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Friday Fabulous Flower - Spiderwort
Friday, June Oneth, and it was in the 40s this AM, so the fingers on the handle bars got really cold while riding in. But gloves? In June? And the house heat on too? This isn't Wisconsin or Maine!...
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Rare Blooms
John pauses with his cursor over a photo of a dark yellow flower. He seems to be debating whether to say something. "I call this one the penis orchid," he admits. I see it. The Coryanthes bears a...
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June 2012 Desktop Calendar
This is an image pulled from my archives. A flashback from 2008. Shown here are some mosses growing in a raked rock garden at a temple in Japan. If you are interested in downloading this desktop...
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Titles
Wondering, with all the time in the world, would we even do all the things we say we would if we had all the time in the world? How does that even work? By saying all the time int he world, do we mean...
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Car constructed of pot runs on coffee?
Far out, man, a car made of hemp, but if memory serves the Phactor correctly, and not all of those years are remembered clearly, didn’t Cheech and Chong come up with this idea years ago? Will it be a...
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New Triassic Papers
Thanks to Ben Creisler for originally compiling these... Chen, Z. Q-., and M. J. Benton. 2012. The timing and pattern of biotic recovery following the end-Permian mass extinction. Nature Geoscience 5:...
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First ever Fascination of Plants Day - 2 weeks ago!
Yes, the first ever Fascination of Plants Day sounds really exciting, and fun, but we missed it by over 2 weeks (May 18), so it was pretty hard to get involved. Unless, unless some of you knew but...
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Brachymeria perflavipes and Beyond
Male of a Brachymeria species, possibly B. hammari, photographed by John Hallmén. For the subject of today's post, the wheel-spin brought up the parasitic wasp Brachymeria perflavipes. This is a...
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Accepted!
Our #arseniclife manuscript has been officially accepted for publication in Science. We now have to abide by Science's embargo policy, so if you'd like more information you can look at the copy...
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Magnolia envy
The Phactors and friends went to a garden party, and a quite impressive garden it was much in keeping with the impressive house and impressive old neighborhood, one of those enclaves where the wealthy...
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Why You Can't Kill a Mosquito with a Raindrop
Compared to a spindly mosquito, the mass of a raindrop is like a bus bearing down on a human. Yet the delicate insects thrive in wet, rainy climates. To find out how mosquitos live through rain...
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"Arsenic bacteria": If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up...
Rosie Redfield (who blogs on this network) has just published an official, careful and decisive rebuttal to the "arsenic bacteria" fiasco in collaboration with a group at Princeton. The paper which...
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In the US, belief in life after death is linked to belief in a just world and...
Religion and afterlife beliefs are pretty tightly bound together, and there are several ideas why that might be. One is that belief in an afterlife might make help people to be more relaxed about...
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My blog is back from the dead (sort of)
Greetings from New London, New Hampshire, where I am attending the Meiosis Gordon Research Conference this week. As such, it seems timely and appropriate to host a guest post on my (very dusty!) blog...
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The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl
Image from Hochwagen Lab This proposal was shouted out as “…one of the most important papers on the control of meiotic crossing over…” (Hawley 2006). Since then, “homeostasis” has been offered as the...
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#microtwjc ...Just Add Manuka Honey.
I tried. I really tried to avoid blogging, and to concentrate on my thesis. When the microbiology twitter journal club appeared, I thoguht that I may write a piece when I had finished with my thesis....
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Two New Triassic Archosaurian Taxa in the New Issue of Acta Palaeontologica...
These two papers have been available for awhile as accepted manuscripts, but now they are officially out and freely downloadable. Niedźwiedzki, G., Sulej, T., and J. Dzik. 2012. A large predatory...
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Stupid spam posts
Apologies to anyone who has had their RSS feeds filled with very annoying (and sometimes arabic) spam posts coming from this blog. Hopefully I have cleared this mess up and if I haven't, I apologise...
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Carnival of Evolution on Pharyngula
The June edition of Carnival of Evolution is now live on Pharyngula: Carnival of Evolution #48: The Icelandic Saga! There are nearly 50 posts written by some amazing science bloggers. I seriously...
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How do point mutations in murE cause hypercompetence?
I'm about to analyze the competence phenotypes of a series of double mutants, to try to find out how our point mutations in the murE gene cause overinduction of the competence regulon. I thought I...
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