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A DNA Sequencing Breakthrough for Pregnant Women
DNA sequencing has made its way to the clinic in a dramatic new way: detecting chromosomal defects very early in pregnancy. We've known for 25 years that traces of fetal DNA can be detected in a...
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Checking the hypercompetence mutants
Here's the results of the transformation time courses of the control strain 'K' (= KW20) and the hypercompetence mutants (RR735 and its backcross descendant RR735).The lower graph is just culture...
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Shock Me like an Electric Eel
Electric eel Electrophorus electricus, photographed by Stefan Köder.The electric eel Electrophorus electricus is one of those animals that seem to border on the mythical. Most people will have come...
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Woohoo! RRResearch made a top-ten list!
If you've come from the list of The 10 Must Read #womeninscience Blogs, you might be a bit disappointed to see that the most recent posts are descriptions of day-to day work in my lab. That's typical...
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Spring thaw and debris moraines
Presently the area is getting it's first significant thaw since mid-December. Since the amount of snow was a local record (a piddly amount compared to snow belt snowfalls) masses of snow got piled in...
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Primary season blues
Nothing can be more depressing than election season here in Lincolnland. The state presently has a governor who ascended to office when the feds locked up his predecessor in a special prison kept just...
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Stephen Hawking and the (cosmological) Riemann's zeta function
Following Emilio Elizalde (read this presentation in pdf) I found a paper by Stephen Hawking in which he used the Riemann's zeta function: This paper describes a technique for regularizing quadratic...
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Pity the postdoc
PNAS has an interesting interview with well-known biochemist Greg Petsko about the plight of the postdoc. Postdocs are the main drivers of published academic research so it was a surprise to Petsko -...
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Field trips versus tours
Some educational tour organization called TPP and wondered if he had ever considered organizing any educational travel for his students. Since 1996 we've taken a rainforest ecology class to Costa Rica...
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Does fructose inhibit development of competence?
I gave a seminar at Michigan State yesterday, invited by the Microbiology graduate students (Thanks guys!). While I was there I met with a research group that works on Actinobacillus succinogenes, a...
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Now that was a political speech to remember. Not!
The most dangerous, unforgivable thing John McCain ever did was to pick Sarah Palindrone as his VP running mate; the idea that she was that close to so much power is truly scary. And now the USA seems...
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Life and lemons: The Memory Addition
About two weeks ago I opened my eyes realized I was in a strange room laying in a strange bed. I saw my ex-wife sitting off to the side. Other people were around. I thought to myself 'oh shit! wtf...
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Science itself has many laws, but it doesn’t give a damn about ours.
This postings title is a quote from Phil Plait's column over at Slate. This in response to yet another GnOPe (the G is silent in case you didn't know) controlled state, Wyoming, trying to legislate the...
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Friday Fabulous Fern
Too much politics and not enough botany and your brain begins to rot, so let's have a Friday Fabulous Fern! Further in a effort to change the seasons, TPP will change gears and provide you with a...
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March 2014 Desktop Calendar at Yosemite
I took some time off this week and went camping in Yosemite National Park. It was my first time there and it was an amazing visit. Granite mountains, boulders covered in mosses, and tough trees...
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A brief history of pi: part 2
by @ulaulaman about #piday #pi #MachinFormula #EulerIdentity Today is the pi day, so I continue the brief history of $\pi$After the introduction of $\pi$ in mathematics, one of the quest linked with...
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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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