Low-tide trip to False Bay this morning -- found many MANY polychaete worms, some nemertean worms, and a couple of hemichordates. Also the more accessible hermit crabs and tiny eels, who like to hide under big pieces of algae. Later in the lab, I successfully identified the larvae in a jellylike egg mass as some kind of gastropod -- not bad for ( Read more... )

Today I dissected siliques (maybe 2mm x 12mm) and seeds (about 50 of them fit in previous)
of Arabidopsis. Fun stuff, actually, though one does get a little disoriented after ( Read more... )

On vacation. Sick. Ugh. The illness was either brought on by sudden relaxation after the end of the quarter or by my possession of a great many fine YA novels right now.

(Girl Overboard: OH NOES I AM TOO RICH makes me a little grouchy, but otherwise this was excellent.
Suite Scarlett: Adorable, and I see a movie adaptation in its future.
( Read more... )

"Big Boggle" is the same as "Boggle Master" is the same as "Boggle Deluxe ( Read more... )

Bought stuff for organizing my papers at my new lab rotation today. I did wind up coming to the lab where Amy, the one I met with over ginger apple cider, works. She's in Jordan at the moment because you're not allowed to fly for a while after doing major scuba diving, which apparently was her winter break. Anyway, binder! Clipboard! Making ( Read more... )

I thought I was mostly done with this paper weeks ago. Nope. My sketchy first draft was a pale shadow of what it needs to be. At that point, I had read n other papers, so I knew what I was going to say in my paper and had written a shortish version without references. Then I went to fill that out -- putting in the citations should be easy, ( Read more... )

First the bad news:
I scored well below the class average on the first o-chem exam. I didn't think I'd done that poorly, but I was wrong.

Next the good-then-bad news:
Today I found a mutant line containing multiple plants (means it's more likely to be genetic than random screwy development) with a no-stomata phenotype (rare, cool, and how we ( Read more... )

Mad geeking instead of working on urgent o-chem.

Clear peachy red (my favorite ( Read more... )

Fox News gets it right for a change:
ID proponents say they do not deny that evolution is true, only that scientists should not rule out the possibility of supernatural intervention.

But scientists do not share doubts over evolution. They argue it is one of the most well tested theories around, supported by countless tests done in many different ( Read more... )