Jul 07
![Cotinus coggygria [CC-BY-SA-4.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Cotinus_coggygria_autumn_leaf-267x300.jpg)
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 …
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 …
Jul 10
![Phage vs. host [CC-BY-SA-4.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/phage_vs_host-300x207.png)
For a recent schools’ outreach day, I put together a card-game based around the arms-races that develop between bacterial hosts and their viruses (bacteriophages). It’s mostly just a bit of fun, but if anyone finds it useful or can suggest improvements (or just make them! I release this under a CC-BY-SA-4.0 license) I’d be happy to hear them.
Mar 06
![Diadema setosum [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Diadema_setosum-224x300.jpg)
It’s amazing how informative an anus can be. Take this sea urchin. The orange pucker in the middle of the spines is its “around-the-bum”, although zoologists would insist on writing that in Greek as “periproct“. The bright orange ring-piece is characteristic of this species, and marks it out as Diadema setosum, rather than any of …
May 26
![Kryptoperidinium [CC-By-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/kryptoperidinium-273x300.png)
Cassiopea, which looks rather like a spelling mistake (but isn’t), also looks a bit like an anemone (but isn’t): It’s actually a jellyfish, but one that spends most of its time living upside-down (relative to its relatives). Unlike its close relatives, it gets much of its energy from sunbathing rather than from fishing. Inside the cells …
Apr 08
![Psilotum nudum sporangia [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Eric Guinther Marshman@Wikipedia]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Psilotum_nudum_sporangia-300x225.jpg)
It’s not much to look at, but Psilotum nudum‘s naked fronds hold a cautionary tale for biologists: Psilotum looks a great deal like some of the earliest fossils of land plants. One of the earliest such fossils is Rhynia, the first specimens of which which were unearthed in Aberdeenshire around 1910, a mere 410 million years after they were …
Mar 30
![Gnetum gnemon [CC-BY-2.0 Alex Lomas]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Gnetum_gnemon-300x300.jpg)
By popular demand, I have resurrected this phylogeny from my old website for Easter 2013. I have added a number of extra groups, updated the angiosperms according to APG-III, and repositioned the Gnetales according the apparently ascendent gnetifer hypothesis. The rotated titles in the table appear to work in IE9, Chrome and Safari, but YMMV. Classification …
Sep 25
![Paddock door with fungus [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/paddock_door-224x300.jpg)
Paddock is the codename of a bunker that was built in the late 1930s as a back-up for the better known Cabinet War Rooms located in Whitehall. The bunker was abandoned at the end of the war, and was only used intermittently after that by the Post Office, whose Research Station sat atop it. In 1998, the surface site and the bunker were sold off, …
Sep 10
![Contents of the human genome [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/genome_contents-267x300.png)
In 1972, the geneticist Susumu Ohno coined the term “junk DNA” to explain why the genomes of closely related organisms vary so much in size: The mammalian genome […] contains roughly […] 3.0 × 109 base pairs. This is at least 750 times the genome size of E. coli. If we take the simplistic assumption that …
Jul 26
![Angiosperm phylogeny stressing magnoliids [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]: thistle appears as an outgroup to the ((magnolia,bay),(pepper,birthwort)) clade](https://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/angiosperm_phylogeny_stressing_magnoliids-300x153.png)
T. Ryan Gregory has a great post at Genomicron on the ‘Platypus Fallacy’. He imagines a platypus professor explaining the wonders of the Human Genome Project to a group of student platypodes: “The lineage of which humans are a part is a very ancient offshoot of our mammalian family tree, so it was 166 million …