This may sound crazy, but it’s been my dream to build a nuclear reactor since I was a kid. I started college as a physics major, but switched when I discovered biology. Now that I’m working in the UPS Physics Department, the stars have aligned and I finally have an opportunity build a fusor! What’s a fusor, you ask? It’s […]
Designing a 3D-printed flow chamber
I’m working on a small, water-tight chamber to measure how flow affects feeding kinematics in Vorticella, a single-celled protist that adheres to surfaces. There are some real design constraints, namely that it must be small enough to accommodate the relatively short (10mm) working distance of the objective lens we’re using. I designed a prototype in Solidworks. The clear interrogation area […]
How to create an ultrametric dichotomous phylogeny in R
If you’re doing comparisons between species, you might be interested in plotting those species on a phylogenetic tree. Once you’ve created the tree, you might want to do some statistics. Generally, you’ll need a phylogeny that is both ultrametric and dichtomous to do these stats. Here’s one way to create this kind of tree in R. Start by downloading a […]