The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' --Isaac Asimov
That's Funny… random header image

Pavilion Lake and the Cariboo Plateau

July 12th, 2010 1 Comment

Salt and carbonate precipitates line the shores of “Deer” Lake, which is spotted with islands of microbial mats. We’re up at 7, skipping breakfast and congregating down at the dock to find our rubber boots and tie the canoe onto the roof of our rented SUV. Over an hour of mental exertion later (remembering forgotten […]

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Mojave Desert Sampling

March 25th, 2010 1 Comment

This week’s sampling trip to Zzyzx station in the Mojave Desert was excellent! I collected samples of hypoliths (light-using microbial communities living on the undersides of rocks), endoliths (light-using microbial communities living within rocks), and desert varnishes and crusts (light-using microbial communities living on the upper surfaces of soils or rocks). These communities are interesting […]

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Proofing a manuscript

February 6th, 2010 3 Comments

I recently got the proofs back for an accepted manuscript and had to go about making sure the editors didn’t screw anything up when they typeset the text. One way I’ve done this in the past (idea via Gabrielle!) is to coerce a co-author into helping me read the entire manuscript. Backwards. One conspirator reads […]

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GUI file diff viewers round-up (for LaTeX)

December 14th, 2009 No Comments

I was having a look for graphical file difference viewers in order to get a quick view of the differences between two LaTeX files. One of the things I was looking for was a tool that could handle changed inversions or rearrangments, places where the text has changed both in content and position within the […]

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Molecular modeling of extremophiles?

December 1st, 2009 No Comments

Dr. Mikko Karttunen, from the University of Western Ontario, will be speaking at McMaster tomorrow in the Physics and Astronomy seminar. He worked on a recent paper titled Microscopic Mechanism for Cold Denaturation in which they used computer simulations to determine that the highly ordered structure of water at subzero temperatures caused protein denaturation because […]

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