A pheromone in the male mouse’s tears causes a positive sexual response in female mice who smell it. The neural pathway was meticulously mapped in a study published today in Nature. Females ready to copulate arch their back and pose their behind when the pheromone, ESP1 is secreted. Females not ready to copulate usually just […]
This Cincinnati group played a concert today (Thursday) at the uptown park at Oxford Ohio. A trio with Sonny on guitar, Dennis “Willy D” Williams – bass & vocals, and Dave Fair- drums & vocals. They played powerful electric blues-rock, with great covers of Blind Willie McTell, Robert Johnson and many originals. Sonny played a […]
Once again, Black Cat Zoot, whose walkin’ is always swingin’:
In case you have been vacationing in a parallel universe in the past two days, you should have heard about the new synthetic bacterium created at the J Craig Venter Institute. In a nutshell, the scientific team synthesized an artificial chromosome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides and transferred it to another bacterium, Mycoplasma capricolum. The […]
This has been going around the intertubes for a while now. Still very cool.
If the title of this post makes you cringe, then you belong to a minority of people who realize why the phrase “highly evolved” is so wrong. Unfortunately, “highly evolved” (as an absolute term) and “more evolved” (as a comparative term) seem to be used all-too frequently. They are uttered not only by non-scientists and […]
Celebrate with a peanut butter and banana sandwich, while listening to The King.
Speaking of sampling bacteria, this ties in well with the previous post about GEBA. And by “well” I mean “in an alternate-universe/ altered-consciousness manner”. The voices in the song are sampled from this KFC employee training tape. The video won a prize in machinima.com. So if you like World of Warcraft, bacteria, KFC, sampled music, […]
Google flew the green-starred flag of hope yesterday, in celebration of the 150th birthday of a man who constructed a whole language based upon hope. He called himself Doctor Hopeful, and he wanted that the language he created would help break down national barriers. He made it easy to learn, so that people would be […]
I am preparing an introduction-to-fungi class. Found this cool Aspergillus-related animation: Life on Earth never fails: Not sure what this is: Of course, there are the zombie ants I have written about before:
Seven shades of brilliant, put a big smile on my face.
First, a short glossary. Homologous genes are descended from a common ancestral gene. There are two types of homology: Orthology is homology due to a speciation event. So if there is a gene A’ in humans and A” in mice, and they are obviously similar in sequence, we infer that they homologous. We usually also […]
Soulico Crew teach us the magical art of making a perfect hummus. Apparently it involves a lot of dancing.
Lots of time on the road means lots of music. Here are a few travel favorites: Heart of Glass / Blondie: great way to start the day. Crosby Stills Nash & Young: blend well with Utah’s byway 12, but good just about anywhere. ZZ Top: when you finally beat town traffic, and you are back […]