Clik here to view.
Research direction and goals (pondering)
Depending on when I count from, I've spent the past twenty or thirty years trying to get people to think rigorously about whether bacteria have any processes that evolved to promote random...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Litopterns: Macrauchenia and More
Much has been made of the "splendid isolation" of South America for a large part of the Cenozoic. Finding itself girt by sea, South America became home to a number of endemic groups of animals: the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Foot of Poposaurus gracilis, Further Convergence with Theropod Dinosaurs
....and the answer to the question we've all been wondering...what type of footprint would Poposaurus have left? It appears that Poposaurus probably could have left a Grallator-like track.Farlow, J....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The top 6 vitamins and supplements you shouldn’t take
The evidence against supplements continues to pile up.Recently I created a list of The Top 5 Vitamins You Shouldn’t Take. Now I’m expanding that list to include vitamin D, which is taken by almost half...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What I read (2013)
(Grade A-F, no E's) Title-Author Additional thoughtsA- Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey. A great read. Completes the series and answers those questions that can be answered while throwing up their...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Flat Earthers & debating creationists
Here's a link to a nice little historical video about flat-earthers of the 1800s and attempts to rationally, scientifically demonstrate that the Earth was a globe. Part of this episode involved Alfred...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Newly Discovered Ant Convinces Others to Be Its Slaves
Studies of ants have the ring of medieval epics: there are queens, castes, warring soldiers and scouts. Certain ant species go on violent raids of neighboring colonies, picking up the young in their...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rare plant theft at Kew
Now this really pisses TPP off. Plant theft in general is annoying, but when the plant is rare to the point of being extinct in the wild, and it's hard to grow to boot, and it may occupy a critical...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Back in the saddle again
The "spring" semester has started, last Monday to be precise. Let's be honest for a moment; this is actually the "winter" semester. Eight of the 15 weeks are before mid-March when the first hints of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gifts that send a message
Our post-Christmas travels provided limited opportunities for blogging. Here's a couple of gifts lovingly presented to TPP and he wonders what the gifters were suggesting? Clearly there is a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Addressing the Gender Issue
***Spoiler Alert*** This post may contain plot details and quotes from The Signature of All Things. It may seem unsurprising that a female bryologist in the early 1800's would disguise her gender on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Faking Sick for a Living
Lying to your doctor is encouraged in one situation: when your doctor is a student and you're an actor asked to portray a certain condition. My friend Amy Savage does this for work. In between fake...
View ArticleClik here to view.
TMI Friday: When you've literrally had your Chips
The victim of this weeks TMI friday didn't really do anything wrong. In fact, this is less of a TMI Friday than a FML Friday, but it's an odd story that perhaps you'll find interesting, and perhaps...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Governor is a misunderstood environmentalist not a political trickster
The governor of Joysey, Crisp Crusty, or something like that, has been in the news a lot lately for political dirty tricks. However, the governor's actions were clearly misunderstood. Closing lanes...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Planning more RNAseq experiments
The postdoc and former RA generated some great RNAseq data, which I'll write about in another post. But we have some money that needs to be spent on sequencing in the next couple of months, so we need...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What I've done lately
('Lately' being the 20 months since I last updated the Table of Contents of my lab notebook.)I've been keeping a Table of Contents of my lab notebooks since I was a grad student, initially on paper but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
MLK Day - Monday
It's a strange, quiet Monday what with classes cancelled for MLK Day. This has always struck TPP as a strange thing to do, cancel classes, when what you want is for students to learn something. It...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How natural processes can create meaning
The project of science is largely about asking why things happen. We seek causal explanations: Why do planets follow elliptical orbits? Why does water become solid in cold temperatures?Historically,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Taxonomy of Cow Farts
The organism in the above picture (from Garrity & Holt 2001) may not look particularly remarkable, but this is a very important microbe. This is a thin section of Methanobrevibacter ruminantium, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cold and plant hardiness
It's been cold, seriously cold, and while restating the obvious, it perhaps prompted a reader to ask about the effect of extreme wind chills upon plants. OK, this is an easy one; wind chill doesn't...
View Article