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Tikiguania Is Not From the Triassic
Hutchinson, M. H., Skinner, A., and M. S. Y. Lee. 2012. Tikiguania and the antiquity of squamate reptiles (lizards and snakes). Biology Online published before print. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.1216...
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When Psychologists Take Things Too Literally
Thankfully, in brainstorming meetings where I'm asked to "think outside the box," no one has ever put me in an actual box. That's not true of the undergrads who volunteered for a recent psychology...
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Friday fabulous flower - a Bignon
Bignoniacae, the bignon family, are largely tropical trees and lianas, and most of them have large showy flowers adapted to different pollinators. Catalpa trees and trumpet creeper are our temperate...
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Si tu vois ma mere
Last night was a typical Friday night for the Phactors: Chinese carryout and a DVD. Mrs. Phactor picked the movie, Midnight in Paris, a nice enough piece of Woody Allen fluff for nothing but an...
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Brief update
Things are progressing much faster than usual - this will be an epic week for paper-submitting! The Research Associate submitted her manuscript about natural competence in E. coli a few days ago, to...
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Biology of carnivorous plants
People have a certain funny fondness for carnivorous plants: pitcher plants, venus fly traps, sundews (maybe my favorite), Audrey II, bladderworts, and so on. They are among the favorites of visitors...
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Got the blues?
There are things that may be bigger crimes against nature than artificial hybrid orchids, and blue-dyed white moth orchids are one of them. OK, this really doesn't affect nature in any particular way...
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Do we really need a new measles vaccine?
Measles, that deadly childhood infectious disease is almost a distant memory to most people nowadays, that is except for a few isolated outbreaks across the US and Europe. This is all because of a...
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ArXiv submission?
I'd like to put our arseniclife submission to Science onto the arXiv server so that anyone who's interested can read it. Not many biologists use arXiv (it's mainly a physics thing) but it's a very...
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The Thorium Dream
Thorium may be the nuclear fuel of the future. It is clean, abundant, and safe. Check out this video made by the crafty folks at motherboard.tv documenting the grassroots movement to bring back thorium...
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Lists of Elsevier journals to boycott
Readers of this blog probably already know that there's a call out to boycott journals published by Elsevier because of their anti-scientific publishing practices. Initially researchers were signing a...
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Glenodinium and the Horseshoe of Light
Yes, it's another dinoflagellate. The subject of the above photo (from here) is Glenodinium pulvisculus. Glenodinium is a genus of photosynthetic, mostly freshwater dinoflagellates in the family...
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The #arseniclife manuscript has been submitted!
We've posted the manuscript on the public arXiv.org server. You can download the full pdf, including all the supplementary data, at http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.6643.
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Darwin Day Planning
Every year the Phactor hosts a little birthday party for Charles Darwin, but this year Feb. 12th falls on a Sunday. Since my Mondays and Tuesdays are just impossible, and Wednesdays are for catching...
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Berry Go Round #48
Welcome to the January 2012 edition of Berry Go Round! Here are some interesting botanical posts that I found from the past month. Enjoy! - Have you heard about the plants that eat nematodes? If not,...
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Largocephalosaurus, a New Eosauropterygian from the Middle Triassic of China
Cheng, L., Chen, X., Zeng, X., and Y. Cai. 2012. A new eosauropterygian (Diapsida: Sauropterygia) from the Middle Triassic of Luoping, Yunnan Province. Journal of Earth Science 23:33-40. DOI:...
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Do kids have to be taught about the supernatural?
One of the big questions about our supernatural instincts is to what degree they are innate, and to what degree they are learned. While there is some evidence that kids are born with a instinctive...
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Weird Words of Chemistry: Frigorific
I ran across this word when my youngest, who I'm coaching for the thermodynamics event for Science Olympiad,asked me why the freezing point of water was 32o on the Fahrenheit scale. The...
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Who Was Horse Eve?
Her story doesn't involve any borrowed ribs or knowledge-bestowing apples, but she was the female forbear of all horses alive today. Researchers say the Eve of horses lived about 140,000 years ago....
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How does you know if you're winning?
The great state of Lincolnland has banned smoking in public buildings, and as a result all the addicts retreat to the out of doors, just barely, to feed their habit, thus creating a smoky corridor for...
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