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Could I use Pinterest to organize links to research papers?
I spent much of yesterday going through piles of papers on my desk, throwing out some and sorting others into topic piles. Most of it was printouts of pdfs of research papers, which I keep mainly to...
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Solution to grapefruit medication problem
Last Saturday our dinner group planning committee decided to include a salad recipe that featured chunks of grapefruit pulp. One of our super worry worts said, “Don’t grapefruit interact badly with...
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HI0569, gene of mystery
The RA's heroic project to create knockout mutants of every gene in the H. influenzae competence regulon has turned up one big surprise - the HI0659 gene. This small cytoplasmic protein, whose mRNA...
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UK meet Schmallenberg virus - Schmallenberg virus meet the UK
Still-born lamb after Schmallenberg infection. http://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/i Europe is currently experiencing an incredibly worrying outbreak of disease across hundreds of farms in the...
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Pinterest report (ho hum)
Thanks to an invitation from @SciChem_, I got a Pinterest account yesterday and tried it out. I wasn't hoping that Pinterest would be a good substitute for formal reference-management programs like...
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Happy Birthday, Charles!
Today is the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday 203 years ago. It's easy for an evolutionary biologist to get depressed these days what with the prospects of getting a GnOPe candidate that has...
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Best Practices for Justifying Fossil Calibrations
This is a pretty substantial article from a large number of authors working in a variety of taxonomic groups regarding the proper presentation of data when looking at historical patterns in...
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CIHR proposal - mutant phenotypes
We've been going back and forth and around and around on the part of our CIHR grant proposal where we propose to ... well, part of the problem is that we've not decided whether this section should...
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An element by any other name would smell as sweet
Elemental naming was as fraught in the 19th century as it can be today (though now the IUPAC has rules and committees). Alternate names and symbols for elements persisted not merely for decades, but in...
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Love is in the air (and microbes too)
With Valentine’s day fast approaching and love being well and truly in the air it got me thinking, could the bacteria we live with be somewhat involved? The bacteria living in a commensal, symbiotic or...
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Cake Walk
Ordering a cake for Darwin's belated birthday was like a trip to another land. Cake themes: subcategory: professional - no biological/scientific professions at all. Bummer.  Can you do some botanical...
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ASTRONOMICAL - The Movie
A scale model of our solar system in twelve 500 page volumes printed-on-demand. On page 1 the Sun, on page 6,000 Pluto. The width of each page equals one million kilometres.This film takes us through...
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Your Sharkskin Speedo Makes Sharks Scoff
"Inspired by the sleek, hydrodynamic properties of sharkskin," Speedo claims, its Fastskin FSII swimwear mimics the texture of a shark to reduce drag and make you faster. But the material might work...
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Botancial Geek Tour - 2012
The planning is underway for this year's botanical geek tour, our third, in the continuing quest to see the 1001 botanical gardens you should see before you die. Economic times being what they are,...
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Confirming your suspicions on climate change denial
Particularly with the topic of climate change denialism, it was pretty easy for us skeptics to believe that corporations and individuals whose fiscal interests are wrapped up in polluting businesses...
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Is stasis a general trend across non-skeletal traits?
In today's eSkeptic, which celebrates Darwin's 203rd birthday, Donald Prothero write about the most cited paper in all of paleontology: Eldredge and Gould's Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to...
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Did Mosses Ruin the Planet?
The mosses crept out of the ocean, covering the bare rocks on our desolate planet over 400 million years ago. They sped up the chemical weathering of the rocks and decreased atmospheric carbon dioxide....
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The handedness of belief
People who are ambidextrous are more likely to have magical beliefs. That's something that was known before but has recently been confirmed by Gjurgjica Badzakova-Trajkov and team from Auckland...
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To Kill Parasites, Flies Self-Medicate with Booze
Everyone negotiates hazards in their lives. Your food is poisonous, say. Everything wants to eat you. Parasitic wasps are laying eggs in your body that will eventually hatch and chew their way out. To...
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Identifying new drug targets in zebrafish
Classically, when very little about molecular biology and protein structure was known, one of the best methods to discover drugs was to try to guess physiological effects by looking at drug similarity....
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