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This. Hot. http://www.facebook.com/flowhive We are very excited to introduce our new invention that allows you to enjoy fresh honey straight out of your beehive without opening it. It's far less stress for the bees and much, much easier for the beekeeper. Launches tomorrow 11am. Is getting good reviews. You can fit 2 Flow supers on top of a non-modified Langstroth brood box from the looks of things, as long as the frames are deep If it's as good as it looks it does have a couple of on-flow impacts of interest: If beekeeping becomes idiot-proof, more idiots will keep bees and not look after them, potentially providing a pool of pathogens and pests If European beehives proliferate they could potentially knock native bees back a way. European bees start foraging much earlier in the day than the locals. These are not negatives which would stop me from coveting and purchasing a Flow hive, any savings I make in time and money stuffing round with extractors etc I'll put into providing native hives for the locals

I have found Eden seed quality to be progressively worse over the last few years- germination rates decreasing. Have been a customer of theirs for 20+ years and I'm switching to our local seed network for all veggie seed This could be due to vendor storage for Eden seed at the retail end of course, more experimentation definitely needed, but I purchased from at least 3 different local stores Bought 2 packs Eden seed capsicum, subject to my usual germination in propagation mix semi shade. One germination. Minimal germination for 2 x carrot variety, and nil for of all things, radish Bought 2 packs random seed from local seed network the other week, 100% germination in one species, too many to count in the other It's not the money I resent losing on Eden so much as I miss the opportunity to harvest food which should have grown and has grown previously here Local seed networks are a safer bet for me

He said "please". Did you read that? Or are we back to that pathetic thread where anyone who said they were in favour of zero population growth was practically accused of wanting to break into houses and slaughter forum member's children. One of the low points in the intellectual life of this place IME

I have a bunch of Psychotria carthagenensis/ alba plants I'd like to put along a fenceline in NSW There's a small chance that cows could get to them when they're taller ( the plants, not the cows ) Google has some loose insinuations that some Psychotria species could be potentially toxic to cattle, however most of the search results don't mention species and Psychotria is a large and varied genus B&T World Seed has a reference saying P. viridis is toxic to cattle, but I can't find the study reference for that. And I'm planting P. carth Has anyone here had P. carth within range of cattle reach? What were your experiences- cows OK? If cattle are known to be affected by it I'll plant them somewhere else

PDF shuffler. I use it on Linux, not sure if it is on Win or iOS

Hey wow, thanks Anodyne

A mate has made an outdoor edibles patch, and I gave him a spawn bag to fill it Now either I've mismarked the spawn bag ( possible ) and not recorded it on the spreadsheet, or he has Golden Oyster mushrooms growing wild up his way Golden oyster is about the only thing it could be hey, especially if they are fruiting directly off the spawn from the bag. He couldn't get a spore print as the mushrooms were too wet Is too early for Chanterelles isn't it? They're more a cooler season mushroom and his microclimate is quite warm Normally I'm 1) way more careful in the lab and 2) way less paranoid about ID, but my mate has a family and I'd hate to recommend feeding him something I wasn't 110% sure of the ID on. I have too many species in the culture library these days as I'm isolating local fruits, *sigh*, it's a wake up call for sure

Well I would, I quite liked the bloke. So what if he said something dumb, I said something similar a coupla years ago and I'm sure I've said other dumb stuff. Big deal. He seems OK to me

Oh I love the sarcasm personally. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, so sarcasm harder people. Harder. Shit deserves to be made fun o Yep you are right in one sense, and my analogy was shoddy. Yes, water boils at ~100°C @ 1ATM. But the uses to which empirical observation are put reflects our own input and relationships with each other. Are you testing BP forsurgical polymer manufacture or are you calculating gas use for pouring boiled H2O over the heads of political dissidents? Either way, the figure is a constant. The end use is not Did I get my point right yet? Science isn't privatised. A fuckload of what's funded has been privatised. Not too much of that is prohibited, or even out of range for many people. We've just embraced learned helplessness about chasing ideas rigorously for ourselves. There are valuable citizen science projects which combat this, and I love them And yet... here you are... still complaining. Where's that luscious info you're witholding? Don't take it personally, I've been caned for saying similar stuff years ago. But it was good advice. Don't whinge too long, fix it.

