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Field of Science
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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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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.
Weather Forecast - Snow
Clever names for plants, gardens, and the such
Science & Pseudoscience - Senior Seminar
Kauai - Botanical paradise?
Saturday fun - household chores
The things you can learn from feng shui
Berry Go Round #36
Ice "Flowers"
Friday Fabulous Flowers - Alpine Tundra
My desk is wooden. Who knew?
Something we all need - TNT detecting plants
Whither comest new technology?
Alpine tundra meadow
Another frightening news article about wine grapes
Alpine tundra in the Rocky Mountains
Ancient Beer
New Record - 85 degree shift
Stock Market Sausage Sunday?
No escaping upward
Islands in the sky
Get some culture
Friday Again
Missed a land mark - 500th blog
Friday Fabulous "Flower" - A Basal Angiosperm
Seed catalog addiction - look for the symptoms
Important science - Wine Grape Genetics
HT to AoB blog.
Fun with English
Do the student shuffle
My Darling Clementines
Fighting the Winter Doldrums
Is your character changing?
The Sound of Silence
Botanical quest - daun salam
Mostly Unicellular
Friday Fabulous Flower – At the Stage of Seed Dispersal
Food Chain at Breakfast
Student Evaluations - Yawn.
So imagine what someone has discovered? ""Hard" instructors seem to do better at preparing students for upper-level work, even though the grades may be lower and student-evaluation scores weaker in those classes." Duh! And guess who the "hard" instructors were? Oh yeah, permanent senior faculty who aren't worried about evaluations deciding their future employment! Fortunately my bosses have never placed an over reliance on student evaluations, but at institutions where student evaluations reign supreme you select for easy, sometimes even pandering instructors, except for some very very few faculty who can be both hard and popular. This is the great failing of junior colleges; faculty careers live or die based upon whether you please your students. Lincolnland has a great many junior colleges and their graduates show up in my classes as 3d year students, and about 50% still have poor study skills and poor work ethics, so they sort themselves out quickly even though most sport quite good grade averages from their junior college. This is also a failing at uber-elite institutions where you cannot fail. Give an uber-elite student for whom admission was their last academic hurdle a C, even for no effort at all, and mommy & daddy dearest who pay that awesome tuition initiate the cascade of complaint that ends up with a dressing down of the presumptuous faculty member, who had better have tenure. At our great public institutions students are free to fail, and that's why the grades of our top students actually mean something. Oh, even our institution has it's soft underbelly of disgraceful grading (8 out of every 10 students in every single course in music get As!). Sure, never a sour note. Unfortunately our current provost would be better suited for work at a junior college, so one must always be on guard. One day all of that paper filed away will be recycled as garden mulch and smart money says the plants will grow great.
Beer - The Natural Selection
Primate Brain and Snakes
A Mirror on American Culture
Monday Morning Musings - A new semester begins
Unsustainably stalking the wild asparagus
Why in blue blazes do we need this?
Friday Fabulous Flower - Yellow Walking Iris
Plants deep in thought?
it absolutely fascinating that scientists are finally starting to consider plant sentience a serious possibility. The idea of plant communication is not entirely new, and has been an integral part of some spiritual practices. So, if plants are capable of communicating with each other, and understanding whether those around them are family or not, can they also feel pain? And if they can feel pain, do their relatives hear their screams when they are cooked or eaten? I think the idea of plant sentience may put a whole new perspective on things for some people. It would seem that if plants are capable of the same things as animals (realization and communication), that eating a carrot would be no different than eating a chicken leg, as both come from beings that display awareness. It certainly gives you something to think about.
What a great example of anthropomorphic thinking. This isn’t new; consider the legends surrounding mandrake, whose name is basically a synonym of anthropomorphic, but nothing about plant communication suggests plants have any such higher animal attributes. Plant communication is not equal to plant sentience; organisms can “communicate” without having any awareness in the usual sensory sense of the word because plants don’t have sense organs or a nervous system, so the concept of pain seems misplaced as well. Seriously, do you actually think a head of cabbage screams in pain as you colely slice it into slaw? Sorry but that's just cabbage-headed. Does a plant grow toward the light because it “loves” the feeling? Do roots grow down because they enjoy the tug of gravity? Is the color yellow happy? When you google plant sentience, you will notice one interesting thing. The people discussing this idea are not botanists or horticulturalists.
