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The Man who made Mountains
U.S.G.S. engineer Bailey Willis († February 19, 1949) was known for his unorthodox approach to geological questions. Puzzled by the geological structures he discovered in mountain ranges, long before...
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Unnatural news about cancer cures
It was only a matter of time. Apparently news feeds popping up on Facebook have been referencing lots of "natural cures" the sort of thing regular reported at web sites like Natural News. So now a...
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A thaw reveals bad bun-buns
Officially this is the snowiest (already), and perhaps the coldest winter on record for this area, and it's only Feb 19th. Of course this week's thaw could kill the coldest winter record, but the thaw...
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Free online medicinal chemistry course at Davidson College
I wanted to alert interested readers to an introductory course on medicinal chemistry by Prof. Erland Stevens at Davidson College that seems to cover pretty much every basic and important aspect of...
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New Neopterygian Fishes from the Chinle Formation of Utah
This is an important new paper describing some new fishes from the Chinle Formation of Utah. Well-preserved fish are rare throughout much of the Chinle and relatively understudied in previous decades....
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More from The Signature
***Spoiler Alert*** This post may contain plot details and quotes from The Signature of All In the midst of the drama and intrigue that plays out in this book are some great mossy points for...
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American taliban in action
One of the USA's general problems is its smugness in thinking that WE are better than everyone else. OK, the USA has things to be proud of, but WE ain't perfect either. Recent events have displayed...
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Friday fabulous flower - a repeat, but better
While tropical plants are generally day-neutral in terms of flowering, something about the short days (actually it's the long nights) stimulates a lot of our glasshouse tropical plants to flower. It...
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Bark Beetles and their Hidden Harems
Galleries dug in a grand fir Abies grandis by fir bark beetles Pityophthorus pityographus, photographed by Louis-Michel Nageleisen.For producers of commercial timber, the above picture would not be a...
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Not feeling any safer here in Lincolnland
The fire-arms prohibited signs like this one were put on our academic building sometime during the past few days, but TPP is not feeling any safer. Nonetheless, with quite a few restrictions, like no...
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Pompeii – a Geological Movie-Review : Introducing the Main Character
The new movie “Pompeii” reconstructs one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in history with unprecedented “3D” special effects – but even the best visuals can’t help if the science is wrong – so how...
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Can you patent a fraudulent stem cell method? Yes!
Woo-Suk Hwang talks to reporters afterfraud is revealed. Photo: Reuters.At first I thought the Patent Office was having a little fun. Was it an April Fools Day joke? No, it's only February - and the...
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On making mistakes
In postulating an incorrect structure for DNA, Linus Pauling surprisingly committed an elementary chemical blunder (Image: pauling blog)In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Freeman...
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Waiting for signs of spring
Officially the 2013-2014 winter has been a long, cold, and snowy, and today is no exception. It's a bitterly cold day following another below zero Fahrenheit over night low. Just to make himself feel...
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What happens when chemists have nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon?
This. It started with me posting a link on Facebook to an awesome recent paper describing physicists' efforts to reweigh the electron to an accuracy of one part in a trillion. The great Aaron Finke -...
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Hell and happiness
Believing in hell seems to make people unhappy. That's the conclusion that Azim Shariff (University of Oregon, USA) and Lara Aknin (Simon Fraser University, Canada) have come to as a result of a series...
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The steady-state universe of Albert Einstein
We present a translation and analysis of an unpublished manuscript by Albert Einstein in which he proposed a 'steady-state' model of the universe. The manuscript appears to have been written in early...
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Tom Tomorrow on tomorrow's income inequality
It's been a long, long time since income inequality in the USA has been as great as it is today. The top 1% are worth as much as the bottom 50% and the difference is growing. How will this end up?...
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Digital features in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry
J. Med. Chem. has an editorial describing how the journal plans to make structural information in papers more accessible in a digital format. Most of this would entail having spreadsheets of compounds...
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Hiding hydrogen bonding groups in large druglike molecules
As most medicinal chemists probably know, one of the major challenges in the field currently is to find out the principles that govern the ability of "large" molecules - especially ones violating the...
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