Going away...

Going on vacation until June... may not be able to post much there. Although it's not like you'd notice the difference anyway...

Lurk ToLWeb and Paleos to get a bit of a protist fix if necessary. Or read a paper by Tom Cavalier-Smith, or two, or three. That shall keep you busy! mwahaha...

Another delinquent Sunday Protist -- Euglenids

Kinda busy this week; going on two week vacation on Friday, so naturally stuff just piles up. Thus I'm gonna parasitise off the ToLWeb Euglenida page and send you guys there.

They have cool pictures:



And possibly nearly everything you'd ever wanted to know about Euglenids and their evolution.

Back to chaos...

It's that time of the term...

Protistology final Thu, then a genetics exam 8.30am SATURDAY freaking morning, and two more exams Mon and Wed. Thu shall be dedicated to taking care of a massive hangover. On top of that, I have a shitload of lab stuff to do, because I'm so great at timing things so that everything matures exactly when it really shouldn't.

And Firefox is telling me protistology is not a word. ISOP needs to lobby some dictionaries...

I did go on a microforay, however. Don't have time to process all the images, but found a few cool cysts (I think):





The latter may be a dino cyst; anyone know?

And a girdle view of a good ol' diatom:


Off to cram study intelligently with a long term goal of retaining learned info past the final (yeah right.)

J Endless Excuses, v1(1):1

My blogging style apparently asks for a new category label: "Excuses". How long before this becomes the largest category, overtaking the "Protists"?

Just spent a week writing a research paper for my protistology course... for some inexplicable insane reason, epigenetics of new MAC formation in ciliates seemed like a wonderful idea at the time. I knew absolutely nothing about epigenetics, other than that histones and miRNAs were involved. And for those who don't know, epigenetics, histone modification, miRNA pathways... are chaos of unimaginable magnitude. The sheer complexity of it all is overwhelming, as well as how much is still unknown. Non-coding RNAs are a relatively recent major discovery (early 90's, I believe), and the field has been growing at an incredible rate. And of course, there was no better way to introduce the stuff to myself than via ciliates, possibly the strangest eukaryotes on earth. It's kinda like going to a foreign country to study quantum physics in a language you know nothing about.

Then I spent a whole two nights pondering about the evolution of nuclear dimorphism, and wrote a couple pages of 'conjecture' (ie. pulling shit out of one's ass in a scientific manner). I was considering editing the essay and posting stuff here (in a less condensed manner)... anyone care about ciliate epigenetics here?

Anyway, with exams around the corner, I don't know how much I can redeem myself. There's about five exams patiently waiting to devour my brains and my non-existant soul...

I'll just cuddle up with Denial and watch a few anime series instead. Denial is so warm and fuzzy and comfy! =D

NO, BACK OFF, DENIAL... I told you we can't continue our relationship any longer! I've started seeing others... I only come to you when I'm troubled... we shouldn't be together anymore! <_<


Now that we've established that the author has imaginary conversations with an abstract noun, have a good weekend!