Clik here to view.
Friday Fabulous Flower - Better late than never
To put the final touch on what has been a tough year, here's a Friday Fabulous Flower, only one day late, which have been in short supply the past few weeks. What's interesting with monk's hood or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Of HQPs and KM plans
I don't know why this latest round of grant proposal writing sapped my drive to write blog posts. But the last of the three proposals (to NSERC, Canada's equivalent of NSF) is pretty much done, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fun fall freeloaders
Our urban estate attracts a lot of wildlife because it's got cover, water, and food, some natural and some supplied by TPP's garden, and some offered up because we're good hosts. This time of year is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Wracks
Bladder wrack Fucus vesiculosus, from here. 'Wrack' is one of those lovely old-fashioned words that doesn't get used anywhere near as often as it deserves. As well as being an alternative for the word...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to run a world-class lab
One of this year's Nobel laureates in physics, Serge Haroche, has a few words of wisdom for fostering a good research environment. Our experiments could only have succeeded with the reliable financial...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My dog ate my homework
It's midterm and TPP gave an exam today. These events are deadly to the grandparents of students; two of them died. And another fellow showed up appropriately winded to declare that he'd just gotten...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Survey results: Where do you get your science news
The last poll asked people where they get their science news. Most folks reported that they get science news from blogs, which isn't surprising, since they were reading this blog. Interestingly, less...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pleiotropy saves the day for evolving new genes
What is the origin of new genes? In order to do new stuff, new genes are needed. Where do they come from, then? Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) - direct transfer of a gene from one organism to another -...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What you missed on the Internet last week: 10/29/2012
What is the oldest linguistics department in the USA? Language Log tries to figure it out. And out. This is more interesting than it sounds. Oppan Chomsky Style MIT students remake the world's most...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Leaf fairies!
Yesterday morning a huge leaf cleanup task filled the Phactors' lawns. TPP use to rent a beast of a machine, the Billy Goat, to vacuum and chop leaves, but at times you could only clean an eight or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Vampire Spiders Pounce on Victims with the Best Costumes
A version of this post first appeared on June 7, 2012. Happy Halloween! It's reasonable for a hungry predator to hesitate when its prey appears to be two halves of an animal glued together and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crocodilian relatives that walked upright?
I seriously have trouble believing this. Can anybody shed some light? It's from the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Wikipedia on Crurotarsans (spelling?) says nothing of it.
View ArticleClik here to view.
I'm finally testing a hfq mutant
The RA's gone off on a short but well-earned trip to the sun, and before she left she made the H. influenzae hfq knockout I've been waiting for. So yesterday, after clicking 'Submit' on our NSERC...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Science education and comics
posted by @ulaulaman about #science #physics #comics #UncleScrooge In 2002 F. Javier Perales-Palacios and José M. Vílchez-González studied the impact of comics and cartoons in the study of physics....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Book art
Lately TPP has had some travails about book art, his, and their subpar resolution, which will take some effort to correct. Ah, well. So it was with some amusement that this article on "book art" was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A good month
Dearest Readers, thank you very much! October was the 4th highest traffic month for TPP ever, although TPP has yet to break the 20,000 hit barrier, and that was even with only one Friday fabulous...
View ArticleClik here to view.
hfq results
Yes indeed, hfq is needed for full competence development. The mutant grows as well as its wild-type parent (top graph) but develops about the-fold lower competence (lower graph). Next step: Make...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Maybe first-borns aren't smarter after all
Although it is conventional wisdom that your birth order affects your personality, it's a hotly-disputed topic among scientists, and in fact my sense is that, if anything, a majority of researchers...
View Article