Ever wondered how fast the desert can turn green when the rains get going? There’s a Portal blog post on that (with pics)!

A guest post from last week on the Portal Blog about studying Kangaroo rat placentas!

We have a modest sized group of current folks at ESA this week presenting on all the cool things they’ve been doing. We’re also around and always happy to try to find time to grab a coffee or just a few minutes to chat science. Our schedule for the week is: Monday Get a double dose of rapid change in ecological communities from the Portal Project with Morgan Ernest and Erica Christensen. 02:50 PM – 03:10 PM in C120-121.

The Portal Project turns 40 this year! In celebration, we will be regularly posting about the history of the site, new things going on, natural history of the desert, and other fun things over at the Portal Blog.

Our lab is looking for a PhD student interested in the molecular mechanisms of operant self-learning, a form of motor learning.

We have a new paper out! You can access it here. The people This paper really was a team effort. Faye Nixon and Tom Honnor are joint-first authors. Faye did most of the experimental work in the final months of her PhD and Tom came up with the idea for the mathematical modelling and helped to rewrite our analysis method in R. Other people helped in lots of ways.

The Problem You’ve probably heard the joke about the two people camping in the woods who encounter a hungry predator. One person stops to put on running shoes. The other says, “Why are you wasting time? Even with running shoes you’re not going to outrun that animal!” The other replies, “I don’t have to outrun the animal, I just have to outrun you.” For me this joke highlights a problem with the way some people argue about climate change.

Previously I wrote about our move to electronic lab notebooks (ELNs). This post contains the technical details to understand how it works for us. You can even replicate our setup if you want to take the plunge. Why go electronic? Lots and lots of lab books and folders. Many reasons: I wanted to be able to quickly find information in our lab books.

We finally took the plunge and adopted electronic lab notebook (ELNs) for the lab. This short post describes our choice of software. I will write another post about how it’s going, how I set it up and other technical details. tl;dr we are using WordPress as our ELN. First, so you can understand my wishlist of requirements for the perfect ELN. Easy-to-use. Allow adding pictures and notes easily.

I recently asked on Twitter for any recommendations for software to organise my PDFs. I got several replies, but nothing really fitted the bill. This is a brief summary. My situation I have quite a lot of books, textbooks, cheat sheets, manuals, protocols etc. in PDF format and I need a way to organise them.