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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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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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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.
Leaf windows
While easily bored, the Phactor also can easily amuse himself as long as there is some nature to play with. And you just never know what new thing you will see ifyou look carefully enough. So while the various cousins amused themselves with the aquatic equivalent of motorcycles, the Phactor poked around in a nearby salt marsh just to see what you could see. The seaside ox-eye (Borrichia frutescens) is a pretty common plant in such places in our part of the world. If you know anything at all about plants it would not surprise you to find that the leaves were thick, succulent, and waxy, common features of plants in dry or salty environments that present similar problems for plants. But did you look closer? The lower side of the leaf when held up to the light shows this attractive veiny pattern. The lighter green pattern is produced by clear areas, windows to the leaf's interior. Such windows are pretty common in other succulents, but came as an unexpected surprise here. The plant tends to hold its leaves more or less upright, thus presenting this windowed lower surface to the outside presumably so the morning or afternoon rays of sunlight can enter through the windows illuminating the green palisade layer from the bottom side. Most of the leaf mesophyll is almost devoid of chloroplasts. This is an educated guess; anyone know for sure?
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