Meaghan and the Molds of Doom

In 2014 I made a terrible Christmas mistake.

For gifts, I like to give people nerdy homemade things, and I find that Christmas is a particularly convenient excuse to procrastinate on important tasks that I don't want to do (like study). For Christmas of 2014 I made chocolate molds of cool extinct animals, including a giant ground sloth and a 2D Dunkelosteus face. The molds were cute, the chocolates were tasty, the bacon-flavored lollipops I made in these molds were hilarious and kind of greasy, it was fun all around. Yet somehow this sparked a series of events that led to a replica of Cophecetus bleeding unset resin like a mysterious holy relic, hives from my fingers to my biceps, and a floor so splattered in epoxy we may need to pour more plastic on it just to even the whole place out.

Same same, and yet SO DIFFERENT.

Gimme Some Mo' GMO

It's our blogiversary this week, did you know that? It has been two glorious years of science, antler earrings, strange google search terms, and failing to write a post every month about a dead animal we liked (sorry!). It's been a great two years, and we're excited for many many more. When we started writing, we imagined a blog where we could talk humorously about awesome science and science-related things, and also bitch heavily about some of the pseudoscience we encounter on the regular. We also daydreamed about fame and fortune, neither of which have happened just yet but we're patient.

HOW ARE WE NOT FAMOUS YET THOUGH SRSLY

Bitching about bad science or non-science masquerading as science has always been a big theme of the blog but doesn't yet have its own label. It should. So for our blogiversary, we'd like to debut a new tag (pseudoscience is a pain in our ass), and introduce it with an irritated post about the  anti-science, anti-GMO movement.

For-Real Science Titles

Listen. Sometimes reading about science is not the invigorating spell-bound haze that we have often portrayed it as. It can be monotonous. It can lead to random outbursts of extreme anger - "WHY DID I READ ALL OF THIS WHEN IT IS SHIT, IT IS SUCH SHIT!"
 

Oreodont literature sucks SO HARD, Amy, SO HARD!

 But sometimes, it is gold and not for the reason you thought it might be. Here are a few gems discovered in epic quests through the vast and echoing forest of unrelated literature.

Paleosol Cupcakes, Part 2 of 2

We hope you're ready, world.

You're probably not, though, because this blog post contains scientific sketches of cupcakes and there ain't nobody prepped to handle that shit. Let's delve deep into the world of paleopedology baked goods, a sentence that by all rights should never have entered this universe but is somehow here anyway.

CUPCAKE #1: MOLLISOL

Mollisols are grassland soils. Because grass forms a thick blanket of vegetation on the ground, it creates a lot of organic material (chocolate cake and white cake mixed together). Mollisols often have calcareous nodules ("pearl" sprinkles) and gypsum layers (silver sprinkles), but also have crumb peds which are basically small lumps of dirt inside the overall dirt. Here we have a well-drained mollisol - the small Bt horizon  wasn't constantly soaked with water, so instead of turning green it oxidized (rusted) into a reddish layer, or in this case, red velvet cake.

This one comes with a super epic cooking video, in which Meaghan pronounces 'calcareous' the Canadian way (aka... incorrectly).

Disappointingly, Meaghan's camera battery died soon after that video was filmed. The rest of these cupcakes shall have to stand without explicit, Star-Wars-style cooking directions.

CUPCAKE #2: HISTOSOL

Paleosol Cupcakes, Part 1 of 2

For those of you not in the know, some people study dirt. While this is fortunately not an affliction either member of the Vengeance Team suffers from, it is an actual thing, and sometimes it is actually a very interesting thing. Of the poor souls who study dirt, paleopedologists are probably the best off because at least their dirt is really really damned old: they study paleosols, literally "ancient soils."  Paleosols record evidence of past climate, organisms and ecosystems, which grants them an automatic +10 interest points over modern soils.

Paleosols tend to have poorly articulated layers (soil horizons) only visible to very experienced dirt-interpreters. In this way, they are much like most of Meaghan's experiments in baking ("Is this a layer cake that has suffered some sort of faulting? Did you mean to leave large unconsolidated lumps in this cake for some reason?"). As such, Meaghan felt that baking paleosol study tools was the perfect way to celebrate the completion of her first year of graduate school. That's right: when Meaghan thinks of celebrations, she doesn't think about drinking, she thinks about nerd-baking... and that's why she's in graduate school.

Schools out - it's time for SCIENCE! And baking!