Some nice thoughts here. Of course Meselson and Stahl (my personal favorite) make an appearance, as well as Nirenberg and Matthaei and many others. If you need inspiration today to keep plugging along (which I do!), this is for you. www.asimov.press/p/beautiful-...

Lincoln, NE last night. 48 years old, lived my entire life in Missouri, Michigan, Colorado, and Nebraska, and that was my first time ever seeing the aurora!

Frank likes to roll around under the ottoman, and with the color and pattern of the rug, he’s pretty effectively camouflaged…

My wife sent me a pic of the wiener bros and I think it would make a good album cover. Theres a vibe…

This is the line I highlight as my favorite in all of biomedical literature when I teach DNA structure in my spring Molecular Biology course. Lol…

Lucy and her mantis friend at age 5, and hissing cockroach friends at age 13… I think she may have inherited the entomologist gene from me!

The many faces of my little red weenie boy, George, who is 5 years old today!

Sometimes I wonder how all the different coat colors and patterns in, say, Dachshunds came to be. Then I see posts like the one below and it’s like “oh, yeah, one popped up in a litter randomly and was selected.” To paraphrase Monod: What‘s true of Lima beans is true of wiener dogs…

The person who lost control of their car and drove through my yard late Wednesday did manage to miss the 12-foot skeletons and for that, I am grateful 🙏

Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year https://theonion.com/third-amendment-rights-group-celebrates-another-success-1819569379/

Wanna know how I know I’m making an impact? Anonymous students have started to tell jokes I make in class back to me on the whiteboard on my office door… 🤓 🧪 😂

Kitchen smells pretty good right now. Whole house, actually!

Reposting this to remind me to talk about it in class…Today was on nitrogen fixing bacteria that live in the fungus gardens of leaf cutter ants. So I guess this could be part of the microbial physiology physiology course with a strong myrmecological theme…

“Twilight Override,” the latest solo project by Jeff Tweedy, who leads the long-running band Wilco, is a triple album that earns every minute. “I just thought that it flies in the face of a culture that’s gotten faster, more surface level,” he said. nyti.ms/4ngMQgu

Yet again, never having learned how to swim remains a net positive as far as I’m concerned.

Last of the hot peppers for the season! Scotch Bonnet, Habenero, Jalapeño, and Habenada (a mutant Habenero that has a defective capsaicin biosynthetic pathway.) Turning some of these into jam shortly!

I’ve told students for years now, a good term paper idea for an evolution/pop gen course or a music course (or both!) would be a thorough analysis of the claims in Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA” through the lens of genes x environment interactions. There’s a lot to mine, there.

Guess no one in the NYT puzzle writers room has ever force-fed a mouse. Sad.

I think D very narrowly edges out G for me, but a different day might find that switched...

Caveat: this only works in rats that have been engineered to express a cocaine responsive ion channel in the brain. Probably not going to stop a given human from using or help someone get clean any time in the near future...but still very, very cool approach!

Very nice writeup on someone I've admired and learned from for many years. I didn't know he had passed until catching up on This Week in Microbiology driving to campus this morning. His 1958 paper on Salmonella growth rates basically founded the formal study of microbial physiology, which...

Festival of capsaicin at the house tonight…

Text from my daughter giving @lukelukeluke.bsky.social vibes 🍄‍🟫🍄🍄‍🟫🍄 😂

It’s a shame I can’t go back in time like 25 or 30 years and ask the yeast genome sequencing and KO collection folks to use something other than S288c derivatives & designer deletion strains. The BY474x strains suck!

Yeah, still got it! (Doing yeast genetics with my own hands, that is.) Measuring mutagenesis efficiency by EMS in 2 S. cerevisiae wild-types, by loss of CAN1 function leading to canavanine resistant colonies. Does the BY474x background have a mismatch repair defect? 🤔

It’s Friday afternoon and I was working in the lab all day and my impulse control was slipping so I gave in. I finally did it. Almost felt like I didn’t have a choice… I licked a Petri dish! Stay tuned on Monday to see what grows… 👅 🧪 🦠 🤓

Not my picture, but this lovely couple are nesting a few blocks from my house, in the woods adjacent to Holmes Lake in Lincoln. Haven't seen any juveniles yet, but here's hoping!

