mindlace

It has been far too long since I posted about microbes on this blog. As a brief recap, prokaryotic microbes - bacteria and archaea - outnumber (and outweigh) all other forms of life on this planet by a wide margin. I have long held that those microbes living within the earth - either lithospheric or […]

Our ancestors were using fire for cooking over a million years ago. This gave us an artifact to compensate for our mutant jaw muscles, which were not as strong as those of our fellow primates. Fire aided our masticatory ambitions as well as our gustatory needs by rendering previously inedible or toxic foods into a […]

I apologize for the lack of posting; I’m frantically trying to get my projects done in time for the end of the semester. After that, I’ll have a good deal to say. In the meantime, you can get a snapshot by checking out my comment on Glen Barry’s post where he rightfully dismisses current biofuel […]

I am disturbed that none of my professors have bothered to mention Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to “Watson and Crick’s” description. Who did more real science, the person who actually showed the structure or those who drew the obvious inferences?
Their description contains the following assertions: DNA is double stranded in antiparallel sequences of four nucleotides bonded […]

Thanks to our inestimable leader, the topic of making fuel from corn and other cellulose sources has received renewed airplay. Unfortunately it suffers from the same problem as every other time this has been discussed: Cellulose is an incredibly long-chain hydrocarbon that looks very little like the alkanes that predominate in fuel oil. For reference, […]

I had the privilege of listening to Dr. Bhattacharya speak about the evolution of the chloroplast a few days ago. It inspired this notion in me: what if the nucleus was originally a parasitic archaeon that infected bacterial colonies?
One of the main tricks that he mentioned was the acquisition of a sugar transporter by the chloroplast/cyanelle/cyanobacteria […]

Nature Mill makes an indoor composter. It makes me think that an indoor gas-generation device could work.