Plant Nerdery

I create podcasts on a lot of different science topics. This week I was given the opportunity to create a video about anything I wanted to (within reason). I've always wanted to do a piece about monocots and dicots, but couldn't ever figure out how to make it cool. Truth is, it is a bit of a nerdy topic. Kids learn it in school though, and it's impossible to find any good videos on the topic. 

Thus, I present ... our nerdy plant video of the day. I tried to show that plants really are cool.  I'm not talking this time about how they'll kill you or how you can get high. I do like those topics though. This time, it's all about the basics- monocots vs dicots. You learned it in school, but why did you learn it? It's important, that's why. If you're into plants, I think you'll like this short. 

To learn more about this topic visit our monocots vs dicots page.

Ticks with a twist of lyme disease

Over the summer I found out that our new house, being so close to the woods, is crawling with ticks. At one point we found between 5 and 10 a night in our bed. It's a terrible feeling to have a tick bite you while you're dreaming. Needless to say, one of those ticks was carrying a pathogen. While I can't be sure it was lyme disease, since I didn't get it tested, I do know that it was something in the same category because I had all the signs. I got treated with antibiotics and I'm fine.  However, it made me start thinking about the disease.

A few weeks after I got treated for lyme disease, we went to Africa. Turns out, one of the preventions for malaria is the antibiotic, doxycycline, which is exactly what I had been on for lyme treatment. I basically continued treatment for another couple weeks there. In the meantime, we bumped into a researcher, Brian Allan, who studies ticks and lyme disease. Because of those two chance occurrences, we decided to make this short update:



If you're still interested in reading up on the ecology of this disease, we did a short writeup here: http://www.untamedscience.com/biodiversity/article/lime-disease

Tracking Baboons in Style!

If you've been following our work at Untamed Science, you might know we just went to Africa. You might also know that we were tracking baboons with a group of researchers. Yet, we weren't able to share a whole lot about what we were doing, because we knew we were going to release this video. So, after a month of work, here it its.



Read more about this research at our full link here: http://www.untamedscience.com/baboons

After it's all said and done, I think the project turned out very well. I'm happy to say I completely enjoyed every one of the researchers on the trip and I wish every expedition could be as fun as this one.