LIKE I don't object to Pinchbeck's poetic style, but fucked if I'd call him a researcher Have often wished I could make something up completely and say it sufficient credulity while charging bulk $ and selling books. I'd giggle and give the game away pretty early on Absolutely cannot believe that so many people are so willing to sacrifice independent thought in order to suck up such peurile crap and spout it back out without losing mass credibility. Oh. LNP. I guess it's just human nature. Years back I was surprised to find such a willingness to bow to the alpha-men spouting unproveable crap in the EB community- especially overseas-and that was back when the signal/noise ratio was lower. Now it just saddens me. Scratch any human being and you will find irrational beliefs not far below the epidermal layer. Even if it's just " She'll come back to me one day " or "If I stop smoking pot tonight I'll be right to drive tomorrow even if the cops are round". Irrationality is especially true of biologists and physicists IME I don't have a problem with that, it's fun. But it's when an irrational claim is aggresively argued as a proven, logical statement and gains momentum- that's when it shits me Absence of evidence etc. Still, it's a bad example. Science is what we, the people make of it. Your analogy is like claiming private transport excludes the poor because cars exist. Untrue. Both cars and science exist as somewhat weighted social constructs- but they can be used in so many different ways Private science can be crap. So can public science. It's poor science and a tunelling of research focus driven by a short term market economy that's the enemy. The important thing about science- as opposed to religion, or fucken intergalactic space alien pyramid DVD selling schemes- is that once you find something is wrong, or different, you get to write it up and challenge or change the findings. I Really, you make that sound like you're gunna take your bat and ball and go home because you don't like the players. Gosh, who here is lucky enough to fall under the definition of 'everyone' above? Is this a statement designed to make us each secretly glad you don't mean us as individuals? If you gave a fuck you'd contribute all this good information you've just spruiked and get a decent discussion going

Where do you draw the line with this? I'm all in favour of isolating threads on chemtrails, antivaxxers and conspiracy theories ( for example ) But some of the most interesting discussions here have started out with something like vague theory and get developed by subsequent posting types into a cross disciplinary discussion on formal research techniques and developments And most of the best threads here get hijacked one way or the other, which I really like as well

Sounds like a reasonable start to me, MG isn't making any claims beyond those he's outlined and the experiment seems consistent enough without being in a fully controlled chamber At least he's admitting to variables which weren't covered by the experiment. Most scientific papers don't list the things they left out ( and sometimes those things are important ) and you don't find that out until you try to replicate the experiment. That's why the submission includes their contact details- so you can ask

What species are you looking at having sequenced? I was looking at a few too. Perhaps we could share costs?

I enquired about this a fair while ago, not sure if the technology has changed in the last 12 months, here's a mashup of what I got back then You can split your sequencing into 3 stages. You'll need a wet lab to extract the DNA. It's not hard, tho some ppl do it better than others Cheap and local is available for most people, obtainable for beer in some instances. The sequencing mob will want about 5ug of high quality DNA per species, which is a lot. A crude prep won't pass the sequencing company's QC either. Find a company to do the sequencingDNA can be shipped anywhere in the world ( AFAIK, no restrictions exist on import or export )- find the cheapest and most reliable sequencing place Cheapest a few years ago were the BGI Beijing Genome Institute, AGRF and The Ramaciotti Centre, UNSW. If you are linked in with geneticists who have the relevant toys, sometimes there will be a run done with a spare 'lane' free- ie they aren't running a fully stocked session and have space for your species, in which case it will cost fuckall in comparison to BGI etc above Whoever you choose will want to know How big is the genome? Is there a closely related species that could be used as a reference genome? How much coverage do you want? Eg how many times is each base represented by a read. For example, wheat and barley are appox 5.5Gb and about 8x coverage. . What kind of library preparation? I would suggest (on an Illumina instrument) 75 or100bp paired end reads, AND a 3-5kb mate pair library. Paired end reads are cheap and will give you lots of coverage. A mate pair library is critical to putting a genome together if there is no reference genome. They may ask more technical questions relevant to the sequencing You will also need bioinformatics support to make sense of your dataI'm under the impression it takes a lot of computing power and storage space, and that human expertise is important in interpreting the data. I got pretty lost after the bits requesting info on coverage. Roundabout then I gave up and decided to delegate the job to someone else when it came up Not sure if this is what you are after, good luck. It's all very do-able, but it's not as simple as it looks on CSI unless you are willing to throw $$$ at it, or have genetically obsessed mates