I’ve been feeding the yeast inferior YPD. Found this bottle from 1992 in a retired colleague’s chemical inventory and decided to give them this well aged, vintage treat. It’s like wine, right?

Just saw a Grackle attack and kill a House Sparrow and start eating it...or at least it seemed to be aggressively stabbing it with murderous intend and an end goal of eating it, while the sparrow fought for it's life! I'm not a birder but I was captivated!

Big snotty colonies of an unidentified yeast-killing contaminant that I isolated to play around with. Ewwwww…

I have a hunch that in 70 years, my great grandchildren will be antiquing in the West Bottoms in Kansas City and will come across a Cybertruck in the same condition as this Edsel… The Edsel actually looks cool though, so maybe not. 🤷‍♂️

Happy 75th birthday to the GOAT-est GOAT that ever GOAT-ed. 🐐

OK

I’ve gotten to “Genius” the last 2 days with no hints, so I got that going for me, which is nice.

Last track meet of the season. I used to call the guy in green “mini-me” but he’s about 2” taller than me now so not quite applicable.

On this week’s ep, Kevin Bird (@stairwaytokevin.bsky.social) explains the events of the last 3 months, how science is funded in the United States, why it is being attacked so aggressively, and the ideologies behind these attacks. Found everywhere you get podcasts. open.spotify.com/episode/0E9l...

I didn’t know #worldrobberflyday was a thing but Asilidae are one of my favorite Dipterous families. Here’s one in my office! Taken September 7, 1997 in Columbia, MO.

Hey, my PhD advisor just got elected to the NAS! I feel like I’m Henry in that scene in Goodfellas where Tommy is going to become a made man! Oh, wait…

I drive by this sign twice a day and I laugh twice a day.

What’s our plan if federal funding for scientific research just goes away? Like, totally? Go back to the pre-Vannevar Bush days when private philanthropists like Carnegie et al. were the only source of funds? Who is that today? Do I need to take a quick ride up to Omaha to ask Uncle Warren? 🤷‍♂️

Here's the "standard" genetic code, in which 21 informational outputs (20 amino acids and a "stop" signal) are encoded by 64 3-base codons. This is only one possible encoding scheme out of many. How many are possible, though? I posed this question to my undergrad Mol Bio class today... 1/n

Cleaned and tuned up and working like a champ! Typewriter # 6 is a 1967 Smith-Corona Coronet Automatic 12, my first electric machine. Sweet!

Ok…this typewriter acquisition was not my fault. I saw someone giving this one away on FB marketplace because “it doesn’t work” and the location was a block away from my daughter’s soccer practice so I HAD TO TAKE IT! I had no choice. Also, I plugged it in and it just works. 🤷‍♂️

Tilled up the garden and planted 2 varieties of blueberries and 1 each of raspberries and blackberries. Also for the biochemists out there, the bike I’m using as an accent piece belonged to the wife of the guy who discovered Proteinase K. I can elaborate if anyone is interested… 🤔🤷‍♂️😂

My daughter’s hamster, Roamer, displaying his talent. One of my students memorialized his love of carrots in a portrait.

My graduate training was at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Lab. Founded at the height of the Cold War in 1965 to study the effects of radiation on plants, when the DOE was still the Atomic Energy Commission. 60th anniversary this year…Will there be a 61st? Hard to say.

Oh come on…one of my favorite cell biology terms!

Still a good use of this meme, I think...

Relatable.

You can cover all of the wiener dog some of the time, and some of the wiener dog all the time, but you can’t cover all the wiener dog all of the time.