Author: Cassi

Lamb’s Ear, a plant you can pet

Lamb’s Ear, a plant you can pet

On a recent trip to the San Francisco Botanical Garden, I stumbled on the niftiest plant ever. It’s called Stachys byzantina or “Lamb’s Ear”, named for the softness of it’s leaves. And WOW are they soft.

Inheritance is inescapable for us animals after all

Inheritance is inescapable for us animals after all

Lateral gene transfer–grabbing genes from other individuals or even other species–plays a big role in evolution for bacteria and other single-celled organisms (prokaryotes). But the last few years have seen a string of studies supporting the idea that this mechanism might be more important than we thought for animals.

Fresh off the ArXiv: Data mining for better materials synthesis

Fresh off the ArXiv: Data mining for better materials synthesis

Materials design–where the material constituents and synthesis method are determined based on the desired functionality of the final product–remains one of the Holy Grails of material science. A new software tool developed primarily at Oak Ridge National Laboratory aims to tackle the problem through a combination of data mining, crowd sourcing, and machine learning.