May 19
![Tardigrades [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/tardigrade-300x157.jpg)
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’ …
May 19
![Passiflora foetida flower [CC-BY-3.0 Alex Lomas]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Passiflora_foetida_flower-300x295.jpg)
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 …
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 …