What is Lichen? Why is it so cool??

On a recent bike trip to the shore of Lake Waubesa near Madison, WI I saw this awesome tree covered in this crazy greenish stuff.

Summer has returned to the northern hemisphere and I'm SO PSYCHED.

That greenish stuff on the trunk of the tree are lichens. Lichens are the coolest fungi! Lichens are also the coolest plants and the coolest bacteria! Wait...  how is that possible????

Experiments at Home #2 - "Skillet Control Oven"

In my last post I showed how my skillet was coated in liquid after a short stay in my pre-heating oven. I guessed that the liquid was water and that it came from the burning of natural gas. Though I was quite confident in my guess, I admitted I hadn't done any other experiments to show that the liquid actually was water.

Thankfully, The Second Criterion blogger Jenny pointed out that while my oven produces heat by burning natural gas...

This is my oven! Definitely try this at home!!!
If you want to know why the flame is blue, check out this post.

Experiments at Home #1 - "The Skillet Mystery"

In my ever-continuing quest to become an actual adult, I have recently begun to cook. I use a real oven and everything!

In my usual encounter with the oven it takes just a few minutes of pre-heating before I realize that I have yet again left the big skillet inside. Panicked, I pull it out of the oven, and notice something weird! Finally I decided to repeat the skillet-in-the-oven experiment and document my findings. Here we go!

Step #1--observe the condition of the skillet before its trip into the oven.

Why Pee is Cool - entry #6 - "Pee, Our Connection with the Earth's Metabolic Cycle"

Here, in the final PeePeePost, is where we bring all we have learned together and find out how the act of peeing unites us with our planet.

sciseekclaimtoken-4eab48c19bc77 Any form of life that we know of needs two basic things.  The first is matter, as life has to be made of something.  The second is energy, so life can do something with that matter (e.g., move around, reproduce, watch trailer park boys).  Most life on earth gets its energy from the sun.  All life on earth gets its matter from...from earth, duh!

As we learned in the last PeePost, the atoms in your body are no different from the atoms in rocks/oceans/air/etc.  Additionally, the composition of our bodies is close-ish to that of the earth's crust!!

Graph of abundances of chemical elements in the earths' upper continental crust.  We are made mostly of the really abundant stuff in the upper left (e.g., oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc.)

Because of those two facts, I like to think of any kind of earth life as little tiny earth particles--walking, talking, peeing, sometimes neighborly little chunks of the earth's crust.

Humans are earth particles.

Why Pee is Cool - entry #4 - "PeePee Portal to Phosphorus" or "What the Alchemists Did Right"

Travel with me back in time, when humans were first beginning to wonder things like "What the hell is the world around me made of anyhow!?"  Picture yourself as an ancient alchemist, repeatedly trying in vain to figure out a way to turn anything into gold.  You pretty much suck at doing science, but as a result of all your fool-hearty work you do know how to do things like mix, heat, and distill stuff.  The first problem you face as an alchemist is that you need some substance to do experiments on.

Pee