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Stygophalangium: Harvestman or Mite?
The original illustration of Stygophalangium karamani, from Oudemans (1933).In 1933, the Dutch zoologist Anthonie Oudemans described what he believed to be a remarkable new species of harvestman. Based...
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What would be a "non-intuitive" prediction in medicinal chemistry?
Over the last two decades when computer-aided drug design was in development, one of the most common refrains you heard from medicinal chemists about its utility was that it did a poor job predicting...
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The Geology Of Star Trek: From Extraterrestrial Minerals To Alien Life-Forms
August 19, 1921: Happy Birthday to Eugene Wesley „Gene“ Roddenberry - creator of Star-Trek Universe, where you can find some fascinating geology, from extraterrestrial minerals to silicon life-forms !!...
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TGIF Seminar
A strange, eclectic group gathers every Friday sometimes at commercial establishments if they don't remember the group from the last time and sometimes at the houses of "members". In this particular...
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Not just in time
Having been brought up to never throw away anything that might be useful, TPP has accumulated quite a bit of stuff over the years: screws, wire, rope, wood, flotsum, and so on. But it's only useful if...
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Eukaryotic Microbiology Intro Readings
My advanced microbiology course, Eukaryotic Microbiology, is up and running. At least the website is. I have assigned several introductory papers for the course as a primer for the students. The papers...
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A science missionary in dangerous country (state)
Teaching if done well is a difficult task, although it does get easier with practice. Teaching is also easiest when the students are interested, eager, and willing. When they aren't one or more of...
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Nighty night nightshades
This hasn't been the best growing season for nightshades: tomatoes, eggplant, chili peppers, petunias, etc. Both the combination and the sequence of weather seems to be not to their liking. Firstly it...
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Infantizing college students
TPP taught biology to freshman non-majors and majors for a long, long time, for over 20 years total. So just about every intellectual student-faculty interaction you can think of has happened along at...
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FieldNotes: Amplituhedron and the dissection of cats
Dissecting Cats With High School Students by Rachel Fairbank at Billfold: As a first-year high school anatomy teacher I got into the habit of hiding my cat dissection manual under a pile of books...
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Botany 2015 by the numbers and some plant identification
TPP has been struggling with a few plant identifications these past couple of hours; a sunflower (just checking the id - Helianthus laetiflorus var. rigidus), a rosinweed, a couple of species (maybe?)...
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On live-tweeting at conferences
Nature News has an interesting piece on another novel aspect of the collision of 21st century social media with 20th century scientific culture, this time related to the phenomenon of live tweeting...
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A chemistry decoder
A basic guide to decoding organic compound names© Andy Brunning/Compound InterestThe August 17th edition of C&EN — Chemical and Engineering News, the American Chemical Society's weekly newsmagazine...
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Darth Cheney & Iran
The surfacing of Darth Cheney to 'splain the problems with negotiating with Iran was so very predictable. First, all of the knee-jerk GnOPers who exclaimed that they were against the anti-nuclear...
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Guns, safety, and the OK confedreracy
Here's another update from an OK science missionary. And what Stan says about guns and safety is sadly true enough for almost anybody in this country today. Like TPP said before, best to leave rednecks...
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The Dicynodon-Lystrosaurus Assemblage Zone Boundary May Not Approximate the...
Wow, well this should definitely generate some discussion and a bit of research.... Gastaldo, R. A., Kamo, S. L., Neveling, J., Geissman, J. W., Bamford, M., and C. V. Looy. 2015 Is the...
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Sea Bass, Mutant or Otherwise
...though to the best of my knowledge, none of them have fricking lasers on their heads.Painted comber Serranus scriba, copyright Roberto Pillon.The Serranidae are a group of marine fish that go by...
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Midwestern USA and food
When TPP first moved to the midwest in the fall of 1970, nobody knew what a bagel was. To a kid even one from upstate NY, no bagels was an indication of a lack of civilization, and even if they had...
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Jurassic World fact check: can we clone dinosaurs?
One of this summer’s biggest hits was the movie Jurassic World, which earned a record $209 million on its opening weekend back in June. It's so popular that it’s still showing in theaters now, more...
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Hypno-Moss
Recent decades have seen a great deal of shifting around in the classification of mosses. As molecular data have become de rigeur in phylogenetic studies, a number of features previously used to...
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