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Over the river and through the woods
It's a wet, gloomy Saturday morning here in the upper midwest, and nothing much to do outside anyways. Mrs. Phactor has run off to participate in a fund raising event with her professional group thus...
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Antibiotic resistance found in isolated cave system
The next weeks #microtwjc paper has now been chosen and stuck up online over at http://microtwjc.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/microtwjc-week-17-christmas-edition-paper-and-discussion-points/ . If you want...
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D'oh! Dough!
Another cold, wet, miserable day, and TPP finds himself again blogging instead of ticking items off his honey-do list. Item one is to mix up cookie dough so Mrs. Phactor, F1, and foreign student can...
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Title in evolution quiz
For those unawares (prolly all), I post these titles in evolution i) as a reminder to myself when I skim the numerous eTOCs that I get in my inbox every week, ii) to point out that evolutionary biology...
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Plantains - Common name & culinary confusion
There are times when the Phactor wonders if someone is putting me on with some the questions that people ask. Here's what someone asks, "I've heard a lot about fried plantains, how good they are, and...
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Limpets of the North-east Atlantic
The common limpet Patella vulgata, photographed by Rokus Groeneveld. When Linnaeus published the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae in 1758, he defined the genus Patella as having a subconical shell...
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First day of winter
Today is unofficially the first day of winter as determined by yours truly. Today feels genuinely cold, and is the coldest day we've had so far. A few flurries are in the air as if to emphasize the...
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Ancient Insect Carried Built-In Trash Basket for Camouflage
Covering yourself with garbage is a great way to look less delicious to predators. More than a hundred million years ago, one insect species took this strategy to the extreme by growing a kind of...
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Nobel Week Dialogue
There hasn't been much blogging over the last two weeks, mainly because I have been blogging for a special event preceding the official Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. "Nobel Week Dialogue" was a...
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Diverse Tetrapod Track Assemblages from the Late Triassic of Morocco
Lagnaoui, A. Klein, H., Voigt, S., Hminna, A., Saber, H., Schneider, J. W., and R. Werneburg. 2012. Late Triassic Tetrapod-Dominated Ichnoassemblages from the Argana Basin (Western High Atlas,...
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Nominations for least green product/appliance of the year
It's the time of year when lots of useless products are marketed, and you wonder who buys all these things? Sometimes it's not immediately obvious that some of these products are not only largely...
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Findings: That Kind of Person
That Kind of Person is now complete. Many thanks to all who answered the call to participate. For some time now, I have been studying the effect of context on pronoun interpretation. If words and...
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Understanding governmental action - fiscal cliff edition
To understand things, you must at times look to sources of wisdom and insight. For politics in general, there seem to be only two such sources, both comedies. What does this tell us? So with respect...
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Malaria Makes Its Victims More Tempting to Mosquitos
Think mosquitos have a special fondness for you? Do they choose to target you over adjacent humans? No matter how badly you have it, things might be worse if you were infected with malaria. New...
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Lab Notebook: You know you are writing a paper when
Your "recently added" list in Mendeley is growing at an exponential rate: (click to expand. note time added.) Every new paper you read results in downloading at least two more (not unlike the Hounds of...
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Final exams graded
It's 4:35 pm on Thursday of final exam week, and the exams are graded a whole day early! Results were generally better than expected, but this was not universal. Still almost all students are doing...
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Is education the main reason why some countries are less religious?
There's no shortage of hypotheses for why some countries are religious and others are not. Sometimes it seems like everyone has a different idea - coming up with hypotheses is easy. It's testing them...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - a bromeliad
This time of year regular visits to our glasshouse help your mental health. The greeness, the humidity, the earthiness are all very comforting and rejuvenating because it's so alive. Quite a few of...
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In praise of experiments
Today, the excellent Neuroskeptic writes about a new study investigating which US states are most suicidal. The interesting twist was the form of the data: Google searches. It's an interesting study...
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Great Freebie for plant ID in upper midwest
Nothing beats recognizing a family, or what passes for a family, when trying to ID a plant. A lot of the common families are pretty easy to identify on sight especially if you have a nice "cheat"...
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