April 29, 2008
This is going to be a challenging post to write for several reasons. How do I explain that a paper that does not show too much new stuff is actually a seminal paper? How do I condense a 12-page Cell paper describing a gazillion experiments without spending too much time on details of each…
April 28, 2008
The human body represents to me the same universal innocence, timelessness and purity of all seed pods, suggesting the mother as well as the child, the parental as well as the descendant, conceived according to nature's longings.
- Ruth Bernhard
April 28, 2008
(First posted on July 21, 2006) Some plants do not want to get eaten. They may grow in places difficult to approach, they may look unappetizing, or they may evolve vile smells. Some have a fuzzy, hairy or sticky surface, others evolve thorns. Animals need to eat those plants to survive and…
April 28, 2008
Chad wrote a neat history of (or should we say 'evolution of') clocks, as in "timekeeping instruments". He points out the biological clocks are "...sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics..." and he is right - for us biologists, messier the better. We wallow in mess, cherish…
April 27, 2008
Words mean what they're generally believed to mean. When Charles II saw Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral for the first time, he called it "awful, pompous, and artificial." Meaning roughly: Awesome, majestic, and ingenious.
- S. M. Stirling
April 27, 2008
UNESCO recently published and informative book: Open access to knowledge and information: scholarly literature and digital library initiatives; the South Asian scenario, which, from what I can see, can be easily modified for all other geographic areas as well. Perhaps it can be used as a template…
April 27, 2008
This post is a relatively recent (May 24, 2006) critique of a PLoS paper.
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There is a new study on PLoS - Biology that is getting some traction in the media and which caught my attention because it was supposed to be about circadian rhythms. So,…
April 27, 2008
Today is Orthodox Easter. Most everyone here will have lamb for lunch today. We did something different....
First, for breakfast I had snenokle (here is a recipe from a delightful Balkans food blog Palachinka) and I ground some chocolate on top of them:
Then, we had eggs. Not just painted on…
April 27, 2008
My kum Miroslav (see previous posts just below) has taken a picture of this lizard, which is quite common in Nigeria. This is a male (females are more drab and single-colored) and it is about 0.5 meters long (20 inches). What is the common name and the Latin name of this lizard? Please tell me…
April 27, 2008
Considering I've been writing textbook-like tutorials on chronobiology for quite a while now, trying always to write as simply and clearly as possible, and even wrote a Basic Concepts And Terms post, I am surprised that I never actually defined the term "biological clock" itself before, despite…
April 26, 2008
My 'kum' Miroslav (see the previous post) is working in Nigeria right now. A few weeks ago he went to Lagos on business and took this picture from the car:
April 26, 2008
'Kum', in Serbo-Croatian language, denotes two things - godfather to a child, or the Best Man at the wedding. Well, I was a Best Man at a wedding some 20+ years ago. So, yesterday morning I went to visit them.
I saw the kids (20, 13 and 10: boy-girl-boy) - I have only seen the eldest one when…
April 26, 2008
Gene Genie #30 is up on Gene Expression.
Friday Ark #188 is up on Modulator
April 26, 2008
Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.
- Samuel Butler
April 26, 2008
I walked around town a little bit these days. My feet know the way, even if all the names of streets were changed from WWII National Heroes to saints and medieval princes. It has changed a lot - there are nice new stores, cafes, restaurants and apartment buildings everywhere, the parks are well…
April 26, 2008
After the 1999 Clinton/Clark bombing of Belgrade, almost all of the ruined buildings were quickly torn down and replaced with modern buildings, perhaps out of spite (which is the national character trait). After all these years, the city is unrecognizable - it is cleaner, livelier, prettier, more…
April 26, 2008
There were quite a lot of events and actions in Belgrade for the Earth Day last week. I came in on that day so I did not have time to see anything. But I loved the balloon they placed in the center of the Slavija square: it was a globe with recognizable outlines of the continents. But the parts…
April 26, 2008
I already mentioned my friend Srdjan Milovanovic before. Like his father, he is a psychiatrist now, but we go waaaaay back. We have been friends since we were really small - he was two and I was three years old. We grew up in this house - Srdjan on the 8th floor, I on 7th floor:
We were in the…
April 26, 2008
It took a century to build the St.Sava Cathedral. I remember playing on its foundations as a kid - a great fortress to play in. But the enterior has just begun to be worked on - I am not sure if the pictures can show the immensity of the space in there:
April 26, 2008
Early Human Populations Evolved Separately For 100,000 Years:
A team of Genographic researchers and their collaborators have published the most extensive survey to date of African mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Over 600 complete mtDNA genomes from indigenous populations across the continent were…
April 26, 2008
Beef soup with cream, eggs and lemon - today's lunch:
April 26, 2008
This is an appropriate time of year for this post (February 05, 2006)...
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So, why do I say that it is not surprising the exposure to bright light alleviates both seasonal depression and other kinds of depression, and that different mechanisms may…
April 25, 2008
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of the pick-ax…
April 25, 2008
Last night's dinner - crepes filled with a mix of cheese, eggs and sugar, baked in the oven with some sweet cream:
And, for the drinking game, we used 'Vranac', an excellent Montenegran wine:
April 25, 2008
Since this is another one of the recurring themes on my blog, I decided to republish all of my old posts on the topic together under the fold. Since my move here to the new blog, I have continued to write about this, e.g., in the following posts:
Preserving species diversity - long-term thinking…
April 25, 2008
The Echinoblog
Observe The Banana
Ben Off to Iraq
Transient Reporter
Being the Chronicles of B
April 25, 2008
I was kicking myself all day yesterday because I forgot to take my camera with me for most of the day. First, my mother and I went to the bank to do some business which, of course, made us hungry so we stopped by a bakery and got fresh djevrek (no, although it looks like a sesame bagel, it is not…
April 25, 2008
This post (written on August 13, 2005) describes the basic theory behind photoperiodism and some experimental protocols developed to test the theory.
Timely prediction of seasonal periods of weather conditions, food availability or predator activity is crucial for survival of many species. Although…
April 25, 2008
Last week in Trieste, immediately after the scienceblogging session at FEST, I helped start a new blog - Via Ginnastica. It will be run by nine room-mates (in an apartment in the Gymnastic Street), all nine graduates of the Science Communications program in Trieste and all now science journalists…
April 24, 2008
I wish I could have this clock:
See a series of images and the sped-up animation to see how it works.
