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Want to learn the California mosses?
If your answer to this question is yes, then you are in luck. There are some great resources out there to learn to identify mosses in California. One is this book California Mosses by Bill and Nancy...
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Never a simple staple
Stapled peptide. Image: NatureCarmen Drahl of C&EN has a pretty nice overview of what's happening in the world of stapled peptides. Those who have followed this development are aware of both the...
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Visit New Orleans while you can
The botanical meetings will be in New Orleans this summer. Perhaps this will be timely because if global warming keeps melting Arctic sea ice, and the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica a lot of...
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Mosses of Sequoia National Park
This video focuses on mosses of the Sequoia National Park in California. It is the first in a series of videos made by Lena Coleman, a graduate student at California State University Northridge. The...
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Purple treats - A colorful cultural palate palette
Oh, this is so much fun! Other than the Mardi Gras king cake, TPP is hard pressed to think of purple treats in our culture. So how interesting to find out how common purple treats are in Filipino...
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End of Hiatus
A couple of months ago, for reasons too irritating to get into, my internet got cut off, which made blogging nearly impossible. But then again, I needed to focus on writing up my thesis. That didn't...
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Chemistry Nobel Prizes and second acts
While having a discussion about Barry Sharpless with a fellow chemist the following random question occurred to me: How many chemists have contributed at least one significant piece of work to science...
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India and endosulfan: A bitter harvest
India’s response to the ill-effects of a toxic pesticide has been slow and inadequate Endosulfan, a pesticide, has been poisoning villagers in India over the past two decades. Its use has caused...
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What to do when winter isn't winter
It's the 2nd week of February. It's winter. Yet the ground is bare and the high temperatures for the next week will all be above freezing. This really sucks. You'd think you should be able to do...
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Aging Makes People Colon-Close-Parenthesis
Getting older is not a recipe for crotchetiness. Although those two cranky Muppets will always be up in their balcony, Americans in general don't become less happy with age. If anything, they get...
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Taking DRACOnian measures against viruses
When Alexander Fleming shamelessly took credit for a drug produced by the penicillium bread mould, our fight against bacteria completely changed. Even now, bacterial diseases are nowhere near the...
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What kind of person sees ghosts?
The human mind is naturally attuned to try to spot hidden agents. In fact, we're too good at it, because we tend to interpret all sorts of random environmental noise as actually being caused by...
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Ash Bored
Our street, our neighborhood, our yard is a bit more impoverished because a large (4' diam) white ash tree was taken down this week. It's the city's tree, a boulevard tree, and two years ago they took...
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The Burlinius Head-hiders
Cryptocephalus (Burlinius) bilineatus, photographed by Josef Dvořák. I may have to confess that, in direct opposition to the Deity, I am not overly fond of beetles. There are, quite simply, far too...
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Bad medicine infiltrates M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Texas is usually considered one of the country's top cancer centers, but that hasn't stopped it from promoting bad science. In Friday's Huffington Post, Dr. Lorenzo...
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Year of the Snake
A couple of former students from Asian students emailed to wish TPP Happy New Year, and now we enter the year of the snake. Now far be it for this biologist to suggest any type of discrimination...
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On toxic couches and carcinogens: Chemophobia, deconstructed.
Last week I attended a great session on chemophobia at ScienceOnline 2013 headed by Carmen Drahl and Dr. Rubidium. The session emphasized how "trigger words" - alarmist phrases judiciously placed in...
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Chest X-rays are not effective at detecting TB infections
Enlarged microscopic image of TB-causing bacteria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis When I immigrated to the UK as a student, I had to do something that I wasn't expecting. I had to carry with me a recent...
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Happy Birthday, Charles, Abe, and my baby Sister
Here in Lincolnland, Abe's birthday is a pretty big deal. Of course for us biologists, Charles Darwin's birthday is a big deal too in that this day is used to remember his contributions and encourage...
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Jays Know Which Worms Their Sweethearts Crave (Do You?)
Finding just the right gift for a significant other sometimes means relying on hints; this is especially true if you are a bird and your significant other is also a bird. Even the cleverest corvids...
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