Author Archives: paleololigo

Scientist (Paleontology, Geochemistry, Geology); Writer (Speculative and Science Fiction, plus technical and non-technical Science); Mom to great boy on the Autism spectrum; possessor of too many hobbies.

Women in STEM from A to Z – #AtoZchallenge

Every April for the last three years, I have participated in the “Blogging from A to Z” challenge. It took me a while, but I finally came up with a theme for this year and I’m going with it.

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STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. These are fields that up to 50 years ago were almost entirely dominated by men. Nowadays, men still dominate in many of these fields, but women are taking their places alongside the men and doing some amazing work.Continue reading “Women in STEM from A to Z – #AtoZchallenge”

Find Me an Amniote! Stat!

Amniotes are important. You are an amniote (I promise). Birds are amniotes. Turtles are amniotes. Crocodiles are amniotes. Dinosaurs were amniotes. Dogs and cats are amniotes. Lizards are amniotes.

But amphibians (like the spring peepers that have been so noisy of late) are not amniotes. Fishes aren’t amniotes either.Continue reading “Find Me an Amniote! Stat!”

We Don’t Have Those “Exotic” Beers Here

This really happened.

In the summer of 2011, I made my nearly-annual visit to the Hanna Basin of Wyoming. I had two students with me who had never experienced the West before and were a little surprised by the difference in culture from western New York State.

I had explained to them one of the things that is a ‘thing’ in the West is drive-through liquor stores. To this day, I don’t know how this does not encourage drinking and driving, but whatever. There we were in the tiny, tiny town of Hanna. We had stopped to get water and check out the grocery store. Across the way from the grocery store was the tiny tavern and liquor store of Hanna.

Back “in the day” when I was a graduate student working in the Hanna Basin, the grocery store and the liquor store were kind of OK. I had even bought them out of (their only 6-pack) of New Belgium’s Fat Tire. Since I graduated, the town has dwindled horribly. The hardware store was gone and the grocery store was mostly bare shelves – but I could have bought some game meat there.

I had forgotten to pick up beer in Laramie before we left, so I decided to avail myself of the liquor store.Continue reading “We Don’t Have Those “Exotic” Beers Here”

My Local Beer Market

An important thing one must consider when thinking about opening a brewery is who your clientele might be. I mean, what is your market. To explore this, I took a little stroll to my local grocery store (shown as number 3 on the map below).

My town's tiny grocery store. Small, but effective.
My town’s tiny grocery store. Small, but effective.

Our town is small, so we have a small grocery store. It’s not a chain. So far as I know, there is only one other Breen’s store, and it’s about 20 miles away in an equally small town.Continue reading “My Local Beer Market”

It’s Not Good to Think Outside the Homeobox

It was a very good question in my class last week – a series of them actually – that stimulated me to prepare this post.

We were talking about the development of limbs and how the formation of the various bones is directed by the action of homeobox or HOX genes. HOX genes are highly conserved among animals, meaning that the same gene in humans is likely to also be found in fish or even more distantly related animals, like fruit flies.

HOX genes direct the development of the overall body plan of animals. They help the developing organism differentiate between the head-end and the tail-end of the animal. HOX genes regulate the formation of bones in limbs, insuring the common pattern shared among all land vertebrates and the lobe-finned fishes.

But… Why are they called ‘homeobox’ or HOX? And how do they actually work?Continue reading “It’s Not Good to Think Outside the Homeobox”