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How our lab neighbors melt their agar media
Each bottle on its own heater-stirrer, with its own stir-bar, stirring gently and slowly melting from the bottom up. Don't these people have a microwave oven?
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And on other fronts...
Knockout-mutant manuscript: One of the reviewers of the Research Associate's manuscript about her knockout mutant collection asked that we do plasmid-complementation tests to confirm that the mutant...
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Plant parasite of plants
One of our students defended her master's thesis today, and it was a very impressive study designed to see if a plant parasite responds to a host plant under water stress like insect herbivores would...
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Jumping Vampire Spiders Choose Victims by Headwear
It's reasonable for a hungry predator to hesitate when its prey appears to be two halves of an animal glued together and hopping up and down. Jumping vampire spiders faced with this decision took it...
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Kreativ Blogger {award}
I've been chosen for the Kreativ Blogger award chain letter*. I'll play along. Rules: link to the blog who nominated you, say seven things about yourself that readers may not know, list seven other...
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How to run a state - university
Once again the political brain trust of our fair state (Lincolnland) has figured out how to weasel out of a fiscal obligation. In this case what is likely to happen is that the state will place the...
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Not good...
Next week they'll announce the new Macs; I hope my old (4 years plus) MacBook Pro can last until then. Luckily this isn't The Blue Screen of Death, just a Mac 'blue screen crash', where the screen...
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Who are the real job creators?
The Phactor was still on his first cup of coffee when Nate showed up to begin work on a combination stone/wood-henge pergola. It stands a bit behind the lily pond that we filled with money during its...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Begonia
Well, a Begonia isn't very exotic, so it always comes as a surprise that so many people don't notice what they are looking at. Yes, flowers. But Begonia is a monoecious plant. Mono = one, ecious =...
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Grill experimentation - pizza
Sometime back the Phactor bought a big pizza stone at a garage sale, and Mrs. Phactor wanted to know why we needed another pizza stone in addition to the one that lives in our oven. At any rate after...
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Chistians find it harder than atheists to recognize their own faces
Christianity, many people would agree, encourages adherents to think less about themselves and more about their group of co-religionists. Yina Ma and Shihui Han, of Peking University in Beijing,...
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Government subsidies for chiropractic education
Source: daryl-cunningham.blogspot.com The U.S. is having a political debate about college tuition loans. Everyone seems to be in favor of keeping the loan rates low, but politicians disagree about...
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The value of higher education
A few months back the Phactors had to hire help to move some heavy bedroom furniture, so the local moving company sent over a team of gorillas. Typically enough they were relatively young and big...
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The Coral-lovers
The free-living (but, from the look of it, not particularly mobile) coralliophiline Latiaxis mawae, photographed by Merlin Charon. While the subjects of today's posts, the gastropods of the...
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Overeating Makes Flies Obese, Diabetic, Dead
Fruit flies that eat human diets suffer human consequences, according to new fly-fattening research. Overeating caused diabetic symptoms in flies, whether they ate too much sugar or went Atkins....
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Titles
This is only a fraction of the new papers on research in evolutionary biology from the last week or so. How many creationist papers have been published in the same time-span? POPULATION SUBDIVISION AND...
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China is a dictatorship
The fact that Hu Jintao refuses to talk to the Danish press as he visits Denmark next week. Apparently he never has in China either, in the almost ten years that he has been General Secretary,...
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A classic little flower
The Phactor has been really, really busy, and he hopes his editor notices the low frequency of blogging and understands that all that energy is being directed at finishing his book. In terms of...
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Global warming and hummingbird migrational timing
Our botanical geek tour scheduled earlier this year, but planned way back in February, almost came too late to see flowering displays of azaleas and rhododendrons. This was no surprise by the time of...
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