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What can I recover from an old failed experiment
About 18 months ago I did a big mutagenesis experiment, intending to isolate new hypercompetent mutations. I made several mistakes and the experiment was a failure, but I did freeze stocks of...
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FieldNotes: Rogue Microwave Ovens Call Home
Serotonin and the science of sex by Bethany Brookshire at Scicurious: In 2011, a group of scientists “turned mice gay.” The only issue is, of course, they didn’t. Rather, Yi Rao and colleagues at...
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Nobelist John Pople on using theories and models the right way
John Pople was a towering figure in theoretical and computational chemistry. He contributed to several aspects of the field, meticulously consolidated those aspects into rigorous computer algorithms...
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Any help with apple experiment?
TPP is ready to begin a new apple experiment; the last one was a failure. With limited space, TPP has been looking at the columnar dwarf apple trees, basically a central shoot with lots of flowering...
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Feeding the pseudoscience rumor mill
Source.LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik has a piece this week considering how (or whether) journalists should address pseudoscience and its purveyors. He, along with others — Keith Kloor/Discover...
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April 18, 1906: San Francisco´s Wicked Ground
“O, promised landO, wicked groundBuild a dreamTear it downO, promised landWhat a wicked groundBuild a dreamWatch it all fall down”“San Andreas Fault”Maybe the first persons to note something unusual in...
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Where agricultural technology doesn't work - rice terraces
This is a very handsome image of human transformed land. TPP's initial impression was that this was a marvelously fluid work of stained glass art. This image shows rice terraces in Yunnan China that...
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Snowden and the debate on surveillance versus privacy
In June 2013, NSA contractor Edward Snowden met with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen Macaskill and film-maker Laura Poitras in Hong Kong. The whistleblower gave them documents which proved the...
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Debunking Moss Graffiti
Have you heard of moss graffiti or moss art? Outdoor walls and surfaces covered in mosses shaped into words or images (Google Images). Many articles on the internet promote mosses as an easy way to...
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RNA-seq progress
I've collected and frozen all the 24 samples for our make-up RNA-seq run. (not the Trizol-prep ones - they've been deep-sixed). And this morning the co-op tech learned to prep RNA from each sample....
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Other tasks for the soon-to-be-departing Co-op tech
The Co-op tech will be leaving us at the end of the month. Last week she gave an excellent bab meeting presentation, and this revealed a couple of loose ends and interesting possibilities that should...
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April Flowers
April has been quite mild, even warmish, so the gardens (and field work) are charging along at an alarming pace. This must be pretty close of peak flowering, whatever that may mean. So far over 75...
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Dot Snails
A dot snail Punctum pygmaeum crawls over a mountain bulin Ena montana (itself not a very large snail). Copyright Stefan Haller.The dot snails of the family Punctidae are one group of animals that...
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Barrallier's Monkey
"Gogy told me that they had brought portions of a monkey (in the native language "colo"), but they had cut it in pieces, and the head, which I should have liked to secure, had disappeared. I could only...
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Today's work on the RNA-seq samples
The Co-op tech has pressed half the samples through the RNeasy kit spin columns, and will probably get the rest done today.But she also is still working on the PCR checks (problems getting...
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Happy Earth Day!
It's Earth Day and TPP doesn't know whether to celebrate or cry. You see TPP remembers the first Earth Day because he was a senior, and it was spring, and he was going to graduate school, and he had a...
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Shape vs vibration: Continuous rather than discrete?
There's an article in C&EN by Sarah Everts on a new paper by Eric Block's group at SUNY Albany that throws a rather large stone at the window constructed by Luca Turin's vibrational theory of...
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Earth Day Bouquet
Mixed lettuces: Bibb, black-seeded Simpson, oakleaf, harvested today and in the sink for washing.
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Moore's Law turns 50: The End of the Beginning?
The cost of gene sequencing has surpassed even Moore's Law.Nature has a perspective reminding us that Moore's Law turns fifty this month. The article talks about the ramifications of the law for the...
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FieldNotes: Let the sleeping apes lie
Apes reveal secrets to good sleep by Matt Walker at BBC - Earth: Watching an orangutan sleep is like watching a giant, orange baby slumbering sweetly. These huge great apes like to get into bed, and...
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