Organisms
pharyngula | January 10, 2011Mary surprised me today. We're both alumni of the University of Oregon, and today the UO football team is in a competition for a national title, so she told me I must acknowledge the Ducks. OK. Go ducks.
pharyngula | January 6, 2011Unfortunately, it's learning the hard way, and I think it's a terminal lesson.
(via Don Strong via Ted Grosholz via Galen Leeds)
pharyngula | January 3, 2011Sea urchins are cool and beautiful animals:
But it's the closeup of the self-sharpening teeth in a radial mouth that grabbed me.
pharyngula | December 28, 2010
My direct experience with prokaryotes is sadly limited — while our entire lives and environment are profoundly shaped by the activity of bacteria, we rarely actually see the little guys. The closest I've come was some years ago, when I was doing work on grasshopper embryos, and sterile technique was a pressing concern. The work was done under a hood that we regularly hosed down with 95% alcohol, we'd extract embryos from their eggs, and we'd keep them alive for hours to days in tissue culture medium — a rich soup of nutrients that was also a ripe environment for bacterial growth. I was…
pharyngula | December 27, 2010Mary listened to Science Friday on Christmas Eve, and now she's all about the bees.
pharyngula | December 17, 2010This is fun for a little while—Google has made their BodyBrowser available, a handy little tool that lets you explore the anatomy of the human body. It only works with the new Google Chrome web browser, unfortunately, and it doesn't do much, other than spin and click a rather rigidly fixed anatomy model, and about all you can do with it is click on a bit of something or other and see a label pop up.
What would be more useful is something that demonstrated some physiology, too. Stuff that just sits there is ultimately rather boring. A body with working parts that students could poke at and…
pharyngula | December 15, 2010
Pucker up!
Unless you're English, in which case you may soon have no excuses for smoochies ever again.
pharyngula | December 11, 2010
This is awesome news. Biologists have figured out how to enable two male mice to have babies together, with no genetic contribution from a female mouse. I, for one, look forward to our future gay rodent overlords.
It was a clever piece of work. Getting progeny from two male parents has a couple of difficulties. One is that you need an oocyte, which is a large, specialized, complex cell type, and males don't make them. Not at all. You can tear a boy mouse to pieces looking for one, and you won't find a single example—they're a cell found exclusively in female ovaries.
Now you might think that…
pharyngula | December 9, 2010I'm really liking these CreatureCast videos Casey Dunn's students put together — and there are two new ones, on moray eels and stomatopods. That's communicating science!
Also, Dunn has a new book, Practical Computing for Biologists, also available on Amazon right now. I'm going to have to get a copy; it might be a good idea to introduce more students to the basics, too.