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The GPCR Network: A model for open scientific collaboration
This post was first published on the Scientific American Blog NetworkThe complexity of GPCRs is illustrated by this mechanical view of their workings (Image: Scripps Research Institute)G...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Pencil cactus
Yes, it's Saturday (forget this, it's Thursday, it took that long to get the image where it could be uploaded), but the idea to blog this came yesterday. One to TPP's favorite winter flowering plants...
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This Penguin: An Unexpected Journey
The humble king penguin chick had no way of knowing, when it woke up that day, that tall creatures from far away would come to send it on a journey. Nor could it know that its journey would become the...
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Friday fabulous clubmoss
This is a rather poor picture of a very young Selaginella sporophyte (~1.5 mm), the typical and familiar generation of this club moss. A student has been investigating the use of various common...
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Atheists prefer video games over board games
Chris Burris, at St. Jerome’s University in Canada, has been quizzing students at "a southwestern Ontario university" about their interests in video games and board games. He's found that atheists were...
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Squirrel recipes?
The local free-loading, well-fattened fox squirrels, while quite handsome, gather in our "wildlife friendly" gardens in great numbers during the winter season because the Phactors provide an excellent...
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Racism Alive and Well in America, Example #35,672
Jason Cole wrote an article on Yahoo Sports (yeah, I know) regarding the absence of any minority hires for any of the 15 available head coach or general manager positions in the NFL. Currently, it is...
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1968 nostalgia
Listening to a speaker the other evening trying to tell students what it was like in 1968, even though that was the year of his birth, brought on quite a wave of nostalgia. The sixties were TPP's high...
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Indoor cats
The kitty girls that currently reside with us are indoor cats. Outdoor cats get into trouble as does any cat anywhere when lacking supervision. One of two, and one of the previous two were privileged...
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The Osangulariidae: Deep-Water Trochospires
Dorsal (spiral side), lateral and ventral (umbilical side) views of an Osangularia specimen, from here. For today's post, I'm presenting for your consideration the Osangulariidae, a family within the...
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What do botanists do when not in their office or lab?
Field work! Protecting biodiversity is a tough job, and biologists are racing against extinction, mostly from habitat loss, and now perhaps from climate change. To help document and preserve plant...
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In Our Partners' Heights, We Get What We Want
If you ask most heterosexual people what height they're looking for in a partner, they'll describe basically what a children's-book illustrator would draw: the man taller than the woman but not...
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Quinoa the international commodity
Quinoa, a pseudocereal native to Bolivia, is growing in popularity, although TPP still thinks it has a grassy sort of non-descript taste that he can’t get excited about. However its popularity in...
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Traveling: Israel and Istanbul
I just returned from the 30th Jerusalem Winter School in Theoretical Physics. It was an intensive school focusing on modern cosmology and galaxy formation with lectures from experts in the field. You...
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What makes psychology and neuroscience hard
Explained by today's XKCD: Ambrose Bierce pointed out the same problem in his 1911 satyrical dictionary (The Devil's Dictionary):Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief...
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Obama's Lizard? Not So Fast
Left dentary of a currently unnamed lizard from the latest Cretaceous, from Longrich et al. (2012). Yeah, this is a pretty petty point, but what would this site be if it didn't pertain to pedantry? In...
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Chemistry
Chemistry has its own problems with replication, according to Nature: Scrounging chemicals and equipment in their spare time, a team of chemistry bloggers is trying to replicated published protocols...
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Flowers - a cosmic, comic interpretation
Imagining how our customs appear from an alien perspective is always a great comic device, so this cartoon is pretty funny, and a good introduction to SMBC Comics (Saturday morning breakfast cereal, in...
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Eradicat in New Zealand
Eradicat? Eradicate cats? In New Zealand? In one sense this fellow is right. Cats are hard wired to hunt and kill anything furry or feathery thing they can get their paws on. And they are very...
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Drought worrying at official start
It remains bone dry here in the upper midwest of the USA. January is almost at an end and the amount of precipitation has been way below average. This area has received none for the past 10 days or...
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