I had to teach myself a bit of Python recently, so decided to do it by implementing this parse_phylogeny.py thing (it’s uploaded here as a text file). It takes a nice intuitive mark-down for phylogenetic trees (below) and spits out a Newick file (-f nwk), or a Wikipedia clade format (-f wp). It’s not amazing (hey, it was my first attempt at Python in anger) and I know there’s a bunch of repetitious stuff in the functions that could be lifted out, but whatever. Maybe you’ll find a use for it.

The Barbican is a sprawling concrete brutality as apt to divide opinion as Marmite or skinny jeans. Built in the 60s and 70s as a housing estate and cultural centre on a vast bomb-site in the City of London, it does not sound like a promising place to go botanising, but after the fire-weed was concreted over, other plants moved in…

Aside from the fleabane gussying up the scheduled monuments, and the friendly rivalry of the residents’ window-boxes, the Barbican also houses a large conservatory containing more than 2000 species of plant. It is open to the public most Sundays.

When we went to the Berlin Botanischer Garten in 2005, we saw some pretty cool stuff,  including a flowering Welwitschia and some fantastic tree ferns. However, like every other botanical garden I’ve ever visited, mosses , hornworts and liverworts were effectively ignored, or - worse - treated as dreary also-rans at the start of one of those ’evolution houses’ so beloved of curators without the wit to find something accurate to do with their cycads.

Previously on Bagging Botanic Gardens: Maspalomas et al., Wisley, Brussels, Down House, Much Else Besides.

The minute I found out there was a botanic garden in the north of Gran Canaria as well, a return visit became inevitable.

The Jardín Botánico Canario “Viera y Clavijo” is in the outskirts of Las Palmas, and is much larger than its Maspaloman sibling. As well as showcasing a Canary Island pine woodland, it also has a impressive path carved into the side of the cliff that overlooks the site. This affords splendid views across the gardens - assuming you can stomach them.

Our microscopy practical always turns up something new, which is the main reason I enjoy it. This year it was a ciliate called Euplotes patella. This kneecap-shaped critter is a single-celled organism masquerading as a tiny animal. The appendages that look like long hairs or legs are bundles of extra-long cilia called cirri, which it uses to scuttle about like a microscopic woodlouse. The cirri around the front of the cell (top of the image below) are also used to sweep food into a region of its cell membrane that acts like a mouth. Euplotes will eat bacteria, yeast, algae, pretty much anything it can fit into its mouth really: much like me at Christmas.

In the days when potted plants were more than just disposable land-filler, my Nan would try to force her wizened poinsettia to flower by sticking it into a bin-liner with some apples every night from October until December. Sum total of flowers she ever saw: zero. Ho hum. But how many poinsettia flowers can you see in the picture below?

If you’re wondering whether you can include the ones that are partly off-screen, you are asking the wrong question. There are many hundreds of flowers here, not six or ten. The red leafy-looking things you might have been cruelly mislead into thinking were petals are actually brightly coloured leaves. The flowers themselves are found in the tiny yellow-green blobs in the middle…

Previously on Bagging Botanic Gardens: Wisley, Brussels, Down House, Much Else Besides.

Eden Project

An old clay pit in Cornwall doesn’t sound like the most promising place to find a tropical forest, but the alleged proximity of the entrance to Magrathea might go some way to explaining it. The Eden Project’s bubble-wrap domes are now such a familiar part of the Cornish tourist board’s marketing that you’re not really expecting them to be as impressive as they actually are in the flesh:

A few months ago, I went to a creative origami lunchtime session organised by some lovely people at $WORK. I’d done origami a bit when I was younger, but mostly just frogs and cranes, which have since helped me while away the hours when invigilating exams. However, at this lunchtime session I was shown how to make modular origami. This involves making lots of (generally quite simple) origami parts, and then slotting them together to make larger structures.

Tardigrades make me squee. These little relatives of the arthropods and velvet-worms are found in the water around mosses, and they are quite easy to find if you have a cheap microscope and a little patience. Like spiders, they have eight legs, but unlike the legs of a spider, they’re plump and stumpy, and end in the little ‘fingers’ you can just about make out in the photos below. Ignoring the excess of legs, it’s easy to see why they’re sometimes called water-bears.

All science is either physics or stamp-collecting.

This rather mean-spirited dismissal of chemistry and biology as “stamp-collecting” is attributed to Ernest Rutherford, the physicist usually (not wholly fairly) credited with discovering the atomic nucleus and the proton.

Shortly after Rutherford’s death in 1937, particle physicists discovered the muon, pi mesons, kaons, the electron neutrino, the anti-proton, the lambda baryon, xi cascades, and sigma baryons. It took physicists the thirty years following Rutherford’s death to make sense of this veritable album of subatomic stamps.