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How Rice Plants Kick Out Party Crashers
To really sympathize with rice—and to understand why it's developed tricks for bossing insects around—I need you to imagine you're a plant throwing a party. Have you got it? Let's say it's a...
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A galaxy longest ago and farthest away
The first thing you need to understand is that the Universe is big, really big, you can’t wrap your brain around it big. Even though most of our species doesn’t want to admit it, some attempt to...
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Crazy bike stuff
All of a sudden crazy bike ideas are appearing all over the place. So what has we got? In the biomaterials category, there's a bamboo rickshaw that is rather aesthetic and terribly cute as well. How...
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Fraud, not error, accounts for most scientific retractions
There's a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that should make the scientific community sit up and do a little pondering. Researchers from the University of Washington, the...
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Why junk DNA makes perfect evolutionary sense
ENCODE (Image: Ed Yong) The recent dustup over the ENCODE project and its confusing finding that "80% of DNA is functional" surprises me greatly. What surprises me especially is that people are...
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A love-hate relationship between religion and democracy
According to a new analysis by Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom and Gizem Arikan, political scientists at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, religious believers don't think much of democracy. However, they found...
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New Triassic Animal Video Clips (Museum in a Minute) from the New Mexico...
The New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science has released a bunch of short, one minute video clips on a variety of fossil animals. I've linked a few of the Triassic-themed ones below. I think...
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Deadly viruses, bats and Python Cave
How would you like to adventure inside a tunnel that is 15 metres in length, 12 metres wide and in parts only 3.5 metres tall? Doesn't sound too bad. The catch is that this very popular tourist...
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Oops, RRResearch has become RRProposals andRRPublishing
It's been four months since I posted about an experiment! (I discovered this because I looked back through old posts to see what experiment I should start with.) I had one experiment (A below)...
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Exams
Please understand this. Nobody, nobody dislikes exams more than faculty. The reason is simple. Exams are a huge pain to evaluate fairly, and the results can be so discouraging. You have to be quite...
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A Day in the life of ESO
the video about the #ESO50years celebration day posted by @ulaulaman In order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ESO, it was realized a streaming with a lot of talk by some ESO's researchers....
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Crispy, a close call
It was a bit crispy last night with a low of 33 F, 1 degree above freezing and a frost for all the literate people out there who the C scale. This is a little bit early for a frost, but not much. The...
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New landscape shrub
Yesterday, while cruising a local nursery for late season bargains, the Phactors encounter a little shrubby plant with lavender flowers, and what was pretty interesting was the TPP had never heard of...
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Bohr and the horseshoe
an anecdote about #NielsBohr via #GeorgeGamow Wrote George Gamow in "Thirty Years that Shook Physics": Above the front door of his country cottage in Tisvilde he nailed a horseshoe, which is...
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I've already done Expt. C once; need to repeat
In my last post I described four experiments/series of experiments I wanted to do. One series (= Expt. C) I'd blogged about back in June; at that time I wrote that I was all set to do the experiments...
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Hemiaster: An Echinoid with Heart
The Upper Cretaceous Hemiaster (Hemiaster) bufo, in (a) aboral, (b) oral, (c) lateral and (d) posterior view. From Fischer (1966). For today's post subject, I've drawn the echinoid genus Hemiaster....
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Will we see Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever again?
Last Tuesday a man, flying into Glasgow, Scotland from Dubai, was admitted to the local hospital with a very rare disease in these parts - in fact it was the first reported clinical case of the disease...
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What you missed on the Internet last week - 10/8/2012
My Nomination for the Ignoble Gibbons on helium. Fraud vs. Questionable Practices Neuroskeptic worries that discussions of reforming science often conflate fraud and questionable practices (like the...
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Martin Rees: From Big Bang to the Biospheres
posted by @ulaulaman about #MartinRees #BigBang #universe #astronomy In order to celebrate the anniversary the first observation from x-ray astonomy, the Brera's Astronomical Observatory in Milano...
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What do the Presidential candidates think about science?
ScienceDebate.org recently posed 14 questions to President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and just a few days ago, the candidates answered all 14. Can we learn what they...
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