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Field of Science
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From Valley Forge to the Lab: Parallels between Washington's Maneuvers and Drug Development4 weeks ago in The Curious Wavefunction
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Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.4 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
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Course Corrections5 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.
Honorific immortality
One way to achieve a certain degree of name immortality is to have an organism named after you. Generic names or specific epithets (2nd word of binomial species name) that are constructed upon someone's name are called honorifics. Botany is just littered with honorifics, some of which are famous (Linnea, Darwinia) and others which are rather obscure (Magnolia, Poinsettia, Nicotiana). And then sometimes honorifics are combined with a taxonomist's idea of humor like a new fungal species, in this case a sort of puffball (a gasteroid bolete) that was named Spongiforma squarepantsii. Of course this isn't the first species named after a cast member of that cartoon, there's a phytoplankton, as drawn, a stramenopile, named Shelton J. Plankton, but maybe that isn't an official species name. This is how to have fun with taxonomy.
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The ultimate for this is the names for genes, mutants, and gene products in drosophila... 'Sonic Hedgehog,' 'I'm not dead yet' (a reference to Monty Python), 'Cheap Date' and so on... I heard an interview once with a very boring medical doctor who didn't like the funny names, because it turns out humans have homologs of these genes, so the names go with them. And he didn't relish the idea of telling a patient with a genetic disease that it was caused by a mutation in 'Sonic Hedgehog'
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