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Winter post-mortem and triage
Well, most the glaciers have retreated, and even the mid-week snowfall has melted, and it's getting easier to assess the damage and the cause.Privet hedge - seriously wounded by bunnies; amputation...
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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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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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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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The Post Antibiotic Era will take your job away.
In 1934, The Los Angeles Milk Commission gave its employees devastating ultimatum- lose their tonsils or lose their jobs. When our antibiotics stop working, your employer may force you to make a...
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Organic seeds - save your money
TPP went to his favorite garden shoppe to buy a few packs of seeds, some lettuce & spinach to put in his cold frame for some early season salad. And there, prominently displayed, was an entire rack...
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She lost me at the Central Limit Theorem
I've been saying for ages that I need to learn the statistical programing language R, so that I can work with all the bioinformatic data we're generating. So yesterday I looked through the Coursera...
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Cinnamon
One thing is certain based on the experience of 40+ years of teaching botany; very few people know what they are really eating or where it comes from. Providing such information, enlightening a few...
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Getting ready for RNA-seq cell/RNA preps
The RA's missing notebook hasn't turned up, so I don't have her notes of how she prepared the samples for the RNA-seq analysis. Luckily the main procedures are ones she used in many experiments and are...
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Cleaning out the freezer now a lower priority
Things stay preserved better frozen than generally believed. This is such a relief. Let's not worry about that bag of cranberries residing in the lower strata of our freezer, although every now and...
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A blink of an eye
Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded...
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Here's a local tribute to the Irish - weird, but a tribute
St. Patrick's day celebrations here about has a lot to do with cabin fever. Here in the upper Midwest, people get a bit crazy after a couple of months of winter, and as a result do some pretty weird...
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Forcing flowering
What's a guy to do? Spring is not cooperating, and my taxonomy class needs some flowers. Some of the early flowering tree/shrub species are showing swelling buds, so it's time to force some flowering....
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Does the world need a glow-in-the-dark bicycle?
Well, hell, yes! A glow in the dark bike might even be enough to get TPP to ride at night. A glow bike is just plain nifty, and much cooler than the light bikes seen riding around NYC in Men in Black....
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Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
For the jillionth time, the tomato is a fruit. That this question went to the Supreme Court is totally silly, but then to add that the justices had to consult a DICTIONARY, well, that's just insulting!...
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At long last spring?
Yesterday was the vernal equinox, a bit of a misnomer because if TPP understands it correctly, the night and day light hours are not exactly equal because of something or other about when the day is...
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Girdling the hedge
Let TPP show you the privet hedge bordering his driveway along the property line. This is where the snow gets piled when, and if, the driveway gets shoveled. What is notable this year is just how...
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A Concise History of Geological Maps: From Outcrop to the first Map
March 23, 1769 marks the birthday of pioneering stratigrapher William Smith, who is also credited with creating the first useful geological map, however like many other great accomplishments also...
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Enthusiasm and promise at the ACS Dallas National Meeting
I am writing from the Dallas airport from where I am heading out back home after a fantastic national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). This meeting was definitely the best of its kind I...
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