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Music

This is what it smells like when mice cry

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 […]

Sonny Moorman’s group at Oxford

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 […]

Black Cat Zoot – No Swingin’ In Your Walkin’

Once again, Black Cat Zoot, whose walkin’ is always swingin’:

A non-post about Craig Venter’s new bug

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 […]

Technical specifications for Little Red Riding Hood

This has been going around the intertubes for a while now. Still very cool.

Highly Evolved

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 […]

Happy Birthday Elvis

Celebrate with a peanut butter and banana sandwich, while listening to The King.

WoW is full of bacteria

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, […]

Feliĉa Naskiĝtago Doktoro Esperanto

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 […]

Cool shroom vids

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:

Music: Lulu and the Lampshades

Seven shades of brilliant, put a big smile on my face.

The medium-rare biosphere

All the roots hang down Swing from town to town They are marching around Down under your boots All the trucks unload Beyond the gopher holes There’s a world going on Underground — Tom Waits, “Underground” Our picture of the microbial biosphere is heavily skewed towards what we can see, culture, and are interested in. […]

It ain’t necessarily so

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 […]

Public service announcement: how to make hummus

Soulico Crew teach us the magical art of making a perfect hummus. Apparently it involves a lot of dancing.

Coast to coast (almost) interlude: travel music

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 […]