Got the Moby Dick lego set?

Be the first on your block to get the Moby Dick lego set! Both the free standing 3D Moby Dick and the mosaic mural of Ahab were created out of legos. Moby is fairly small for his species, only standing about 7 feet tall, but that's still one whole heck of a lot of white legos. This particular display was at the Sydney Aquarium in Darling Harbor and it sort of caught my fancy.

Fall Field Work

After the summer lull field work begins again. Several students have projects that will require the team work approach to collecting data/plants/soil. A colleague wants to collect soil specimens from our long-term experimental plots, and that is always hard work. And we'll need to collect seed from some species for glasshouse experiments, and collecting data on an invasive species must be done for the depressing purpose of demonstrating the speed and extent of its spread. All these things must be done before 1. hunting season, and 2. a controlled fall burn. This makes for some fun because by now the prairie has reached it's full height, and even finding our plots can be tough, and then removing everything that could burn. Good thing one of the new students is tall; less chance of losing her. A few newbies will probably volunteer to give a hand with the field work just to see what field research entails and just to see the prairie. Regular nutritive rewards, particularly chocolate, keep things moving along. You know you just leave trails of little chocolate bars from plot to plot.

Something wrong with MLK memorial

Since the unveiling of the MLK memorial, something about the whole thing has bothered me. Anyone my age remembers vividly the civil rights movement and the role that MLK played in bringing about change. MLK may not have been the ideal man, but no denying his impact, so this is in no way an issue about MLK's worthiness of a national memorial. It's a strange nagging feeling that something just doesn't fit. Part of it is that MLK just doesn't look right in white marble, but this wasn't the basic problem although certainly it is bothersome. And then it finally hit me, this statue was more like what you would expect for a stature of Mao during the height of his power. Yes, this was a stature more fitting of Mao than MLK, the arms folded across the chest as he emerges triumphantly from the marble leading the revolution. It just isn't right; it's the wrong sort of image for MLK, just like the stupid sculpture of George Washington draped in a toga is just wrong for the man and his time. Wow! While searching for relevant images, the creator of the MLK monument turns out to be Chinese! Don't know what that explains, but it's sort of a spooky connection. Does this creep out anyone else?

Wildlife friendly yard and tomatoes

Our gardens provide food, cover, and water to quite an array of wildlife, unfortunately this year their primary food seems to be tomatoes. Let's see, so far the opponents have fielded a team consisting of young possums, a couple of raccoons, and a woodchuck. Apparently it takes quite a few tomatoes to keep these critters well fed, and all one asks is a BLT on a regular basis, one without teeth marks in the T. Now not to be too unfriendly, but what with small mammal populations running about 10 times higher in urban areas than in rural areas, my aim is to relocate a few individuals to even out the population. As a result of this experimental approach, the kitchen is now for the first time in a long time awash with tomatoes. The cucumbers have been quite wonderful, but the zucchini have been relatively speaking a no-show maybe for the 1st time in my long gardening history. Hard to know why; while growing they are producing mostly staminate flowers, perhaps a stress response to the hot, dry conditions. With the return of some cooler nights the capsicums are beginning to set fruit again although the variety has been fruitful during midsummer in the past. Rain is still needed, and it was probably too little water during my absence in July and early August that set the stage for poor fruiting now.

You still say tomato

Tomato, tomato (said with long and short vowel sounds), a domesticated solanaceous fruit that by any other name would still taste as good, especially while thinking about the sugo alla puttanesca the Phactor cooked last night from fresh Amish paste tomatoes. For quite some time, botanists called the tomato, Lycopersicon esculentum, the juicy wolf peach, a name which added a bit of European skepticism about how esculent this neotropical, and newly arrived, nightshade might be. If you know anything about Old World nightshades, then you'll understand the skepticism. No one doubted that the tomato was closely related to the huge genus Solanum, the name sake of the nightshade family, and now relatively recent molecular studies have shown that the tomato species is part of the genus Solanum. Now what is usually done in these circumstances is that the specific epithet (esculentum) is transferred back to Solanum to produce a new combination, Solanum esculentum. Ta da! And for awhile that was the species name of tomato, but then someone remembered Linnaeus. Remember Linnaeus? The father of taxonomy. Well, the order in which taxonomic names are published counts with the first name published (the oldest) being judged correct, and no one is older than Linnaeus. Linnaeus was simply set as the starting date of plant names, and Linnaeus had named this plant Solanum lycopersicon. Subsequent to Linnaeus the specific epithet was raised to a generic level and a new specific epithet was added, but now that tomato is back in Solanum the whole thing reverts to Linnaeus' original species name. Image credit - diversely colored wild tomatoes from western S. America: Ana Caicedo, Univ. Mass.

