Nerd of this parish.
May 05
![Pisum sativum (white) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Rasbak]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Pisum_sativum_white-288x300.jpg)
Organisms evolve adaptations to increase their fitness There are few ideas in science that explain as much of the natural world as does natural selection, but there are few ideas in science that are more frequently misunderstood. Often the misunderstandings are deliberate or disingenuous, but I’ve seen quotes like the one above even in undergraduate essays and …
Jan 06
![Lophophora williamsii [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Lophophora_williamsii_RHS-300x300.jpg)
It’s not really a botanic garden, but the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Wisley is near enough as makes no difference. We visited in what should have been the dead of winter, but which in reality was this weird sprautumn mash-up that is now December in the UK. The heather garden was particularly pretty, despite the wind: At £12, the entry …
Jan 06
![Euchlanis rotifer [CC-BY-SA-3.0]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Euchlanis_sp.-300x276.jpg)
Most years the pond-water microscopy practical throws up an exciting ciliate (or two, or three), but this year, the only ones we saw were duplicates, or too bloody fast to photograph. Ho hum. So this year you’ll have to make do with an imposter. It’s still got cilia, but it is not a ciliate, and although it’s no bigger …
Dec 22
![Gingko biloba Meise [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Gingko_biloba_Meise-300x225.jpg)
The last time we went to Brussels, I got terribly excited that the hotel we were staying in was right next door to the Botanical Garden of Brussels. Unfortunately – as we discovered in short order – at some point in the 1930s the plants had mostly been shipped off elsewhere, leaving the garden not very botanical, and Dr …
Oct 06
![Vasates quadripedes on Acer saccharinum [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Vasates_quadripedes_on_Acer_saccharinum-300x256.jpg)
Today is the first day of the new (academic) year at $WORK, but – aside from a couple of intro lectures – this is the calm before the real storm, which arrives in the form of a deluge of biological chemistry in November. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a few mugshots of some weird ciliate or other around …
Sep 17
![Barnsley fern [Public domain]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/barnsley_fern-300x300.png)
Flowers are essentially tarts. Prostitutes for the bees. (Uncle Monty, Withnail and I) Our tiny garden has only passing acquaintance with sunshine, so about the only plants that really thrive in its dingy clutches are shade-loving ferns. This Japanese painted fern is my current favourite: who needs flowers anyway, when leaves look like this? The colour is spectacular, but …
Sep 06
Towards the end of the last millennium, I spent a lot of time befriending arsenic. The last two years of my PhD involved measuring how much iodine had fallen off a chemical used as a wood preservative day-in, day-out, and arsenic trioxide was the most exciting component of an otherwise excruciatingly dull test for iodide ions. …
Sep 06
![Magnolia ×soulangeana fruit [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Magnolia_×soulangeana_fruit-225x300.jpg)
A quickie this week: magnolia fruit look like something from another planet.
![Recursion [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook, Andreas Thomson, Frank Vinzent]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/recursive_leaves-300x176.png)
![Bark [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/bark-300x225.jpg)