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Messing with nature - you never can do just one thing
One of the most basic of ecological lessons, and a lesson most commonly ignored, is that you never can do just one thing. Interactions among organisms and between organisms and their environment are...
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Master Gardeners - what to make of them?
Over at the Garden Rant blog there's quite a discussion about the Master Gardener designation, and the rule that people so educated not use the MG as a credential commercially. On one hand, these...
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TMI Friday: A Vexacious Consequence of a Vasectomy
It was an emergency. The patient was 51 years of age, running a high fever, and pain and swelling in a particularly sensitive area, in which an operation had been performed a week previous. Gentlemen...
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Google Promises We'll Feel Better in the Summer
Shakespeare wasn't kidding about the "winter of our discontent." In the colder and darker months, people do more internet searches for mental health terms, from anxiety and ADHD all the way to...
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Social entrepreneurs in India: Water for all
Nearly three-fourths of all diseases caused in India are due to water contaminants. Despite that, one in eight Indians still lacks access to clean drinking water. The poor now realise that paying for...
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Saturday AM field trip
TPP is generous and supportive of a number of nonprofit organizations and lots of starving artists. So this AM he found himself leading three couples on a field trip wild flower foray. It seems TPP's...
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Are Christians bad tippers?
Earlier this year, there was huge kerfuffle over some Pastor in the US who refused to leave a tip in a restaurant. By way of explanation, he wrote on the bill that he already gave "10% to God"....
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The boson, the spin and the graviton
Some days ago, ATLAS has been released a draft about the spin of the new boson. The decay channels studied are the fab four: $H \rightarrow \gamma \gamma$, $H \rightarrow WW^*$, $H \rightarrow l\nu...
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Photosynthesis in Hornworts
Photosynthesis is the most important biological reaction on the planet. It creates the sugars and starches that we and other animals rely upon for food. Photosynthesis also helps to regulate the...
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"Anatomy of Mollusca": A Case of Plagiarism
Whilst researching material for an upcoming post, I came across this book on Google Books, published in 2010 by the International Scientific Publishing Agency, New Delhi:Anatomy of Mollusca, by Rita...
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Earth Day - we have met the enemy
TPP has been around since the first Earth Day, and while a lot of people now pay at least some lip service to the topic, progress has been pretty slow. Recycling has been a bright spot, here and...
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Some thoughts on the events around Boston
We were enjoying a quiet evening of music and reading on Thursday when my wife alerted me to a message she got from the MIT emergency system that there had been a shooting somewhere on the campus. A...
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Over-planted ornamentals - Bradford pear, and they stink too.
Bradford pears (Pyrus calleryana of Callery pear) has to be one of the champions of over-planted ornamentals especially in the tree category. They do grow quickly, and then because of their anatomical...
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The circle of life
An electron encountered a positron: they are inexorably drawn towards each other, but their combination is intended to be fatal, and from their union remains only a photon, traveling... and...
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The Kellyclams
Ruddy lasaeas Lasaea adansoni photographed in a rock crevice by David Fenwick. Members of the family Lasaeidae, commonly known as kellyclams, are small thin-shelled bivalves that often live in close...
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Another two-month gap - I really don't know why I…
Another two-month gap - I really don't know why I haven't been blogging. (Probably something to do with the massive preparations for my online Useful Genetics course at Coursera (RRTeaching update...
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New Experiment: The Vocab Quiz
Curious how good your vocabulary is? I just posted a new experiment that will tell you. There are 32 questions. At the end, you'll see your score and how it compares with others who have done the...
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This is war! Seriously! Bunnies beware!
"You don't tug on superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask from the old long ranger" and you don't mess around with Mrs. Phactor by sitting there outside the breakfast...
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Scientists Unsure Why Female Flies Expel Sperm and Eat It
She's apparently a picky mater but not a picky eater. The female of a certain fly species, after mating with a male, dumps his ejaculate back out of her body and onto the ground. Then she gobbles it...
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In the Dark
Dark matter is the commonest, most elusive stuff in the universe. Can we grasp this great unsolved problem in physics? The world we see is an illusion, albeit a highly persistent one. We have gradually...
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