Clik here to view.
TMI Friday: Eat your Vegetables
There are a number of odd things that people do in pursuit of a sexual high, but today's story may just be the most bizarre event I've written about for TMI Friday. It was a peaceful afternoon, when a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Creationist implosion
Since the middle of last week I have been having an email conversation with a creationist. He emailed me after we had a conversation several years ago, now asking various questions about evolution,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Friday Fabulous Fall Color
It's a late fall this year and a lot of plants are slow in developing fall color. Here's witch hazel showing you why you should plant it. It grows in the shade, it's a pretty tough plant, it flowers...
View ArticleClik here to view.
#MicroTwJC: Dicing up Viral Genomes
In this week's Microbiology Twitter Journal Club, we have been challenged to dissect not one, but two papers. Fortunately, the University of California San Francisco have made one of the papers...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Colorado Plateau Coring Project
Coring is currently underway in Petrified Forest National Park targeting the Chinle and Moenkopi Formations.You can read about the project and follow the links to the main project page and daily blog...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Keeping entropy at bay
Today was a typical enough Saturday. All those little things that needed to be done to keep entropy at bay were beckoning: extracting Jove's testicle from the pond pump, fixing the water hookup on a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
MicroTwJC: Dicing up Viral Genomes Part 2
Good news everybody ! I managed to source a copy of the second paper for this weeks' Microbiology Twitter Journal club, after not an insignificant expenditure of time and energy. In the last blog post,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
University landscaping put to good use
TPP thinks with some justification that the entire campus grounds functions as his classroom. In particular just a one building from TPP's office is a crabapple tree that is a true champion. All...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Guys: no more invasive prostate cancer exams!
Good news for all the over-40 men out there: we don't need routine screening for prostate cancer. More to the point, we don't need to subject ourselves to the dreaded "digital rectal exam" that has...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reddit AMA FAQ
I did a Reddit/r/IAmA AMA yesterday and got a huge amount of questions. Some of them were repeats, so I post them here with answers. I'm planning to do another AMA perhaps next month, so this can serve...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Blogging for bigotry by the Catholic Conference of Lincolnland
Robert Gilligan writes pretty plainly so you don't have to look very hard for the main message here. Robert puts it right up front: religious liberty had ended in Lincolnland. Here's a choice morsel....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Great news! Thylacine probably not extinct!
Wow! This is such great news! The thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, a marsupial carnivore, might not be extinct! So often it's the other case, and so often it's the loss of habitat due to human...
View ArticleClik here to view.
#MicroTwJC: Dicing Up Virus Genomes Part 3: The Controversy
In this weeks Microbiology Twitter Journal Club we are going to be discussing two papers published a month ago in Science. These papers purport to provide evidence for RNA Silencing as an antiviral...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dream-fish, Coelacanths and Super-Predators: The Sarcopterygians
For the subject of today's post, I drew the Sarcopterygii, the 'lobe-finned fishes'. Though something of a poor relation to their considerably more diverse sister-group, the ray-finned fishes of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Found: A Rotten-Smell Button in the Brain
Window or aisle? Hamburger or hot dog? Bouquet of flowers or rotting flesh? Not all your preferences are up to you—some have been hammered into your genes by evolution.If you're an average human, you...
View ArticleClik here to view.
First it snowed, then it leafed
Our area got about an inch of snow last evening, the first of the winter, and not so unusual for November 12. And then the temperature dropped to 19 F (-7 C) over night. Again nothing so unusual for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The beauty of mathematics: the spinning tops
See in fullscreen mode: (video by from PARACHUTES.TV).The top is supposed to be simmetrical about its axis, and spinning with its point in a small, smooth cup $O$, like the Maxwell top; as his...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Smooth and rugged fitness landscapes
Here are a couple of maps of different landscapes just I just made today. The top landscapes are "smooth" and the bottom ones is "rugged". Smooth means that if you start anywhere on the map, there is a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What's the deal with rechargeable battery availability?
The last time TPP was in the market for rechargeable batteries most stores that carry such a product had a reasonable selection. Your basic hardware store chain had a big display and many options...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Mystery of the Missing Moss
This is a tale of a small group of mosses in the genus Sorapilla. Over the past 150 years they were located by scientists only a handful of times in the wild. That is until recently. A undergraduate...
View Article