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Doing the math around artificial sweeteners
"The controversy surrounding these products natural, natural-like, or artificially made sugars will likely continue for years to come. We do know that artificial sweeteners increase our threshold for...
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Under planted perennials & Friday Fabulous Flower - Iris reticulata
Why not double our fun by having a FFF and presenting another under planted perennial at the same time? This will be accomplished by highlighting Iris reticulata, a species of iris that grows like a...
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TMI Friday: Taking a Bite out of Love
Love isn't commonly encountered within the medical literature. The romantic lives of two people in love is a subject that rarely requires the attention of a doctor. But occasionally in the violent...
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Do religious people suffer less stress from economic change?
Over the past two decades, the Polish economy has undergone dramatic change as it shifted towards a liberal market. That, in turn, has lead to profound changes in job security and other social changes...
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Can we predict evolution?
Evolution is not predictable, right? It has famously been said that if we were to rerun the tape of life, it would be very unlikely that something like humans would evolve again. I could add that,...
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Turmoil in the heavens
This one-page comic story published on Race to the Moon #2, that is now in public domain, is referred to an old theory proposed by Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers, a german astronomer:His bold...
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Myriad Genetics CEO Claims He Owns Your DNA
With the Supreme Court about to hear a landmark case on gene patents, Myriad Genetics, the company that owns the patents under scrutiny, is going on the offensive. I've written about this case...
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Sexual strategies: The numbers game
In 1948 Angus John Bateman, an English geneticist, proposed that females invest more in producing and caring for their offspring than males because sperm are cheaper than eggs. Since then, however,...
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Thorny and terrifying memories
The knock-out roses were an exception; they grew, and grew, well last year. They look best when periodically cut back anyways, but this is not one of TPP's favorite gardening chores. It conjures up...
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Lab Notebook: Social Networking
The problem with websites is they quickly become obsolete. A few years ago, I updated the website to make it easier to share pages, adding buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Reddit. A little...
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Leave us alone; we be gardenin'
Spring garden cleanup is no small chore. The primary salvation is that lots of pretty narcissi are in bloom everywhere. Now that the bun-buns have tulips to eat, the various shrubs can be released...
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New Experiment: Collecting Fancy Art
Over the last few years, we've run a lot of experiments online at GamesWithWords.org, resulting so far in four publications, with a number of others currently under review at various journals. Most of...
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Snap! goes the Termite
The snapping termite Cavitermes tuberosus, from Wiki Termes. For the subject of today's post, I drew the termite subfamily Termitinae. Termites are extraordinary animals: socially complex, ecologically...
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Homing Pigeons Never Stop Learning Ways to Get Home
A young homing pigeon must learn quickly how to find its way home from the strange neighborhoods where humans insist on leaving it. At first the bird does this by relying on its crudest instincts,...
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A new interpretation of material of an armored…
A new interpretation of material of an armored archosauriform from the Middle Triassic of Germany that solves the mystery of the purported Middle Triassic aetosaur. Instead this specimen is from a...
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Academic hiring and coaches
Without question the most highly overpaid, least loyal members of the academic community, and here TPP plays very loose with the concept of academic community because most coaches, having been jocks...
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Dung Beetles
Flat-headed dung beetles Pachylomerus femoralis with a ball of the good stuff, photographed by Guido Coza. The dung beetles of the Scarabaeini include 146 species found in Africa and Asia, classified...
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New Experiment: The Language & Memory Test
There is a close relationship between language and memory, since of course whenever you use words and grammar, you have to access your memory for those words and that grammar. If you couldn't remember...
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Under planted and under appreciated perennials - winter hazel
While many people are familiar with witchhazel (Hamamelis), very few people know about winter hazel (Corylopsis), a close relative. The two are similar in being early spring flowering shrubs, and in...
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Happy lettuce for unhappy days
Yesterday, April 17th TPP harvested several nice bibb lettuces for our din-dins. Wonderful! Bibb lettuce grows very well in a cold frame; try it next spring. Little things like this make us happy...
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