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TMI Friday: A Shocking Discovery
You should always be careful with electricity, a fact that is perfectly illustrated in this weeks TMI Friday. Today we find yet another story of a poor soul who recklessly endangered their life during...
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Bees Can Smell How Much Sex Their Queen Has Had
Just because girl talk between bees is wordless doesn't mean it lacks for intimate details. When sister honey bees gather around their queen, they can tell from her pheromones whether she's mated—and...
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Just hanging out in Costa Rica
Not! Walked several kilometers today just doing natural history of rainforest organisms with a very observant and knowledgeable naturalist, one of the best and certainly the most modest. Seriously,...
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Castilla rubber
One of the trees that is fairly frequent along water courses here on the warm, wet side (east of the mountains) of Costa Rica is the native rubber tree (Castilla elastica– Mulberry family). It’s not...
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Rainforest birding in Costa Rica
Costa Rica is a hot bed for birders, and the La Selva field station is a hot bed for Costa Rica. Over 400 species of birds have been recorded here. TPP is not a very good birder (that's Mrs....
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Deepak Chopra's pseudoscience is called out by Jerry Coyne
Deepak Chopra is upset.Why? Well, it all goes back to statements like this one, from Chopra himself:“Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the...
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Neural networks and astronomy
by @ulaulaman about #astronomy #mathematics #NeuralNetwork #Saturn I published this post some years ago (archived version), but for unilateral decision of the online publisher, it is deleted, so I...
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It's a Monday?
One of the stranger things about staying at this tropical field station is the timelessness of the place. Days and dates just don't matter except to the outside world. You begin adjusting to the...
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Malpighiales: A Glorious Mess of Flowering Plants
Ixonanthes reticulata, from here.There is no denying that the advent of molecular analysis revolutionised the world of plant phylogeny. Previously an uncertain landscape of shifting sands, beset by the...
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Rainforest AM and a fig
It's 8 AM, on one hand it seems early, but it's not. The rainforest day shift began their activities about 3 hrs ago at first light, when you first can perceive that it's gray not black out there....
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The Shambulance: Put Down the Bananas! There's No Such Thing as a Mono Meal
The Shambulance is an occasional series addressing bogus products and overhyped health claims. The chief tactical officer onboard is Steven Swoap.While you're enjoying a full Thanksgiving plate this...
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The secret to feeling safer - 1984 version
"In the light of all that we have learned in the last few months, let’s recap where we are: We have a government that collects everyone’s communications data in secret and stores them, justifying the...
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The golden age of computational materials science gives me a disturbing...
Graphene, a wonder material which was made by scientists using a version of Scotch tape (Image: Wikipedia)I was a mere toddler in the early 1980s when they announced the “golden age of computational...
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The Universe in a glass of wine
by @ulaulaman about #RichardFeynman #physics #universe #wine Once upon a time, Richard Feynman telled a story about the universe and a glass of wine: A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass...
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Rainforest understory
Rainforest is hard to describe, hard to show to anyone who has not experienced it first hand. Of course, that is why TPP is here to give his students that experience. Here and there in the forest are...
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Observations on students on a tropical field trip
One of the more rewarding aspects of TPP's work is taking students on field trips, and none are better than rainforest ecology. Here are some observations. This year's class is very observant; they...
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Thanksgiving in Costa Rica and with young people
Costa Ricans, Ticos, are some of the nicest people in the world. They prepared a 1st class Thanksgiving dinner for us gringos, a dinner that was good enough and fancy enough and pretty enough to...
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Cooler Than Your Environmental Club: An Interview with My Little Sister about...
Teenagers who want to cause a disruption don't have to ride a skateboard anymore; these days they can do it on a bike generator. Earlier this November a crowd of students came together in Upstate New...
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TMI Friday: Telephone support
When things go wrong, often we turn to the humble telephone to help us out. Whether we turn to it to call for services found in the yellow pages, family, friends and the authorities when an emergency...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Lipstick plant
Well, how ridiculous is that? TPP is in the tropics and he allows a Friday to sneak by without posting a flower picture! So here you go. This plant has several nicknames, but the most common one is...
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