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On the impact of social media and Twitter on scientific peer review
I am very pleased to note that an my article on the impact of social media and especially of blogs and Twitter on peer review in chemistry in particular and science in general has just come out in a...
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FieldNotes: Encounter with Pluto
The Walking Dead by Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker: Did you get enough sleep last night? Are you feeling fully awake, like your brightest, smartest, and most capable self? This, unfortunately, is a...
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The Sculpins of Baikal
Drawing of Leocottus kesslerii, one of the more plesiomorphic of Baikal's sculpins, from here.In a post that appeared on this site some seven years ago, I briefly introduced you to the sculpins of Lake...
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Living on tree-lined streets makes you young, thin, and rich
Well, that's a pretty amazing correlation, or is it causation? Articles like this catch your attention especially when you live on tree-lined streets. There are lots of factors here where the Phactors...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Sunflowers
Here's a bucket of sunflowers from the Madison, WI farmers' market. They make you happy just looking at them. This area has many flower and produce growers that were originally native to SE Asia and...
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Bryophyte Research Podcasts
The American Bryological and Lichenological Society (ABLS) has started a podcast to feature current research on bryophytes and lichens directly from the experts. Episode 1 focuses on transcriptomics....
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Ludicrous speed! Really?
Ludicrous speed! How funny is that? Tesla has a car with a speed mode of Ludicrous in which it accelerates from 0 to 60 mph (about 96 kph) in 2.8 seconds! That is rather ludicrous! Who needs that kind...
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Interesting counter point on the environment this week
In terms of sustainability here's an interesting counterpoint that both turned up this past week: the State of the States report (news article at Treehugger) by the Global Footprint Network and the...
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Having green in your flag is bad for your IQ
If your country has green in its flag, then you are less likely to be intelligent.If that isn't an explosive statement, then I don't know what is. But data from Raven-online suggest that this is true....
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The problem with molecular modeling is not just molecular modeling
I am attending the Gordon Conference on Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) in the verdant mountains of Vermont this week, and while conference rules prohibit me from divulging the details of the talks,...
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The telescopic view of the Moon
John Philipps Emslie (1839–1913) was a British topographical artist and folklorist.From 1854, Emslie studied at The Working Men's College, and was a student of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He became a...
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The Dicranophyllales: An Early Branch of the Conifers?
Reconstruction of Dicranophyllum hallei, from here.Popular works on the fossil record tend to give us a very uniform picture of the Carboniferous period. A watery swamp can be seen covering the...
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Quarks of power
about @LHCbExperiment #pentaquark discovery Once upon a time, there was a controversy in particle physics. There were some physicists who denied the existence of structures more elementary than...
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FieldNotes: When Snark was a Boojum
Snark-Hunters Once More: Rejuvenating the Comparative Approach in Modern Neuroscience by Jeremy Borniger at The PLOS Student Blog: 65 years ago, the famed behavioral endocrinologist Frank Beach wrote...
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Best garden photographer 2015
Every year Kew Gardens has a garden photography contest. Sigh. Overlooked again. But not really once you see the winning photographs in this year's international contest in all these various...
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Eating periodically: is there thallium in your wasabi?
Wasabi, Iwasaki Kanen 1828via Wikimedia Commons Could your wasabi peas be poisoning you? Short answer. Maybe.Delish recently posted an article on thallium — a highly toxic metal — in kale, the...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - rose mallow
TPP may have done the rose mallow before, but these flower merit a repeat. Quite honestly TPP doesn't know what species of mallow this cultivar comes from because there are several large flowered wild...
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Recycled tires & gardening.
A lot of used tires out there need recycling. TPP decided to try a recycled tire product that looks like brown bark mulch except it's shredded tires. In this case the tire "product" was used to replace...
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Botany 2015 is happening!
Maybe it's a certain environmental cue that triggers an urge to cluster, but around this time of year, somewhere around the continent, botanists gather for an annual event, a meeting, a convention, a...
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Universe
pic via @astroperinaldoPluto's Panorama with the Sun far far away imagined in the documentary Universe - via @astroperinaldoUniverse is a black-and-white short documentary made in 1960 by the National...
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