A Little More Land

Today we took a trip to Wheaton Regional Park. We intended to check out the “Wings of Fancy” live butterfly exhibit, but after visiting the Brookside Nature Center, we decided to hit the trails instead. It was unbelievably perfect weather. This, combined with strolling through beautiful forests, made for an amazing experience. Aside from a [...]

Gordy Slack’s unwieldily named The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, PA is an account of the people, ideas, and events surrounding the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial. Occasionally beleaguering with details and descriptions, often jocular, and informative throughout, it provides a thorough [...]

Here are two beautiful caterpillars I photographed in my backyard recently. I believe they were attracted to the large amount of Virginia Creeper growing on one side of the yard.

Eight-spotted Forester Caterpillar (Alypia octomaculata)

Common Buckeye Caterpillar (Junonia coenia)

A recent ScienceDaily article summarized a July 18 paper in the journal Science that described the mechanism by which a type of RNA is able to regulate gene expression in some bacteria. It was already known that this RNA, cyclic di-guanosine monophosphate (di-GMP), was a so-called second messenger molecule in bacteria. Basically, di-GMP is generated [...]

A beautiful specimen of a female Common Whitetail dragonfly (Plathemis lydia), taken yesterday at Sandy Point State Park:

More detailed, original image here. The females can be distinguished by having three black patches on their wings, while the males only have one, larger patch. This page shows many examples of the different sexes.
The mature males of [...]