January 2011
17 posts
5 tags
DNA Caught Rock 'N Rollin' →
From Science Daily:
It’s been known for some time that the DNA molecule can bend and flex, something like a rope ladder, but throughout these gyrations its building blocks — called bases — remain paired up just the way they were originally described by James Watson and Francis Crick, who proposed the spiral-staircase structure in 1953. By adapting nuclear magnetic resonance...
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Dinosaurs Survived Mass Extinction by 700,000... →
From Science Daily:
University of Alberta researchers determined that a fossilized dinosaur bone found in New Mexico confounds the long established paradigm that the age of dinosaurs ended between 65.5 and 66 million years ago.
3 tags
An Arachnid Alphabet
H - Herpyllus ecclesiasticus
From Alberta, down
south to the Carolinas,
I traverse hard ground
to spread the good news and speak
my chitinous prophecy.
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My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-1-23) →
Tom Waits (12)
Johnny Cash (11)
Dwight Yoakam (9)
London Philharmonic Orchestra & David Parry (6)
Kate Bush (4)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
8 tags
Gulf Oil Spill Blood Tests Reveal Alarming Levels... →
From the Huffington Post:
Four of the people had unusually high levels of benzene, which, according to the ISS, is a highly toxic chemical from crude oil. It has been linked to many health problems, including anemia, leukemia, irregular menstrual periods and ovarian shrinkage.
6 tags
Aquatic Food Web Tied to Land: Some Fish Are Made... →
From Science Daily:
Long characterized as algae feeders, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that nearly a third of zooplankton diets are supported by material that originates on land in lake watersheds.
4 tags
An Arachnid Alphabet
G - Grammostola rosea
Steel, copper wire -
of these things I am not made,
for they are not found
in Valle de la Luna
where I till not the soil.
5 tags
Sea Devils at the Peabody →
From The Life You (And I) Never Knew, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
Sailors dating at least to the 16th century would find these horrors at sea and often brought them back to shore as evidence for their stories of sea monsters, sea devils, and the like.
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Zombie Spaceship Wasteland: A Book by Patton... →
Prediction: in approximately five billion years, when the chitinous, heat-tolerant species that will take our place on earth after the Great Unpleasantness renders our adaptations - and thus, our very existence - obsolete takes a break from watching the sun collapse to sift through the wreckage of our once-mediocre civilization, this will be one of five surviving works to which they will turn to...
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An Arachnid Alphabet
F - Frontinella communis
Just what makes these woods
so formal, so elegant?
The tall, aged trees
and their deep, shifting shadows,
or these hundreds of doilies?
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6 tags
From the Cornell Blog of Ornithology →
“…This morning Hofstra University’s radio station, on Long Island, aired an 11-minute interview with Cornell Lab scientist Kevin McGowan. We’re reposting it here because Dr. McGowan gives a good summary of what the likely causes may have been (as well as some things that probably didn’t cause it), why the well-publicized fish kill 200 miles away was almost certainly not involved, why...
3 tags
Again with the bees. →
“North American bees are disappearing at a rapid rate, signaling a dire threat to the production of countless food sources.”
