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RFK Jr. is not a serious person. Don't take him seriously.1 month ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
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What I read 20194 years ago in Angry by Choice
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Histological Evidence of Trauma in Dicynodont Tusks5 years ago in Chinleana
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Posted: July 21, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
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Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
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post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
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Re-Blog: June Was 6th Warmest Globally10 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
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The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
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Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
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Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
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Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
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in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Fall Color - Bayberry
If you have the space for it, they tend to spread, bayberry (Myrica gale) is a very interesting ornamental shrub because the "female" plants (a dioecious, which means "two houses", plant) produce an unusual fall fruit display consisting of clusters of globose fruits with a gray-blue wax covering. The whole plant, especially the leaves and fruit, are fragrant, and the wax melts around 75 C and can be collected by simmering the fruit in hot water, but based upon efforts of my students in their gums, resins, latexes, oils, and waxes lab, you would need one heck of a lot of shrubs to make even one small candle. The extracted wax is a gray-green color and the candle would smell great when burned. As a native of the deep south my Mother was quite enamored with the bayberry that grew wild near my rural upstate New York childhood home and she wanted some for her garden, and while doing her bidding both Father and son got the worst case of poison ivy. In my defense, this was 5-6 years prior to my first botany course ever, and it was well after frost had removed the tell tale poison ivy leaves. This was a botanical mistake the Phactor would never make now; you must use students to wade in and do the collecting.
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