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How to recognize (and talk to) a chemophobe
Over the last few years there has been a lot of discussion of chemophobia in the popular press and on blogs. But it seems to me that there have been few summaries of the general features of chemophobia...
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Why does anyone care what politicians think about evolution?
It's only been a dozen days since Darwin's birthday, and evolution is in the news, and not because of some new study, but because a possible presidential candidate punted when asked about it. Clearly...
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More Mossy Magnification
Everyone knows about my love of magnification, including my family. This Christmas I got this great lens for my cell phone camera from my sister. Last year I wrote about a similar magnification lens...
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How to run a university - who are the low cost employees?
A cheerful memo arrived just the other day. It informed faculty that the Building Service Workers (aka custodians) would no longer empty broken glass containers in labs and classrooms. The memo then...
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On Screwing Over a Generation of Biomedical Researchers
We, the biomedical community in the United States, live in interesting times. Below is the funding dollars for NIH over the last couple of decades. I completed my Ph.D in 1998 about the time the...
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Tom Morton-Smith's "Oppenheimer": Slight, trite and unoriginal
J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant, enigmatic and complex man. Any treatment of his life, whether biographical or fictional, must bear the substantial weight of these qualities and capture the...
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News, infotainment, comings and goings
These days it's hard to draw a line between news and entertainment. Although TPP doesn't rely upon these types of TV shows for news, apparently many people do. John Stewart's annoucement about leaving...
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Yes, I'm still here
The last-chance-for-everyone CIHR grant proposal deadline is Friday at 8:30 am! After that's in, I promise to get back to the bench and back to proper research blogging.
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Physicists in biology, inverse problems and other quirks of the genomic age
Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner has criticized systems biology as a grandiose attempt to solve inverse problems in biologyLeo Szilard – brilliant, peripatetic Hungarian physicist, habitué of hotel...
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Wind chill and plant cold hardiness
A reader asks an interesting question. How does wind chill affect plants? If a plant is cold hardy to say 10 F [22 degrees F below freezing for those of you who use rational C units], and the wind...
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Fieldnotes: a view to spotted horses in the morning
Fieldnotes is a weekly collection of links to some interesting blog posts and articles about science all over the Web. You will find a new set of suggestions here every Thursday.As a chronobiologist,...
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A History of the Use of Illustrations in the Geosciences: I. Seeing is...
The progress made in understanding realistic landscape-views and the rediscovery of ancient encyclopedias (like the works by Pliny the Elder) inspired Renaissance naturalists to adopt an exact and...
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Grant proposal's done! What experiment shall I do?
I clicked 'Submit' on my grant proposal last night; my immediate teaching responsibilities are light, and there's nothing else big on my plate, so now I get to start doing experiments again!I think the...
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Music for cats
Just when you think you've seen, or heard, it all, along comes something completely different. Some cats are pretty quiet. Some cats are quite talky, yacky, and chatty. Some cats seem to chirp. Some...
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It’s life, Charlie, but not as we know it – Charles Darwin and the search for...
Actor Leonard Nimoypassed away today aged 83. So to remember his famous role as science-officer Spock on board of the USS Enterprise I will share some space-geology-related posts:In August 1881 the...
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Your Birthday Song
This link is little bit of fun. Enter your birthday and it returns the number one song on the American top 40 for that date. Found out the F1's song was Call me by Blondie, which is sort of...
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What we know about the competence-regulon gene comM
The grad student of an upstairs colleague has been doing a lot of excellent work on the Rhodobacter capsulatus homologs of some H. influenzae competence genes, because he has discovered that they are...
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murE mutagenesis planning
I want to create a pool of cells with random point mutations in the H. influenzae murE gene, and to select and screen this pool of cells for hypercompetent mutants. I'm going to do this by...
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Horny-Arsed Trilobites
Reconstruction of Ceratopyge, from here.Just a short post for today. The Ceratopygidae are a family of trilobites known from the Late Cambrian and Early Ordovician. The name of the type genus,...
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Rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock
http://t.co/a0l4FP6ftF Goodbye #LeonardNimoy, #Spock from #StarTrek by SciFiCatOne popular five-weapon expansion is "rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock", invented by Sam Kass and Karen Bryla, which adds...
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