetings, back because we done this here before, so while fond and the memories are rather foggy because that was 40 years ago. So two of my...
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Botanists visit the New Orleans Botanical Garden
The NOBG is located within City Park, one of the larger municipal parks in North America. NOBG got a start during the depression as a WPA project, but over the decades it fell into neglect and...
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Epiphenom AWOL
Sorry about the lack of posts, folks. I moved house recently and I'm still recovering from the shock! Normal service (posts every week) will be resumed in the near future... This article by Tom Rees...
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Informing authors of the real consequences of CC-BY open-access publication
Thanks to comments on the previous post, I now realize that there have been extensive discussions of the merits of different CC licenses for open-access publishing. See for example:...
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A particularly heinous crime: Neurology professor poisons neurologist wife
From Science Careers comes this account of a heartbreaking and especially twisted crime. A professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh, Robert Ferrante, has been charged with poisoning his...
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Ceratium...er...Neoceratium...er...Tripos humilis
The dinoflagellate formerly known as Ceratium humile, from here.ceratium has long been a popular choice as a representative dinoflagellate genus for textbooks, because as micro-organisms go, they're...
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The Shambulance: Laser Lipo Only Kind of Sucks
The Shambulance is an occasional series in which I try to find the truth behind overhyped or bogus health products. With me at the reins are Steven Swoap and Daniel Lynch, both of Williams College....
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Uh,oh! Botanists laugh at LA legislators who don't like evolution
Well, it just couldn't be helped. For no particular reasons that TPP can see, a symposium entitled, "Yes, Bobby, Evolution is true" at our annual ongoing botanical meetings in New Orleans attracted...
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Making the hemin stock/solving a chemical puzzle
Yesterday I tried, and failed, to make a new lab stock of the hemin that Haemophilus influenzae needs as an iron source. Hemin comes as a fine black powder; it's not really soluble in aqueous...
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Paleoenvironmental Interpretation of a Fossil Locality from the Late Triassic...
Havlik, P., Aiglstorfer, M., Atfy, Haytham, E. and D. Uhl, Dieter. 2013. A peculiar bonebed from the Norian Stubensandstein (Löwenstein Formation, Late Triassic) of southern Germany and its...
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Botany confernence symposium generating more PR for Louisiana
Oh, gosh! OK, it's just the Huffington Post, but it's more real good PR for Louisiana and its Governor Bobby Jindal. Here's the link to what the HuffPo had to say about the symposium "Yes, Bobby,...
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Conference aftermath
Scientific conferences are almost frantic activity packed into 4 days, a fevered orgy of interaction, a once a year event celebrating the social, personal aspects of our particular science. At the end...
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What does mercury being liquid at room temperature have to do with Einstein's...
Image: Wikipedia CommonsOne of the great moments in twentieth century science came when Paul Dirac married quantum mechanics with Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity to produce relativistic quantum...
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