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The last few days before a grant deadline
FMLWhy does it always seem that when the grant deadline is imminent, all the work I've done is basically irrelevant and I have 100 times more to do than I already have done? No really, why?
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Chemists' Magic Decoder Ring
What if we gave out chemical name decoders instead of periodic tables?Vintage magic decoder ring.Used under CC license. Source.Earlier this week the Royal Society of Chemistry released a report on the...
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The Secret Language of Chemists: Why does butter make us think of four?
Butter and why it means "four" to chemists.c. Michelle Shrank CC licenseEvery time I take a stick of butter out of the 'fridge I think of the number four. No, it's not some odd form of synethesia, but...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Juneberry
It's June! When else do you expect to get juneberry? Of course the shrub (Amelanchier - there are several species) flowered a couple of months ago and now the flowers are at the stage of seed dispersal...
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Ken Ham's solution to accomodationism and secular humanism
Ken Ham (founder and president of Answers in Genesis, the Creation Museum, wannabe arc builder) is a Young Earth creationist, and he prides himself in taking everything in the Bible literally. AiG even...
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Well watered June gardens
The first week of June has left our gardens well-watered with 3-4 inches of rain. TPP had to remove water from the lily pond and will probably have to do so again today because of the 2.75 inches of...
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This 1783 Volcanic Eruption Changed The Course Of History
“The sun fades away, the land sinks into the sea,the bright stars disappear from the sky,as smoke and fire destroy the world,and the flames reach the sky.”The End of the World according to the...
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Feynman to Wolfram: "You have to extract yourself from the organization in...
Imagine you are an ambitious scientist or entrepreneur wanting to start and run a scientific organization along the lines of your own notions of creativity and rigor. What would be the best way to do...
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Hot, steamy field work
Summer arrived rather quickly, as usual, and after all that rain, with some hot temperatures, all that vegetation and transpiration results in a very steamy environment, sort of a field work sauna. Not...
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Getting at the truth: gender in the lab
Nobel prize winning biochemist Tim Hunt made an unfortunate series of remarks at a luncheon for women science writers and journalists at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South...
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FieldNotes: Water, fire, origin of life, origin of cooking.
Witness borne by Shara Yurkiewicz at This May Hurt a Bit: “I need you.” The resident looked at me. It was a rare permutation of words for a third year medical student to hear. After glancing behind me...
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GOP political experiments
The whole idea of experiments is that they allow you to see if things work they way you think they do. Generally this means TPP is growing plants under different conditions to factor their various...
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How Linus Pauling almost gave Matt Meselson tellurium breath
Matt MeselsonLinus Pauling was the greatest chemist of the twentieth century. Matt Meselson devised the ingenious Meselson-Stahl experiment and almost single-handedly convinced Nixon and Kissinger to...
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The Diprotodontids: Marsupials Go Large
Reconstruction of Diprotodon optatum by Anne Musser, from Long et al. (2002). Offhand, running a search for Diprotodon through Google Image brings up some true horrors of digital imagery.Prior to the...
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A Science Blogger Survey
Have you ever wondered why people write science blogs? In the age of Twitter and Instagram are science blogs still popular? Is science blogging dying out? Does anyone actually read them? Feedback from...
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Governor Scott Walker's attack on academic freedom in Wisconsin
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker really doesn’t like professors. He seems to have a special grudge against the University of Wisconsin, against which he has launched a two-pronged attack this year.It’s...
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Molecular Jek-yls and -hydes
Like Jekyll and Hyde, changing a functional group changes a molecule's behavior. Image from Library of Congress.Chains of pure carbon and hydrogen, called hydrocarbons by chemists, are notoriously hard...
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New 22nd century garden tool - Weed Phaser Rifle
This is just so cool! It's always nice when space technology gets some new and innovative uses right back here on Earth for your own garden. Our June deluge has weeds just shooting up out of the...
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Chlorosis on the rise
An early summer pattern of rainy weather has continued unabated. One out come of this is appearing on a number of plants: chlorosis. This is when plants are not synthesizing enough chlorophyll and...
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