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Insectarium visit
On the way to the French Quarter for some oyster po-boys, there was a window full of tropical butterflies fluttering around. This is not something you usually see in the windows of big federal looking...
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Man Develops Synesthesia after Stroke, Finds James Bond Theme "Orgasmic"
It wasn't only James Bond. Nine months after suffering a stroke, a 45-year-old happened to notice that the wailing horns in a Bond movie's opening credits gave him strange, ecstatic feelings. But any...
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62nd Carnival of Evolution
The 62nd edition: The Whig History is up at Joachim Dagg's Ecology and Evolution Footnotes. It's a voluminous and excellent edition, but as Joachim notes, getting enough submissions is more and more...
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European Influenza virus characterisation published - we're winning for now.
It always amazes me how much effort that our society goes to to track infectious diseases as they spread across the world. Really this probably shouldn't be so surprising to me considering the worry,...
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An outing in Louisiana - Fontainebleu and Abita Springs
TPP can only stand being in a big city for so long, like maybe five days. Today's outing required us to cross the 25 mile causeway across Lake Pontchartrain. Quite near the north end of the causeway...
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Hydroxyurea stalls DNA replication; does competence help cells survive?
In a post a couple of weeks ago I wrote:Stalled replication forks: We have been hypothesizing that one function of the competence regulon's proteins is to stabilize replication forks that have...
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New Orleans restaurant limited time review
New Orleans is one of those cities for eating out; lots of very good restaurants and lots of seafood. So TPP has done his best, mostly with the help of Mrs. Phactor and the recommendations of others,...
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Science in the news: why does it really matter
Most of what is written in a newspaper on a daily basis makes no difference to the life of the common man. Indeed some have even argued that news is actually bad for you That, though, doesn't stop...
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Alexander von Humboldt and the Hand-Beast
The German naturalist F. W. H. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is today remembered as great geographer and explorer (maybe one of the most common names found on topographic maps is even Humboldt),...
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On the Importance of Science Communication
One thing we often try to teach our graduate students and post-docs, and I believe to a lesser extent our undergraduates, is the importance of being able to communicate science to a general audience....
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Did you scan and email a document recently? You might owe $1000 to a patent...
We've seen how badly the U.S. patent system is broken when it comes to gene patents. The recent U.S. Supreme Court case overturning Myriad Genetics' patents on the human breast cancer genes, BRCA1...
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Turing, Fibonacci and the sunflowers
posted by @ulaulaman about #FibonacciDay #AlanTuring #TuringSunflower Today is the american Fibonacci's day, so it could be a good day to write something about one of the last work by Alan Turing.One...
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Home again, home again, jiggity jig
The trip home yesterday was basically a straight, as straight as the Mississippi River allows, shot north up I-55 of about 800 miles. The weather was good, the traffic was light, so it was just a 13...
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Fish Fear Robotic Predators, Unless They're Drunk
Scientists swear they had a really good reason for building a robotic fish, getting some other fish drunk, and then chasing them around with it. The robotic bird head, too. Researchers at the...
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New fern for lily pond and teaching
While messing around in New Orleans, TPP happened to visit a water garden nursery, a big one, just to see what they had. Among the nice array of water lilies were some of the biggest water ferns TPP...
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The Legacy of Rhampsinitus
According to the Histories of Herodotus, Rhampsinitus was a pharaoh of Egypt who ordered the construction of a secure storehouse for his wealth. However, the architect in charge of the storehouse's...
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Heat wave pushes north, way north
According to weather reports from around the world it was bloody hot in many places. OK, when isn't it hot and muggy in Bangkok? Usually it's hot and muggy this time of year around here, but of late...
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Earliest Mammalian Evolutionary Adaptations
Zhou, C.-F., Wu, S., Martin T., and Z.-X. Luo. 2013. A Jurassic mammaliaform and the earliest mammalian evolutionary adaptations. Nature 500 (7461): 163--167 doi:10.1038/nature12429Abstract - The...
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Scientists are creating a dangerous flu strain, just to prove they can
In an outrageous display of chutzpah, a group of flu researchers led by Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands announced today, in a letter to the journal Nature, that they were...
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Paul Dirac and the relativistic world
posted by @ulaulaman #PaulDirac #DiracDay #DiracEquation #Klein-GordonEquation #relativity #physics It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described...
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