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Sending Forget-me-nots
The Chatham Islands forget-me-not Myosotidium hortensia, from here. I haven't been able to prepare a full post lately as we're currently in the field conducting our next survey round for the day job....
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New neighbors - Hmmm.
The Phactor tries to keep an open mind. New neighbors just moved in across the street so enough of the neighborhood must have thought them OK to have gotten through the rigorous screening process....
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My work is laid out for me
I have to make competent cell preparations of a lot of our knockout mutants, and do transformation assays on almost all of them. They're mostly replicates of ones I've already done at least once, so I...
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MoonKAM: The Universe's First Student-Run Planetary Camera
MoonKAM is an educational project developed by Nasa. Some students form a selected school (the Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Bozeman, Mont.) had the possibility to request moon's surface photos...
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Spectrophotometer bulbs
The visible-light spectrophotometer we use to measure culture densities has been giving erratic readings lately so I decided to try changing the bulb. I was happy to find 5 spare bulbs in the folder...
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Due to a coin flip, I get to control my sex life.
Because the sperm cell that happened to fertilize the egg, which ultimately came to be me, carried a Y chromosome instead of an X chromosome, I am a male human. There was an additional Y carrying sperm...
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How it came from bit: Review of George Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral"
The physicist John Wheeler who was famous for his neologisms once remarked that the essence of the universe could be boiled down to the phrase "it from bit", signifying the creation of matter from...
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What entropy is or is not
A primer of what entropy is or is not at 3 Quarks Daily by Rishidev Chaudhuri and Jason Merrill:C.P. Snow famously said that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is like never having read...
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Carnivores have bad taste
Pseudogenes are genes that used to have a function, but no longer do. If a gene contributes to an important function for the organism, offspring with deleterious mutations that ruin the gene will have...
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Feeling Nervous: Action Potentials & Comic Strips
I went to visit my sister at University recently, and found pinned to her notice-board a picture that I drew and posted to her when she first moved in. The picture is a comic strip describing an action...
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Adorable Lemur's Sordid Nightlife Revealed by Lice
How do you study the social habits of an animal that's shy, comes out only at night to scurry through tree branches in dense jungles, and is the size of an M&M packet? You could try talking to its...
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Violet lawn
In addition to our blue lawn, which has now faded, and a bit quickly because of the unseasonal heat, the Phactors also have some areas of violet lawn. Here's what it looks like. Without question this...
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Four years of the Phytophactor
There was a lot going on Feb. 12, 2012: Darwin Day, Lincoln’s birthday, oh, and my kid sister’s birthday too. Hmm, she is the youngest of the three. So with all those things going on somehow the...
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Someone else's so-so Magnolia collection
OK, maybe Kew Gardens has a magnolia collection a bit better than the Phactor's, but then they are a bit bigger, and a bit older too. Enjoy.
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Science writing versus writing like a scientist
It is a fact that I have written more fiction in my life than science writing and more science writing that I have scientific papers. When my advisor has asked me to write I am able to naturally come...
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Postcranial Skeletal Pneumaticity in Triassic Archosaurs
Butler, R. J., Barrett, P. M., and D. J. Gower. 2012. Reassessment of the evidence for postcranial skeletal pneumaticity in Triassic archosaurs, and the early evolution of the avian respiratory...
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College faculty compensation & rising college costs - analysis of a moron
Do college faculty work hard enough? What an intriguing question? So in a counterpoint, the Phactor asks, who is David Levy and why is he such a moron? The issue Levy wants to discuss is that “college...
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Blogging the Origin: Chapter III: Struggle for Existence
Alright, this is a nice short and sweet chapter that goes one step further in making Darwin's case. Let's recall that Darwin is attempting to provide an answer to the question, where do species come...
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Religious students have fewer interracial friends
Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Freshmen (NLSF), Julie Park, an educationalist at the University of Maryland, has investigated how inter-racial friendships and religious affiliation...
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Chocolate is good for you
Well, duh! But just in case you think this is simply a good "healthy" rationalization for indulging, here's the actual list of health benefits attributed to chocolate. Whether chocolate will actually...
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