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English bluebells from Brooklyn
English bluebells are very different from our bluebells; the only similarity is that both are a blue and nodding bell-shaped flowers. These are a hyacinth-like flower (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) that...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Magnolia tripetala
It's not every day that you have a new species of Magnolia flower, in this case Magnolia tripetala, one of the big-leafed species. The flowers are borne at the ends of the branches and sort of sit...
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So how does Respiratory Syncytial Virus infect your lungs?
This post is hopefully the beginning of a new series of stories on this blog covering the thinking behind the papers I cover from the point of view of those scientists doing the work. The first up is...
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Dueling Birds Evolve New Egg Colors in Decades
"Arms race" might seem like too dire a phrase for what's essentially an egg-dying contest. But for the two bird species hurrying to outwit each other, it really is a matter of survival. The stakes in...
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Titles
More papers published this week about evolution: The Evolution of an Enigmatic Human Trait: False Beliefs due to Pseudo-Solution Traps. Spatial Structure and Interspecific Cooperation: Theory and an...
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Religion facilitates learning about omniscience – but it still has to be learned
Recently, the New Scientist published a special ‘God’ issue(behind pay wall) arguing that religion is natural and beneficial to society. All very interesting, but several of the articles gave quite a...
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A Trip to the Moon
A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la lune) is a 1902 French black-and-white silent film by Georges Méliès. It was extremely popular at the time of its release, and is the best-known of the...
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Oral cancer in India: A public health menace
Oral cancer is the most prevalent of all cancers in India, which sees 5.6 million cancer deaths every year. A cheap and widely available chewing tobacco product, gutka, has some 5 million children...
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"Pigging" out in Chi-town
The occasion of the Chicago Plant Science Symposium left us with a choice: head home in the Chi-town mad rush hour, or stick around and go out to dinner with friends. Some choices are easier than...
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University of Florida eliminates Computer Science Department. At least they...
Wow, no one saw this coming. The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million. The school is...
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A stranger in a strange land
As a world traveler the Phactor has awakened in many a strange place. But having bummed some floor space and an inflatable mattress from our city friends following our pig-out dine-out, the Phactor...
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Every day is Earth Day
Today is the official Earth day, but what day isn't Earth day? It's the only planet we've got and it's regularly and routinely mistreated as if another could be had for the asking. The Phactor...
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The Horns of Ammon
Goniatite of the genus Girtyoceras, showing the relatively simple zig-zag sutures of this group, from here. Ammonites are one of the few groups of fossil invertebrates that are known to the general...
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Coffee, bugs, and death
Tiny minds are at work worrying about tiny things, in this case whether a dye from ground up insects ruins your vegan diet when used in a coffee drink. Well, not as much as a strawberry frappacino...
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Conference social skills
(Hmm, new Blogger interface...) I'm just back from EVO-WIBO a small conference for evolutionary biologists in the Pacific Northwest (WIBO=Washington, Idaho, BC and Oregon). The quality of the talks...
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Could it Be? An Non-Archosaurian Archosauriform that is Actually a Dinosaur?
The past eight years have seen quite a few cases where purported Triassic dinosaurs actually turned out to be non-dinosaurian archosauriforms...Revueltosaurus, Shuvosaurus, Azendohsaurus... finally the...
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Modeling magic methyls
Shamans have their magic mushrooms, we medicinal chemists have our magic methyls. The 'magic methyl effect' refers to the sometimes large and unexpected change in drug potency resulting from the...
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Have bacteria evolved gene-specific rates of point mutations?
A paper just out in Nature (Martincorena et al. Evidence of non-random mutation rates suggests an evolutionary risk management strategy) concludes that E. coli genes have different mutation rates....
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Life Advice: Think More about Death
The other kids on the school bus used to shriek when we stopped at my house. Or hold their breath. I lived directly across the street from a cemetery, and until I started riding the bus I had no idea...
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