Nerd of this parish.
Feb 12
Anything is better than an recipe that uses volume measurements for highly compressible powders. I’m looking at you America, and your ridiculous ‘cup’ nonsense. Materials 0.110 kg powdered wheat endosperm (without added carbonates or tartrates) 4.28 mmol NaCl 2 unfertilised jungle-fowl eggs (between 63 and 73 g in mass) 275 mL of 75% (v/v) aqueous diluent …
Feb 09
![pGLO contamination [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/pGLO_contamination_fun-300x224.jpg)
Yesterday’s first-year biology practical involved forcing the laboratory work-horse bacterium Escherichia coli to take up a circular piece of DNA called pGLO. pGLO contains a few genes, but the most interesting of these DNA sequences encodes a protein from a jellyfish. This protein fluoresces green under UV light, and goes by the thoroughly unimaginative name of green fluorescent …
Feb 07
![Drosophyllum lusitanicum [CC-BY-2.0 Alex Lomas]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Drosophyllum_lusitanicum-199x300.jpg)
Busy teaching this week, so it’ll have to be a quick one… I particularly like this plant because of a very specific and unusual thing about its leaves. The more observant of you may spot what it is without having to resort to Wikipedia…
Jan 31
![Amanita muscaria [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Amanita_muscaria-225x300.jpg)
Imperial’s campus in Berkshire, Silwood Park, is a fabulous place to go fungus spotting. The fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) is very common there as there are a lot of birch trees around, and this fungus forms a symbiosis with the roots of those trees: Fly agarics are rather poisonous (for some value of ‘rather’), by …
Jan 24
![Halobacterium salinarum [CC-By-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Halobacterium_salinarum-225x300.jpg)
There are many good reasons to visit San Francisco, some of them thoroughly unsafe for work, but one I didn’t consider was to see this amazing sight on the approach to the airport: The pink colour in the water is caused by a bloom of single-celled organisms I must refrain from calling bacteria, since they are not. …
Jan 21
![Pinguicula esseriana flowers [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Pinguicula_esseriana_flowers-274x300.jpg)
After the trip to Königssee, I was inspired to retail therapy and bought myself as many butterworts as Hampshire Carnivorous Plants could supply: They did me proud over this summer, with two of them flowering despite the root disturbance (on which butterworts are not keen), the chunky cultivar ‘Tina’: and the daintier species P. esseriana: In …
Jan 19
![Marlowe's longboat [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/marlowe_longboat-300x225.jpg)
Marlowe, the cellar spider who has been living behind my beside cabinet for the last 18 months, disappeared a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t too worried as they’d done that before and then turned up again a few weeks later, fatter and of greater span. On Monday, however, Alex found Marlowe’s mortal remains beneath …
Jan 17
![Phycomyces blakesleeanus [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Phycomyces_blakesleeanus-300x224.jpg)
I have delusions of being a competent recogniser of things that turn up in UK gardens, but when this started growing in what had previously been a pot of basil in the garden, I was clueless: It looked a little like moss from a distance, but the bibbly bobblies were most certainly not moss-like close-up, …
Jan 10
![+Laburnocytisus adamii [CC-BY-2.0 Alex Lomas]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/+Laburnocytisus_adamii-199x300.jpg)
I’ve been neglecting the blog of late, for reasons too dreary to explain. So I am taking the astonishingly original step of racking up a load of pretty pictures of organisms to release on a semi-regular basis. I am creativity incarnate. Today, +Laburnocytisus ‘Adamii’. Technically, this is a bit of a cheat for an organism of …
