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Nothing to fear but the daily news keeps trying
Our morning newspaper led off with a headline "Ebola crisis in USA continues". Yes, the number of cases of ebola in the USA doubled, a 100% increase; now there are two. Now in west Africa there is a...
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Friday Fabulous Fungus - Oyster mushroom
It's been a wet, cool fall, a great season for fungi, and this is just the right time of year to spot oyster mushrooms, Pleurotus ostreatus. And you urban dwellers don't need to miss out, a walk around...
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Fall color finally arrives
Fall has been rather slow developing this year probably because of the ample rain and mild temperatures. Today really felt like fall, a bit cold with a possible frost tonight, and finally fall color is...
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Sybra punctatostriata
Sybra punctatostriata, from here.Just a very brief post today, because once again I've drawn a species that I haven't been able to find too much about. Sybra punctatostriata is a member of the...
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Alan Guth, eternal inflation and the multiverse
http://t.co/CnvvOY0mAI about #AlanGuth #multiverse #CosmicInflation #icep2014 At the beggining of October, Alan Guth was at the workshop Fine-Tuning, Anthropics and the String Landscape at Madrid, and...
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Evolution, sex, and mixability
Last Friday Christos Papadimitriou gave a seminar at UC Santa Barbara in the Computer Science department. The title of his talk was Computational Insights and the Theory of Evolution...
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Eeek! Dozer blight!
Wow, these developments outside of Las Vegas are so remarkably vile. This is some of the worst dozer blight TPP has ever witnessed. This is what happens when you have government by development...
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Should the government allow scientists to create new super-viruses?
Let's suppose a bunch of scientists proposed to take one of the most infectious human viruses—influenza, say—and turn it into a super-bug. Is this a good idea?Or to put it another way: should...
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Systematic fiscal abuse of public universities
Higher education especially the USA's systems of public state universities has been one area where our country truly excelled, and now this educational success story is being denigrated and gradually...
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Ahmed Zewail and the challenges of intercultural chemistry
A few days ago I was reading the fine biography of the Caltech chemist Ahmed Zewail who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his wonderful work on laser femtosecond spectroscopy which allows us to...
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Religion matters more than education when it comes to creationist beliefs
The USA is a conundrum when it comes to creationist beliefs. While the US comes about average in high-school science education results, staggering numbers of American adults are not only creationists...
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Sex? Sex? Oh, please. It's copulation.
In higher organisms, sex, gender, and copulation are all neatly tied up together such that to the less well informed (read science correspondent) they are one and the same. So when some science...
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What should our 'senior' co-op tech do next?
We have two co-op (undergraduate) technicians at present (paid from the last of our leftover CIHR funds). Each is with us for 8 months; one started in May and the other in September, so there's a 4...
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Phenotype of the rpoD mutant
This mutation causes H. influenzae cells to become competent prematurely, and to reach levels of competence in rich medium that are about 100 times higher than normal cells. The mutation causes a...
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Effects of cAMP and AMP on competence development by the rpoD mutant
This is a continuation of yesterday's post on the phenotype of our hypercompetent rpoD mutant strain RR753. Yesterday we wrote about its behaviour under 'normal growth conditions, and now we're going...
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Interaction of a ∆hfq mutation with the rpoD mutation
Here's the last part of the summary of what our senior co-op technician has been doing. The last set of experiments tested the interaction between a new ∆hfq mutation we've been studying, which...
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Just in time for Halloween
Yes, it's Tom Tomorrow's Right Wing House of Fear! Be afraid, be very afraid, and of course, vote accordingly.
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Wild life? OK, so why is it just animals?
Apparently the Wildlife Photography of the year contest is only open to people who suffer from plant blindness. Plants apparently are neither wild nor alive. Maybe these guys used to work for the...
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Weird words of science: prilled iodine
"Sample of iodine" by LHcheM. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia CommonsI was browsing the paper version C&E News on the train yesterday afternoon, and...
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PHLOX news tells it like it isn't
PHLOX news tells it like it isn't because conservatives prefer to hear conservative ideology and rhetoric rather than facts, and as a result the political debate is getting more polarized because the...
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