John Muir once said, “nothing dollarable is safe”. He said this during the time that he voraciously debated with Gifford Pinchot on the how we as a society should view the natural world. While Pinchot focused on the sustainable use of natural resources for the next generation to use, Muir argued for a complete lack … Continue reading
This post is a sort of follow-up to an earlier post, “Getting Started with Bioinformatics”. Two years ago, if I were to read that post, I would’ve thought that while bioinformatics if obviously powerful, it is not that relevant to me as someone more inclined in “classic field-based wildlife biology”. In such a profession, I … Continue reading
In 1915 a strange new sea creature was discovered that resembled a “purple sock”. This creature was eventually named as Xenoturbella bocki in 1949, but no one really had any idea what this weird creature was (Westblad, 1949). Unable to clearly establish more information about the creature’s fit in the evolutionary tree or even its … Continue reading
If you have been following this blog, you have become familiar with a myriad of issues facing our oceans today: acidification, global warming, over fishing, ect. Yet, what is actually being done about it? While most of the environmental headlines have focused on the Paris talks, only recently has news coverage begun to highlight the … Continue reading
Venoms are complex chemical cocktails designed to be actively injected into another organism and wreak cellular havoc (not to be confused with poisons, which need to be ingested). Venoms have a rich evolutionary history, with each independently evolved lineage accumulating new duplicate genes that can then mutate and alter existing proteins to produce an extraordinarily … Continue reading
If you’re reading this blog, you have probably heard of the issue of overfishing. In sum, our appetite for seafood has grown larger than what the ocean can supply, and this ravenous demand has resulted in plummeting fish stocks. In fact, it has been estimated that we have reduced the populations of large ocean fish … Continue reading
In economics, nothing is more alluring than being on the right side of the law of supply and demand. Today, owning copper, along with some other metals commonly used in electronic devices, is certainly being on the right side. Thus, any prospect of acquiring copper has the industrial sector simply drooling. And so, back in … Continue reading
UNder the C 