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Soggy Memorial Weekend
Oh, the gardening plans we had! Very ambitious, indeed, but over 3 inches of rain will sort of dampen your enthusiasm for gardening. Things are so wet that water is standing in all the low areas and...
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Everyone Underestimates Fast-Food Calories (But Especially at Subway)
At a McDonald's shareholder meeting last week, a nine-year-old girl accused CEO Don Thompson of sneaky advertising. Stop "tricking kids into eating your food," she demanded, saying that McDonald's ads...
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High Environmental and Metabolic Plasticity as a Successful Evolutionary...
Sanchez S., and R. R. Schoch. 2013. Bone histology reveals a high environmental and metabolic plasticity as a successful evolutionary strategy in a long-lived homeostatic Triassic temnospondyl....
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Good luck to B.R.S.M!
B.R.S.M. is off to the US for a postdoc. And he does Woodward Wednesdays. What's not to like.1. What is your message for BRSM?It's the only time in your life when (unless you have a family) your only...
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Citizen Science Project: Likely Events
VerbCorner was our first step towards opening up the rest of the process. I have just opened up a new good to segment of the website called “Experiment Creator”, which is our second endeavor.Experiment...
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Thanksgiving
When the Protein Data Bank releases a much-awaited protein structure which shows you *exactly* what you wanted to see, it's much like looking at a newly written Mozart symphony. There is a purpose to...
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The Mites of Springs
The Euroepan groundwater-inhabiting Stygohydracarus subterraneus, from here. Arachnids might not normally be thought of as aquatic animals, but there are a number of arachnid lineages that have taken...
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What's the optimal level of weirdness for a memorable children's character?
Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with minimally counterintuitive ideas. That's the theory that, for a fictional character or object to be memorable, it needs to have remarkable...
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Chirotherium Trackways from the Middle Triassic of China
Xing, L., Klein, H., Lockley, M. G., Li, J., Zhang, J., Matsukawa, M., and J. Xiao. 2013. Chirotherium trackways from the Middle Triassic of Guizhou, China. Ichnos 20: 99-107....
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Friday Fabulous Flower - another yellow peony
Well, it was just two weeks ago that the FFF blog was a yellow tree peony, but here's another one. In this instance flowering about two weeks later is a Itoh hybrid, a cross between a tree peony and a...
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How Science Education Changes Your Drawing Style
Take a look at these neurons. Ignore the fact that several of the brain cells look like snowflakes and at least one looks like an avocado. Can you pick out the drawings done by experienced,...
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Bad Evolutionary Arguments
The introductory psychology course I teach for is very heavy on evolutionary psychology. The danger with evolutionary explanations is that it's pretty easy to come up with bad ones. Here's the best...
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TMI Friday, Girls Month
Regular readers of the TMI fridays on this blog may have noticed a worrying trend. I didn't notice it until I came across a post on twitter: @funky49 LMAO - I love that stuff! All the posts were of...
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Google Hearts Microbiology
Today is a great day to do a google search. Google celebrates the 161st birthday of Richard Petri with a Doodle. Petri is the inventor or the plate that bears his name and is used by microbiologists,...
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TMI Friday:...And the mystery of the lost piercing
So let's start this month of "TMI Fridays" focussing on women by talking about penis piercings ! Let us consider the Prince Albert. The legend goes that Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, was...
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The mid-west is wet
Drove across northern Missouri yesterday to get to KC. The overall impression is one of a giant mud puddle. All in all pretty wet places were getting inches of rainfall, and not all of it is coming...
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GnOPe - Nattering nabobs of negativism
When it became obvious that the minority party was simply going to be opposed to everything and anything proposed by the Obama administration as a matter of principle, TPP decided to start calling them...
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Revisiting the Dicynodonts of Western North America
Kammerer, C. F., Fröbisch, J., and Angielczyk, K. D. 2013. On the validity and phylogenetic position of Eubrachiosaurus browni, a kannemeyeriiform dicynodont (Anomodontia) from Triassic North America....
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KC BBQ
When you think of Kansas City, you think of barbeque. On a previous visit TPP tried one of the classic and legendary BBQ places, and it had a lot of grotty old ambience, and OK BBQ, but it was just OK....
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New Hypothesis on the Evolutionary Origin of the Turtle Shell (with video)
This recent early online paper has been getting a lot of attention lately regarding the origin of turtles and their phylogenetic relationships. There is also this associated video on YouTube depicting...
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