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Bartram's Garden - a botanical Mecca
Perhaps it should be Bartrams' Garden (rather than Bartram's Garden because although the garden was started by John Bartram (1699-1777), his son William (1739-1823) inherited not only the garden but...
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Why does white gunk develop on the anode?
The gunk is soft, almost-gel-like. In the photo it's sitting in lumps in the buffer in the bottom tank, but only because I gently scraped it off the anode wire with a spatula after I took the gel...
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Distrust of atheists is reduced if people have confidence in law and order
If you read this blog regularly, you'll have come across work by Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Previously, they've shown that atheists in North...
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The Long (wood) and short of it
Longwood Garden is the best known and largest of the gardens included on this geek tour. It does not disappoint. Longwood has lots of everything, lightly managed natural appearing areas, vistas, a...
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Is Eigenfactor really a good measure?
I have just been alerted to Eigenfactor - a new measure of how influential scientific journals are. A one-page article in PNAS discusses its use, and explains how it is calculated: The Eigenfactor™...
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Striking Alzheimer's before it strikes
Those following the news on trials of drugs against Alzheimer's disease must be familiar with the depressing outlook from the front lines. There was a string of failures reported in the last few years...
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Titles
Yet more papers from the ToCs that I'd like to live longer to read. Evidence of non-random mutation rates suggests an evolutionary risk management strategy Serial Founder Effects During Range...
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Spore Dispersal by Snakes
I tend to avoid snakes in life in general, but this snake is having a super cool interaction with a moss. If you look closely, it appears that this smooth earthsnake is covered in moss spores!...
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Physics's PR problem: Moving beyond string theory and multiple universes
I was reminded of this by a timely post by MJ at "Interfacial Digressions". As everyone knows, chemistry has a PR problem. Fear of "chemicals" runs rampant without context or qualification. In...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Eggs on a bush
Last Friday the Phactor failed to post a fabulous flower for a very interesting reason; the hotel internet cafe had their filter set way high and it denied access to my blog on the basis of its...
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Back to the wild wild west
A rural Oregon county has decided not to fund government. Is this progress? Is this a return to the "good ole days"? Is this really what Americans want? Where's the freedom? Is this civilized?...
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The Secret to Success Is Giant-Jawed Snake Babies
When coming face-to-face with a wriggling, freshly born pile of poisonous snakes, most of us wouldn't linger for a close look. But it was by looking into these living linguini platters that one...
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That's more like it!
I'm using fusions of lacZ to the comA and rec2 competence genes to find out whether the HI0659 mutation acts by blocking competence induction. The first step was to put the HI0659 mutation (strain...
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A minor garden triumph over wildlife
The biggest problem with having a wildlife friendly property is that it is wild life friendly. Sometime this spring a member of our native species of marmot, locally called a woodchuck (as in "How...
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Climate change - Something to beef about
Many people who deny climate change don't want to pay the cost of doing anything about it, but there will be other costs. My colleague over at the Wild Plants Post explains the ecology of grasslands...
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Creative botany
Here's a very creative video about ginko, which is the creative way of spelling ginkgo. Does it really matter if you misspell the main character of your little creative work? After all what was the...
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HI0659 progress and plans
I'm making progress in figuring out how the knockout of gene HI0659 prevents cells from becoming competent. I don't know the answer yet, but I've ruled out some alternatives. We know that the...
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Strategy for making the HI0660/HI0659 double mutant
Here's my plan for making the mutant strain knocked out for both HI0660 and HI0659: I'll start with the two single-knockout plasmids that the RA made by recombineering. Both were made from the same...
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Having a Water Bottle for a Mom Not Ideal
In the wild, young rhesus macaques can reasonably expect not to have their mothers replaced by kitchen props. The monkeys depend on their moms to nurse them and tote them through tree branches while...
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Horsetails are not ferns!
Common names cause a lot of grief, but they remain friendly, although often uninformative or misleading, easy to remember, and at times they are useful as shorthand references. They certainly have...
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