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Free ImageJ Macro -- for citing images
(of course all IJ macros and IJ itself are free...)So I got sick of constantly clicking away just to resize an image and add some citation text to the bottom and then name the file that exact thing; in...
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Dear Leaders and a Volcano
Eternal President Kim Il-sung (1912-∞) and Dear Leader Kim Jong Il (1941-2011). In the background Tianchi or "Lake of Heavenly Peace", a crater lake inside the volcano Baitoushan or Paektusan ("white...
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Holiday help?
A lull in the action gave the Phactor a window of opportunity to wrap some presents. The only fun part of wrapping presents is watching people unwrap them, but there is a time and place for everything....
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No NovR colonies at all?
Yesterday I made 8 preps of competent cells, all to further our phenotyping of our new competence-gene mutants. Four of them needed to have transformation assays done, three were to be frozen for...
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The postdoc's DNA uptake paper (the never-ending saga)
The postdoc and I are back at it yet again, working on his paper about the sequence specificity of DNA uptake. I'm beginning to think there's something pathologically wrong, either with us or with...
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Hitchcock's Birds
Brian Switek has a wonderful post on the dinosaur trackways of New England over at the Dinosaur Tracking Blog. I grew up in Connecticut and as a boy enoyed going to Dinosaur State Park to see the...
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Religious nonsense is easier to understand than regular nonsense
There's a particular brain wave that gets triggered when you hear stuff that doesn't make sense. It's called the N400, and it's triggered by sentences like "I like my coffee with cream and socks"....
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When Phylomon fall from the sky
The winter winds are blowing. These cold winds whip bacteria up into the atmosphere. These tiny specks of life, unaware of the vast sphere turning beneath them, feel only the cold. And one particular...
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For Genitalia, Shape Matters (Not Size)
When it comes to a dung beetle's junk, size doesn't matter. At least, not to the process of rapid evolution that creates new species. Researchers say that what matters there, as males and females...
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An Introduction to Malaconothrus
Specimen of Malaconothrus monodactylus, from the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (M. mollisetosus was listed as a synonym of M. monodactylus by Subías 2004). Malaconothrus is a genus of about sixty...
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There Goes "Dicynodon" Biostratigraphy!
In the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir Christian Kammerer, Kenneth Angielczyk, and Jörg Fröbisch (an allstar team of synapsid workers) readily handle the taxonomic mess more commonly...
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Holiday break?
The semester was officially over yesterday at 1:28 pm when the last grades were posted, and with the reliability of the seasons, one of the first people the Phactor encountered off campus said, "Wish I...
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Kill the tigers
Here's a choice: save the last remaining tigers on the planet, or kill them, chop them into pieces, and eat them in the mistaken belief that tiger parts can be used as medicine. Sounds like an easy...
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The End of the Mayan World
According to the popcorn-movie "2012" (2009) the end of the world will come due increased solar activity that will overheat earth and cause catastrophic volcanic and tectonic storms on December 21,...
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Exotic Image - Shadow puppets
Isn't this a magical image? Exotic, yes? Would you know what it was? Great images are not necessarily complex ones, but images that are strongly evocative of some exotic place or event. They bring back...
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Evolution: Time is on Our Side
A friend of mine asked me the following ‘I just learned that mathematicians assert (not necessarily in an argument to support God) that there hasn't been enough time for the theory of evolution to be...
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The postdoc's new analysis saves us work
Just before he left for a brief Christmas vacation the postdoc did a detailed analysis of the genomic uptake sequences identified by (i) the genomic USS motif identified by the GibbsMotif Sampler and...
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Winter Solstice
Sometime today, around 5 pm, is the actual winter solstice, so today is the shortest day, well, not shorter really, but the day with the briefest daylight period of the year, and since our ancestors...
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Top tips this Christmas:
It is the season to be jolly - full of festive spirit and cheer. However the reality of Christmas for me is eating way too much turkey and cake. Then I try to eat all the chocolates in one go before...
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