Trees changed almost everything

A recent publication in geology (this link takes you to the SciAmer news, not the publication directly) reports that rivers changed significantly because of the evolution of trees. Although rivers vary significantly, they were broad and shallow with wandering courses prior to the evolution of trees where upon these larger plants with deeper roots which could hold more soil began restricting rivers to narrower, and therefore deeper, channels. So it comes as no great surprise that many flood prone areas are often the result of deforestation. Rivers are certainly not the Phactor's cup of tea, but trees are. It's hard to imagine Earth without its mantle of forests and soil, although it certainly isn't what it used to be. This story takes you back to the Devonian, a smallish geological period, just under 60 million years in duration beginning 416 million years ago. At the beginning of the Devonian one group of vascular plants existed and they ranged in size from about the length of your little finger to a full hand span, tip of the thumb to tip of the little finger, and they were the biggest plants on land! But by the end of the Devonian not only had plants diversified considerably, but the first aborescent plants appear, pseudosporochnalean cladoxylopsids. About 10 million years later the first true trees (Archaeopteris) appeared right at the end of the Devonian. The former grew like tree ferns while the latter had a branching crown, and you need more an more anchoring to keep bigger plants standing upright. The next geological period, the Carboniferous, the dominate land plants were aborescent forms of clubmosses, horsetails, and ferns, and these, along with the early seed plants, pteridosperms, formed the forests that changed the form of rivers.

Cover of the Rolling Stone

Only once before has the Phactor gotten the cover picture for a scientific journal where the cover illustration relates or is taken from one of the articles in that volume. But the 2nd cover picture is on its way according to the journal's editor by way of asking for some text describing the image. No question about it, you have to buy five copies for your mother, although these days it'll just be a pdf file. In the grand scheme of things, this counts for very little; it's just kind of fun. Still you have to have at least 5 cover photos before you can even be considered for the centerfold!

Friday Fabulous Flower - At the stage of seed dispersal

A fruit is a flower at the stage of seed dispersal. Fruits aren't something different, just those parts of flowers that undergo a post-pollination development. Here's a particularly interesting one of Paeonia japonica, a species new to our gardens, and what a cool fruit/seed display. The follicle-like fruitlets have an unimpressive dull green-gray to brownish color, looking a bit like a short pea pod, until they dehisce, opening along a lateral suture and then how colorful is that! The fertile seeds have a dark blue fleshy covering (aril probably, or fleshy seed coat) while the undeveloped seed are soft, fleshy and red, and makes you wonder if this is a plant making to most of an otherwise wasted resource (unpollinated seeds) as an attractant and reward because they are considerably larger than at the time of pollination. If not pollinated, most ovules abort their development. The inner fruit wall is purple. This display is exactly what you would expect for bird seed dispersers. Calling all cedar waxwings!

Friday Fabulous Flower - Someone else's very sexy Gesneriad

The biggest downside to having been identified early as a talented teacher was that it generated a career trajectory wherein universities offered me jobs and then sort of expected the Phactor to be on campus. Now this is nothing negative about teaching or its rewards, but my highly developed observational skills would have made me a great plant hunter. So there is a touch of envy when these museum/botanical garden colleagues show off some of their latest exotic finds. This one is truly a wonderful gesneriad. Wow! Sorry, uncertain what the species is. Perhaps a Columnea, but don't know this family well.

Judy in the skies with diamonds

A planet of diamond! What will those darned astronomers find next?