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Issac waters our gardens
The remanents of hurricane Issac dumped rain on north central Lincolnland on Friday night and Saturday morning. According to our trusty rain gauge Issac left us 4.3" of rain super filling our lily...
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The Variety of Life turns 1000
I have just published the 1000th entry onto the Variety of Life site. Subject: the weevil subfamily Baridinae. I started "The Variety of Life" a bit over a year and a half ago to give a broad, more...
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It's the End of the World as We Know It...
...maybe. For lo, it did come upon this day that the ICZN did look upon electronic-only publication, and say that it was good. Provided that it met the following requirements: (1) the published work...
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Good year for haploid males
Enough about the weather, but since it is late summer, we must post on a topic TPP has visited before. This will be no surprise for people who suffer from hayfever, but this has been a very good year...
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Some people study the most interesting things
They got data, but no mechanism to explain why the shape of the glass affects the speed at which people drink beer, but it does! They think it's perceptional where you think more is left than really...
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Safe drinking rules
TPP has provided some rules for drinking safety before, and woe be to those who violate them. First and foremost, don't drink anything with a funny name or funny color. Clearly here is a case where...
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Cool New Cryo SEM
The electron microscopy facility that I work in here at UConn just got a new piece of equipment over the summer and I have some images from it to show off. The laboratory now has a cryo-stage for the...
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The war on atheism - bucking the social norm leads to social rejection and...
Take any given country, and religious people tend to be happier and more satisfied with their lives than the non-religious. Quite why this is so is a matter of debate, but there's increasing evidence...
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Sept 2012 Desktop Calendar
This is leaf of Physcomitrium pyriforme or P. eurystomum. I am not sure which species. It was a preliminary photo that we took for some leaf cell measurements that we will be making this semester. If...
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Darwin's Restaurant (CoE #51)
The 51st edition of Carnival of Evolution is up at The Stochastic Scientist: Darwin's Restaurant. There's something on the menu for everyone. Next edition will be hosted by The Genealogical World of...
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Cocktail Quiz
Now after just offering my primary safe drinking tip yesterday, it only seems symmetrical to see if TPP, Mrs. Phactor, and friends, who will remain unnamed to protect their reputations, violated the...
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ENCODE: What defines genomic function?
A new wealth of articles by the ENCODE (the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) consortium suggest that far more of the human genome carries out some function or other, and one might conclude that very...
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Water, water everywhere?
We, i.e., most residents of N. America & Europe, tend to take water for granted and use it with abandon. It’s only when on occasion we have too little water that we briefly take it seriously....
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The Z Machine Makes Stars and Art
I met Don Winget years ago on a cloudy night in the control room of the Otto von Struve Telescope. His enthusiasm and excitement was overflowing. I could hardly see his face, lit eerily by red lights,...
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Cat Factoid in Doubt
Mrs. Phactor related this cat factoid to me last night: 73% of cat owners let their cat sleep on their bed. This is simply not true, not factually accurate. First, even assuming that their data is...
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Deep-Sea Census Finds Glow-in-the-Dark Bonanza
Sometimes the best way to answer a question like "How many animals on the bottom of the ocean glow?" is to just go down there and poke some sea creatures with a robot arm. That's how researchers found...
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Internet Minions
How good it is to have minions; people who do your bidding. So lacking an example of a FFF (actually a couple are around but still in the camera's memory chip), how good it is to have another science...
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Wicked Plants
A while back TPP wondered about wicked plants only to find out there was a book by Amy Stewart. In about 30 mins TPP will be at a cocktail party featuring Amy Stewart. This all sounds like such...
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Why is there something rather than nothing?
One of the perks of writing a blog is that sometimes publishers offer to send you copies of new books. Sadly, they are mostly not the books that I actually want to read. But here's one that was...
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What did the ENCODE project discover about the genome? A quick shout-out.
Does top-down science work as well as bottom-up science? This is just a quick link-over to my friends at Simply Statistics, who interviewed me on their blog (and vodcast) about the just-published set...
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