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42 and Douglas Adams
http://t.co/OYVsXcrpqm happy #towelday with @ulaulaman 42: properties and curiosities
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Too Easy, but What the Hell
I 'belong' to a 'Creation Evolution Debate' group on Facebook. I joined this group, not because I think there is a debate, there isn't, but because I wanted to see what Creationists thought was...
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Are the old mutagenized cells worth using?
Last month I wrote a post about an old experiment (What can I recover from an old failed experiment). I concluded that some of the frozen mutagenized cells might be worth using, but that I would first...
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The difference between popular chemistry and popular physics
This is from Half Price Books in Redmond, WA which I visited over the weekend. In this world popular physics books are popular physics books. Meanwhile, popular chemistry books are just textbooks.Of...
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A review of Freeman Dyson's "Dreams of Earth and Sky"
Freeman Dyson is one of the most brilliant and wide-ranging thinkers of his time; the rare example of a truly outstanding scientist who is also a truly eloquent writer. This volume gathers together...
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Jurassic Park Mosses
Imagine the world millions of years ago. Covered in plants and dominated by dinosaurs. Mosses were a critical component of the lush green background, but you wouldn't know it from the fossil record....
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Testing a placebo blocker
Oooo! This really is a hard experiment to design. Placebo effect is real, and this xkcd cartoon posted nearby at the Curious Wavefunction hints at some of the complications. Warning: science nerds...
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Small garden creativity at the Chelsea Flower Show
Visiting the annual Chelsea Flower Show at least once should be a must for every garden enthusiast. The big landscape gardens are terribly impressive, but the smaller gardens can be quite lovely, very...
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Sympiesis
Female Sympiesis, copyright Lyle J. Buss.We often imagine that parasites select their hosts largely on the basis of type: one parasite prefers caterpillars, for instance, while another prefers flies....
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John Nash's work makes as good a case as any for the value of...
What's the mark of a true genius? A Nobel Prize based on work that someone did in their PhD thesis at age 22? The fact that their theories are used in a stunning variety of disciplines, from economics...
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FieldNotes: When Snakes Had Legs...
Data Suggests Legs and Toes in Ancestor of Living Snakes by NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR at The New York Times: From the robust boa constrictor to the venomous rattlesnake, all of the more than 3,400 snake...
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Really, truly, deeply depressing news
TPP finds this really, truly, deeply depressing news. Fewer students are taking botany classes and herbaria are shuttering their doors. What this means is that fewer and fewer people have the skill...
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Still planning the mutagenesis project
OK, I'm abandoning the old mutagenized stocks and starting the mutagenesis project from scratch.I want to take advantage of having selectable alleles linked to each of the genes where mutations produce...
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American teens are losing their religion
Just this figure.Fig 2. Percentage of American adolescents endorsing “none” for religious affiliation, 1966–2014.From Twenge et al. (2015) Generational and Time Period Differences in American...
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On the ethics of that "chocolate sting" study
By now many people must have heard of the so-called "chocolate sting" carried out by scientist and journalist John Bohannon. In a nutshell, what Bohannon did was to carry out a fake study on a very...
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Good people that were misled by bad intelligence
Gosh, so many good people were being misled about Iraq. Guys like Darth Cheney were just doing the best they could with what they knew at the time. Sure. Tom Tomorrow has it nailed; Jeb doesn't.
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Rare, uncommon, or just inconspicuous orchids?
Orchids are not as rare or as uncommon as most people think. Orchids are also much smaller, less colorful, less conspicuous than most people think. The reason for this is simple, the ornamental orchids...
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The true treasure of the North
GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! found in the Klondike river in the Yukon territory, Alaska. The news spread like wildfire, fueling the last great gold-rush of the United States in 1896-99. Fig.1." The Prisoner of...
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Completing the toxin/antitoxin project
The honours undergraduate has finished her work on the toxin/antitoxin genes, and has submitted and successfully defended an extraordinarily good thesis. The thesis is written as a polished scientific...
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