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$3.7 million to study quack medicine at a leading cancer center1 week ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
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I am Lazarus1 month ago in Angry by Choice
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A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China10 months ago in Chinleana
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Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM1 year ago in Field Notes
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Bryophyte Herbarium Survey2 years ago in Moss Plants and More
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Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV3 years ago in Rule of 6ix
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WE MOVED!3 years ago in Games with Words
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post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!4 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
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Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez4 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
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Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens5 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
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The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl7 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
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Lab Rat Moving House8 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
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Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs8 years ago in Disease Prone
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Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby8 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.
Almost 400-year-old pear tree
How long can a tree live? Trees are nearly immortal, the result of meristems and indeterminate growth. Many die not because they are too old, but because as a sessile organism they are subject to accidents. Trees get bigger as the get older and as a result big old trees sort of out grow themselves. They become too big and their structural integrity begins to fail; they just break apart usually helped by storms. Supposedly this pear tree was planted in Plymouth nearly 400 years ago. Pears are slow growing trees, and they can be pruned to keep their crowns in proportion to the rest of the tree. So inspite of many near catastrophes, this colonial pear tree has survived. Still that's quite remarkable. TPP has a yellow pine barn beam about 6 x 7 inches from a barn constructed in the 1880s, and one corner of the beam has a strip of bark, so we can assume the tree was cut for timber in about 1880. The growth rings do not go to the center of the tree, but you can easily count growth rings back into the early 1500s when it was already a tree 10-12 inches in diameter. So this was probably also a 400 year old tree, there abouts. Actually while trees this old are now news, it's because we've become a tree-destroying, lumber and paper craving culture with no respect for our elders, big, old trees.
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