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Religious belief and religious involvement have opposite effects on support...
One of the challenges with doing surveys is that the answers you get can depend on the order in which you ask the questions. For example, if you ask people about their religious beliefs, then their...
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Have another cup o' joe, it's good for you
My favorite science studies are the ones that tell us that what we're already doing is good for us. This story fits the bill. In the American Journal of Epidemiology this month, Janet Hildebrand and...
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Mall victory!
The Phactor has done it! Christmas shopping is all done, and no expense was spared. A dinner party and other festivities have been planned and provisioned. And in the process a significant victory...
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How green is your Christmas tree?
Maybe this is a little late to help this season, but here's something to think about. Our "live", or rather slowly dying fir (they have been cut after all.) is quite green and fragrant the more so...
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12 Days of Inkfish, Day 1: Gifts
Consider this a big, many-tentacled squeeze from me to you. This year, I've expanded into new habitats, learned new tricks (like driving the Shambulance), and seen lots of new readers swimming by. I'm...
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12 Days of Inkfish, Day 2: Upside-Down Jelly
Cassiopea jellyfish spend much of their adult lives lying on their backs. Or maybe their heads. However you look at it, they're upside-down: they rest in warm, shallow waters, holding their branching...
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Bicycle design - forkless bike
When we were kids, we routinely took apart and rebuilt bicycles to raise the seat and handle bars to ridiculous heights, but mostly just to have fun and learn about the physics of falling. However...
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New Study on the Late Triassic Pollen Record at the Petrified Forest National...
This is a new study of the palynology of the Chinle Formation of Petrified Forest National Park that fills in a previous sampling gap caused by reevaluation of the local stratigraphy. The study finds...
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Saving Faculty Time - An Administrative Fairy Tale
This is the time of year when you have to report, on the basis of a calendar year, what you accomplished over portions of two academic years and the summer in between. So when your provost introduces...
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12 Days of Inkfish, Day 3: Reverse Sun
"Astronomy! People go crazy studying that!" a Christmas tree farmer said this week after asking my younger sister her college major. He made a head-exploding gesture to illustrate his point. That...
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Filthy dirt
Experimental work with plants takes some planning and some time. Nothing magic about plant growth so you just have to wait, but time to get a glasshouse experiment going. And so an energetic student...
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The best mango?
TPP is blogging while eating some lunch and being careful not to spill soup into the keyboard, again. But the best part of today's is an ataulfo mango. These are simply the best mango we get in our...
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Genetics, evolution and Turing's patterns
posted by @ulaulaman about #Turing #genetics #biology #evolution #morphogenesis reaction-diffusion system I've just written a post about the theory of patterns in nature started by Alan Turing, and I...
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How to grow an awkward virus like Schmallenberg vrius?
If anyone works on viruses that naturally replicate in two distinct hosts and NEED to do this, maybe you can help here. While having a look around for work on Schmallenberg virus (SBV), I came across a...
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12 Days of Inkfish, Day 4: Help Desk
When you use website analytics, you quickly learn that there are a lot of people out there Googling things like "how do i make robot" and "which is best medicine for make baby." This year I've seen...
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Friday Fabulous Flush
Quite a number of tropical plants flush red, which is to say that the new foliage appears pigmented from pink to red, a topic TPP has touched on a time or two (here and here), but never this particular...
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12 Days of Inkfish, Day 5: Running on Water
Human courtship rituals—if you believe television commercials, anyway—are lame. The guy who kneels down right at the jewelry store counter ("It fits perfectly!" "Well honey, that's because I already...
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A Saturday Slowdown
What a strange day! The Phactors don't actually have anything on their activity schedule, and of course, not much in the way of gardening going on, although the post Christmas flood of gardening...
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12 Days of Inkfish, Day 6: Zion Canyon
Stories about earth science have all the transformations and power struggles of a fairy tale. When I asked my friend Tyler Auer—a photography blogger who studied geoscience in college—to tell me the...
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EXTERMINATE!
EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! If you have no idea what this means or who says it, or the significance of this police box, then just stop here because the rest of this will be meaningless,...
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