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Six New Papers from the Forthcoming Volume 'Anatomy, Phylogeny, and...
You can access the abstracts electronically here.Mastrantonio, B. M., Schultz, C. L., Desojo, J. B., and J. Bittencourt Garcia. 2013. The braincase of Prestosuchus chiniquensis (Archosauria:...
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This week's lab - angiosperm leaf diversity
Not only do flowering plants have a tremendous diversity of leaf shapes and forms, they are adapted to many different habitats and they have specialized for many other purposes as well. First all...
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Stephen Hawking's advice for twenty-first century grads: Embrace complexity
Charles Joseph Minard's famous graph showing the decreasing size of Napoleon's Grande Armée as it marches to Moscow; a classic in data visualization (Image: Wikipedia Commons)As the economy continues...
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The bidimensional motions of a heavy metal moshing
posted by @ulaulaman via @LuciaMarino81 about #heavymetal #collectivemotions #physics #fluiddynamics During the APS March Meeting 2013, Matthew Bierbaum with Jesse Silverberg, James P. Sethna and Itai...
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New paper on Neisseria DNA uptake specificity
ResearchGate (which I generally ignore) has pointed me to what looks like an excellent paper on DNA uptake specificity in the various Neisseria species.It's titled "Dialects of the DNA Uptake Sequence...
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Cretaceous to present - in 4 lectures
Well, as usual when teaching plant diversity, you get to angiosperms just at the end of the semester, but only by moving through gymnosperms rather quickly. Angiosperms are the last major plant group...
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All natural, locally sourced liquid nitrogen?
Robyn Sue Fisher wants you to know that she would never cook with chemicals not found in nature. Smitten, her ice cream shop in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, may at moments resemble a high school...
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Overview of the Triassic Pterosaur Record
Another paper from the upcoming volume on Triassic archosaurs.Dalla Vecchia, F. 2013. Triassic Pterosaurs. From Nesbitt, S. J., Desojo, J. B. & Irmis, R. B. (eds) 2013. Anatomy, Phylogeny and...
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The Shambulance: Reflexology and Other Stories
The Shambulance is an occasional series in which I try to find the truth about bogus or overhyped health products. Helping me keep the Shambulance on course are Steven Swoap and Daniel Lynch, both...
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Leafy fun!
This isn't the best image. These leaves are fresh from our glasshouse as of a couple of hours ago, and then scanned as opposed to photographed for this blog. Naturally you wonder what plants have...
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TMI Friday: Vacuum Cleaners Suck
When you look at a vacuum cleaner, what do you see ? A tool perhaps, to help you deal with the crisps trodden into the carpet from a party the night before. A way to keep armies of dust from taking...
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Formatting figures for PLOS journals
A tweet by Jon Eisen last night reminded me what a pain it is to format figures so they are acceptable to the PLOS journals' system. Kate Stafford was particularly annoyed at the idea that she'd have...
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Are fertile women more religious?
In the West at least, women tend to be more religious than men. You can argue about why this might be (and I think it's an entirely sociological phenomenon) but it nonetheless seems to be a fact of...
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Friday fabulous flower - white trout lily
Running a bit late this week, but the last two days have been really busy. It's always like this at the end of the semester and the beginning of the field and gardening season. And even worse, TPP...
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Bugs are on my bush! Or not.
Bugs are on my bush! And I've never seen them before! Ah, an alarming observation, so naturally you call your local neighborhood botanist. Here they are. Are the related to ladybugs? I'm sure...
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Botanical field work and snakes
Mostly TPP has a laissez-faire relationship with snakes: if they don't bother me, TPP won't bother them. For about a decade, a great deal of TPP's field work was done in Queensland, the wet tropics in...
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The Physics of Golf
[Herman Erlichson was a physicist and a historian of science (he had Ph.D.s in both). He was also an avid golfer, and he was my uncle. He passed away just over a year ago, and I've been wanting to...
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Into the Labyrinth
Climbing perch Anabas testudineus emerging from water, as illustrated by Richard Lydekker. Amongst the unholy mess that is the Percomorpha, one group that has long been recognised is the labyrinth...
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Everlasting Love
I just got back data from a survey in which we asked people to estimate how long different emotions are likely to last. We'll use this information to design a future experiment looking at how people...
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As slow as what?
TPP knows a thing or two about patience. Getting publishable results when you're doing field studies can take years; plant communities change, just slowly. Unfortunately because the whole academic...
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