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Category Archives: Science

The ocean amazes

I went to the Seattle Aquarium yesterday and was awed and amazed. My friend Faith went with me, who somehow faithfully remembers all the marine biology things I learned once upon a time. I couldn’t even remember what sea urchins were called, which made me sad.
I made a tiny montage of some [...]

My hijacked cells

My virus is raging still, but I think I’m going to go to work tomorrow, because it’s raging less and I don’t want to have to apply for sick leave. I’ll beg a mask from the lab or something.
When I’m sick, I like thinking about what’s going on in my body. It’s basically [...]

The interwebs have created a tenuous link between myself and CERN

I noticed that one of the sketches I posted to flickr (again, part of the sketch-a-day project) had recently gained a lot of view hits. The hits all seemed to fall on August 7th and 8th, which coincided with the announcement that CERN was going to begin testing of the Large Hadron Collider the [...]

Human-animal hybrid embryos

From Nature Biotechnology 26, 721 (2008) News:

UK passes hybrids
Nuala Moran
The UK Parliament has voted to allow the generation of human-animal hybrid embryos, creating the most liberal legal framework anywhere in the world for embryonic stem cell research. The move confirms that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority acted within its jurisdiction when it gave permission [...]

Plant families

I have this compulsive need to organize all my plant photos into sets based on which botanical family they belong to. My list of plant families keeps growing and growing and is turning entirely unmanageable on flickr. (You can see the group of plant family sets here.)
I’ve never formally studied taxonomy, and I [...]

my new furry friend

I spotted a Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana) in the front yard yesterday. It was rooting around for something at the base of a shrub, in broad daylight. I grabbed my camera and eased the door open very slowly to get a photo. Even though I was quiet, the possum heard me and [...]

Cardinal climber

Good morning, internets.
Today we are going to be talking about the wonderful annual vine known as the “cardinal climber”. It’s a member of the morning glory family, and its botanical name is Ipomoea sloteri. “Ipomoea” means “wormlike” in Latin, referring to the coil…
Actually who cares, I just wanted to share some photos I [...]

a program of passwords

Today in the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Blog, Madge McKeithen writes,

I imagine a doctor and a patient facing a tough situation, a diagnosis difficult to deliver or to make. I imagine neither of them wanting to be in that conversation. What poem might each hold (figuratively or literally)? What one between them? Many come to [...]

parasitized aphids

I once spent several weeks photographing neighborhood aphids during the spring aphid explosion. I’ve always been really grossed out by aphids, but after staring their plump, green, alien bodies on my monitor for hours, I became (mostly) desensitized.
I learned about how braconid wasps parasitize aphids, leaving an exit wound as they leave the dried, [...]