I'm with you on that. In the case above I mentioned tho it was really really necessary. Now we have established a total lack of curiousity between households and an amount of trust we aim for minimal interaction. I don't want to be best friends, or even close. That's what makes them good neighbours now

Oh....... and do ensure your neighbour ain't connected in any way before waging war, condition of ones backyard can sometimes not be a viable indicator that a neighbour 'doesn't care' or does not have the financial clout or contacts to seriously fuck you up. I kinda agree with that. I've had the neighbours from hell, and I've been the neighbour from hell. Context is everything. Previously I've viewed neighbours who have obsessively mown lawns to be weirdly focussed preachy types whose idea of territory extends well beyond their fenceline and into my perceived lifestyle. Some of the obsessive mowing yardwork types have been physically dangerous, fucked up and more slovenly than I once you see the kitchen. But hey, their lawns are mown so they must be reputable citizens ( no ) My place is a shitful mess when things are busy and the lawn doesn't get mowed. Large furry family members drop in on loud motorcycles from time to time. Sometimes there are parties, with music and drinking and shit. Swearing, laughing and talking crap til 3am. Maybe 3-4 times a year even When the yuppies next door moved in it was a nightmare. They spent the whole time on guard getting weird about shit that wasn't happening, making stuff up and attributing all sorts of superpowers to us, confronting us every couple of weeks. Frankly they were scary. If you live next door to people who don't have visitors, are always quiet, have really overactive paranoid imaginations and never have parties you start to question whether they are storing the bodies in the freezer or a bath of ice. You start to wonder when they are going to pop their heads over the fence and get shrill about things they are imagining again. You start to avoid the fenceline, because they have no boundaries, but you do, and if they come in your yard and act like that again you are probably going to face court Then one day we all got over it, and accepted that on some things we have different priorities. They like a mowed lawn, I don't care. We both like honest people around us, and we both like our privacy. If I have a party and it's too loud they are perfectly entitled to ask me to turn it down within reason. If something comes up, we will ask, not assume, and not wait until we're super pissed off to talk about it They are now officially best neighbours ever It's a vine FFS. It takes what, 20 min to trim it back every week? How long have you wasted getting pissed off about it? Give it a think, weigh it up against the full time neuroses and potentially escalating petty spites which come bundled with neighbourhood disputes

Thanks Looks like I have to keep a lid on how many species I can run at once. Traced the error back to a re-used lid on an agar container whose previous species name hadn't been properly wiped out Let that be a lesson to me

No. Dammit, I knew I shouldn't have mentioned the C word :/

Gold. You left out chemtrails tho. Am as cynical as you, and haven't seen the data on the TC experiments, but my mate is a good scientist who does quality lab work. He would have allowed for all the variables and was working the data over a 2 year period. So I'm fence sitting on this one

This. I've been finding this especially true of a readily available, once-loved brand of open-pollinated non-hybrid veggie seeds. The ones in the yellow-brown paper envelopes with no pictures on them. Should I name the brand? Their germination rates have plummeted over the last decade. How on earth it is possible to get nil germinations for 3/5 seed packets when the other two work fine... can't explain it. Especially capsicum. They've been a constant fail I've given up buying them after the last fiasco. Planting my own parsley seed next to them in the seed bed and I got thousands of plants from my stock Fortunately we now have a very local seed exchange. So if I miss a crop save I can go and buy from local backup stock PS if you save seed from commercial hybrid parents, you are potentially not going to get stable characteristic expression from them, they may well be different from the parent stock. Go non-hybrid wherever possible

Found this beautiful one on leaf litter last week in NNSW. There isn't a scale in the pic, it was approx 100mm across at the cap and about 150mm long overall The cap colour was closer to black than brown, and definitely became black after picking. So ignore the colour in the pic below, flash washed it out. Cap texture was mildly velvety At some point I took spore prints and notes on the staining, which was initially red, but I can't remember how fast the rxn was, nor if the colour deepened to black. The notes and spore slides are in the kitchen, so it's quicker and safer for me to ask you here than it is to go find them, if they still exist Am thinking Tyopilus sp, possibly Tylopilus alboater, because staining, and cap/ pore contrast. Any other ideas? Right into the boletes atm, mostly because I didn't think we had any here. Would be nice to find a safe, tasty one, I hear rumours of them out closer to the coast

Thank you -you rock- that was fast!