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Today May 19th, really seems like the first full-fledged day of summer. The temp is in the upper 80s; thunderstorms threatened half the day. Yesterday the daughter of long-time friends got married in a delightful, non-traditional ceremony outside on a lake. Utterly charming. The neighbors' lovely daughter is graduating from high school today at the top of her class. How nice. Their dogs still bark too much. And today the Phactors are busily getting the
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One last time, before she sets out to test her new library preparation with real ancient material, Marie Gansauge discusses the procedure with Matthias Meyer. Instead of artificial, lab grown nucleotide sequenes, she will be working now with extracts from bones and teeth, all very old, all unique in the world, all in very limited supply. Once used, there is no way to refill the stores. Wasting any is not an option. She’s used to that, of course. Ever since... Read more
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A lot’s been happening. The human phylogenetic graph is looking curiouser and curiouser.
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I am sitting on a Southwest Airlines flight heading to Denver for the American Society for Microbiology 2013 meeting. At 3 PM today I am scheduled to co-chair (with David Coil from my lab) a session on “Citizen Microbiology” (well the full title is Citizen Microbiology: Enhancing Microbiology Education and Research with the Help of the Public). The schedule of the session is at the bottom of this post but it promises to be very interesting and exciting (no bias here at all).
As far as […]
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A growing body of research indicates that we do not hold people of different social status to the same standards.
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“For nature moves continuously from lifeless things through things that are alive but not animals.” ~Aristotle Aristotle was fascinated by sponges. He could never quite figure out what they were […]
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Quick post here. There is a really nice piece on in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by Michael Pollan on the human microbiome: Say Hello to the 100 Trillion Bacteria That Make Up Your Microbiome. In it he discusses how he had his microbiome typed by the American Gut Project and he discusses browsing through the output. He also discusses a diversity of issues in the microbiome and work of various folks. People featured include Justin Sonnenburg, Rob […]
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Compiled by an ardent bibliophile, this week's report includes The Eponym Dictionary of Amphibians; Megafauna: Giant Beasts of Pleistocene South America; and a Photoalbum of the Birds of Uzbekistan; all of which were recently published in North America and the UK.Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky,My pile of books is a mile high.How I love them! How I need them!I'll have a long beard by the time I read them. ~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books. Compiled by Ian
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The above skeleton is of the salamander-like Apateon pedestris from the Permian of Odernhelm, Germany. There are just enough of these tiny little bones to show the ghostly outline of this freshwater amphibian. It is our only amphibian fossil at Wooster, and it is another gift from the George Chambers collection. Apateon pedestris is in [...]
