Note: If you do nothing else, check out the videos at the very bottom before leaving!!
What a day! A two post day for sure.
The morning started off with an entertaining and educational tour of the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, NC (blog post to follow).
Next, my wife and I were off to the Sarah [...]

I just got home and happened to look up into the corner of my porch today, when what do I see but a Northern Black Widow (Latrodectus variolus) tending her egg case above my steps.
I have seen hundreds of black widows at my house (see some really cool closeups in my previous post on black [...]

I witnessed a pretty awesome display today by my friendly neighborhood Golden Garden Spider (Argiope aurantia), that I had never before seen. In fact, I had no idea that spiders would make such defensive displays.
As I approached her web, I noticed the web start to vibrate back and forth in quite an exaggerated fashion. [...]

I grew these mouse embryonic stem cells on a plate, and through various molecular trickery, I made them turn in to the crazy cell types you see here. (Click for larger images)

Check out the next two images. They are the same cells viewed in two different ways (normal light, and epifluorescence).

Long neuronal axons stretch [...]

First, for the last two summers my property has been overrun by the Northern Black Widow (Latrodectus variolus). These are distinguishable from the Southern Black Widow (Latrodectus mactans) by the fact that Northern Widows have broken hourglasses on their abdomen, while Southern widows have complete hourglasses. Note the broken hourglass on the female below.

Next [...]

These are mouse embryonic stem cells that I coerced to differentiate into brain cells. The neurons are green, red represents the radial glia (they proved a scaffold for the neurons), and the blue are the nuclei of the cells (that houses the DNA).