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Tweets from Evolution 2012 in Ottawa
Lots of people are tweeting from the Evolution 2012 conference in Ottawa. It's the biggest evolution conference ever - first joint North American and European. Sad for those who are missing it, but at...
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A Sporophyte Gone Wild
What happens when a moss sporophyte's calyptra does not detach properly? Really odd development! I came across this sporophyte in one of my Funaria hygrometrica cultures recently. Calyptra Recap: The...
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The U.S. enters the 20th century (or: why our electrical grid is a failure)
No, the title of this article is not a typo. We did enter the 20th century - the early 20th century - last week. All it took was a thunderstorm. Sometimes I am struck by how phenomenally...
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Botany 2012
The annual botany meetings are in Columbus Ohio, so no big change of scenery for the Phactor, but honestly, sometimes you don't even leave the hotel-conference center. The best part of these meetings...
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The Rotaliida: Building a Wall
Tests of Elphidium crispum, photographed by Spike Walker. The foraminifers have been featured on this site a number of times before, when various members of this diverse group of unicellular organisms...
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NASA's cowardly responses to their #arseniclife FAIL
I've now seen two responses from NASA about the new publications that refute the Wolfe-Simon results. The first was sent to Margaret Munro of Postmedia News, by James Schalkwyk of NASA: We asked the...
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"Arsenic bacteria": Coffin, meet nails
For those dogged souls still following the whole debacle of arsenic-eating bacteria, it seems that Science has published what should be close to the death knell for "arsenic life". I already mentioned...
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Botanical meetings - Day 3
What happened to Day 2? It vanished into the dozens of conversations with friends and colleagues, multiple sessions of scientific talks, research discussions, mixers, and business meetings. Events...
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Why Successful Leaders Share Their Harems
A male monkey cruising through the grasslands with a harem of females all to himself might seem to have hit the primate jackpot. What simian doesn't want a dozen lady monkeys to bear his long-tailed...
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Update on Dragon Dictate
I recently bought a new computer, and Dragon Dictate is working much better on it, if not perfectly. And this is despite the fact that I have trained the new copy much less than the old one. One...
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Unidentified Sedimentary Object
These large (hammer is 20cm long) vertical structures are found in lacustrine sediments (homogeneous fine-grained sand with dropstones, left of picture) of the Alpine last glacial maximum. They show a...
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Chemistry by accident
I just finished another Thesis column for Nature Chemistry, this one on the notion that chemistry sets are an essential part of turning kids into chemists — more particularly, what I called the Uncle...
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Blogger poutine
Here we are a group of bloggers in Quebec just across the border from Ottawa having poutine. Jerry Coyne, Rosie Redfield (blue hair), T. Ryan Gregory, Steve Watson, and Seanna Watson. Picture is taken...
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Zn(III)? Not so fast
Chemists love rogues, oddballs which seem to defy the rules and bond, react, and exist on their own terms. The rogues are valuable because they push the boundaries, teach us about new principles of...
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Different parts of the brain linked to religious practice, spirituality, and...
One time-honoured way to try to work out the function of different parts of the brain is to study people with brain damage. If damage in a particular area is consistently associated with a particular...
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Another fine botanical meeting shot to heck
Well, it's over. Another botanical meeting finished. The Phactor has attended 30 some odd of them now having started 40 years ago, but missing a few. Had a last drink with several friends after the...
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Brain Scans Predict When Poker Players Will Bluff
Your gray matter doesn't have much of a poker face. Even if your stony expression reveals nothing, two bits of brain tissue behind your ears leap into action when you decide to make a bluff. But it's...
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No shit - a new way to study diarrhoeal disease
Diarrhoeal disease is awful. I don't think I have to tell anyone that. According to the WHO: Key facts Diarrhoeal disease is the second leading cause of death in children under five years old. It is...
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A visual depiction of vision
Filed here, so I can use it next time I teach intro psychology: What did we do before XKCD?
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Salt Rush
In the grip of a pretty severe drought, nice flower pictures are a bit hard to come by locally, but really spectacular flower pictures are pretty regularly featured in the annual Botanical Society's...
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