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Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.1 month ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
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Course Corrections6 months ago in Angry by Choice
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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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Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
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A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
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Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
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Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
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Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
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WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
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post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
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Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
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Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
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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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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.
Really really green animals
This demonstrates what happens when you try to catch up on your science reading; you discover all the neat things that scientists have figured out recently, and this is really the neatest thing about being part of science, there are always new things to learn, figure out, and understand. The previous blog mentioned green sea slugs, a organism introduced to me decades ago by a former colleague who went West. Sea slugs eat algae, harvest the chloroplasts and keep them in body cavities where they continue to photosynthesize providing food to the slug. Now it turns out this symbiosis has been going on so long the slug has acquired enough of the chloroplast genes that it can synthesize chlorophyll! Apparently this replenishes the chlorophyll in the captured chloroplasts so that they can function longer. While chloroplasts used to be independent organisms, they long ago lost some genes to the host cell nucleus that were necessary for synthesizing chlorophyll, which makes the symbiosis permanent, except for green sea slugs. Evolution is pretty nifty because biological weirdness makes no sense otherwise. The other thing to note is that green sea slugs actually look sort of leaf-like, now they almost are; they just need a bit of cellulose.
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