Part of the problem is the semantic baggage associated with words like “communication”. Plants react to stimuli, and some of those stimuli are molecular plant signals. Dodder is a parasitic vine that “tastes” its hosts and grows such that it can find and put more parasitic taps into better hosts, but it isn’t thinking yummy thoughts (see this link for some images and a similar discussion). Why do reasonably smart people engage in so much new-agey fuzzy thinking? Taking concepts like sentience and expanding it to a concept where it is synonymous with being alive, i.e., capable of reacting to a stimulus, doesn’t help anyone understand anything. If ever there were a group of people with this problem it’s the founders of the Society for Plant Neurobiology, a new discipline with nothing to study but plant signaling, and plant physiologists and cell biologists were already doing that, and many chided their colleagues for using “superficial analogies and questionable extrapolations”. The use of such terms as plant neurobiology must be regarded as an attempt to make more of a phenomenon than it presently deserves, and it doesn’t assist with the public’s understanding of science one tiny wit as Heidi so well demonstrated. The Phactor has spoken at length with my pal Phil O'Dendron, but he hasn't had much to say, and that says a lot.
Harness Your Body's Green Power!
Our Garden Green Power wrist bracelets are “based on the idea of optimizing the body’s natural energy flower… They are designed to resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body” and to soak up sweat which if it rolls into your eyes can really scroll your nerd and disturb your wa.
Garden Green Power wrist bands can be yours for a ridiculously low introductory offer of $14.95 for the pair (one for each wrist). A new product, Green Power Anklets™ are being developed so that every where you place your foot the grass will grow greener. This was discovered by a user of Garden Green Power wrist bands who liked to walk on their hands, and it took awhile for our product development team to devise a more practical solution for better lawns, particularly if you have a dog. Plant people everywhere will soon be clamoring for Garden Green Power, so be the first to go green naturally. Order yours now!
These wrist bands do actually perform one of the four claims; can you guess which? Who falls for this stuff? A click on the link will show you that the answer is for one, jocks, and if you can't flimflam them out of $29.95 by telling them it works with "the natural energy field of the body", well, you need to be in another business, but could the Phactor fund his research by setting up the Green Power Foundation to launder the proceeds? When the energy is properly aligned the unethical mind boggles, and the gullible get fleeced.
The Plant List - Name that plant!
What is a rare plant?
End of Times Garden Planning - Pre and Post Rapture
Time to update my taxonomy and YOURS: part 2
None of this tells us why such groups evolved. Flowering plants presumably were more successful in many habitats than other seed plants. This may be attributed to many things, not the least being their interactions with animals involved with pollen and seed dispersal, although cycads use both as well. Why monocots evolved cannot be answered other than to say a set of modifications in the ancestors of this lineage were successful and plants with these characteristics proliferated.
The second part of the answer is that the taxonomy of flowering plants is far more complicated than monocots and dicots. Even this diagram does not reflect many of the newest findings or even show all the lineages (it was just handy), but it shows the general organization and gives examples of familiar plants. The ANITA grade is a series of basal lineages now just called ANA as some new relationships have combined what were separate lineages. The label refers to their names (e.g., A is for Amborella, N is for waterlilies, A is for Austrobaileyales), and the AA lineages have two cotyledons while the waterlilies only have one. The eudicots (eu- means true) all share a particular type of pollen. So, although this is not reflected in formal taxonomies because of the difficulty of translating such knowledge into the traditional taxonomic framework, flowering plants consist of the following groups/lineages: three lineages forming a basal ANA grade, monocots, the magnolids, and the eudicots. Even this is simplified, but next spring the Phactor will be teaching plant taxonomy.