Data Not Shown
Working notes on diatom genetics, and the things that never made it into a figure.
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Slower to die
A strain that lasts longer under heat might be better at coping, or worse at giving up. The measurement can't tell you which.
Little crumb
Two names for the same organism, both of them about being broken.
Grab sample
A jar of harbour water on an unremarkable winter afternoon.
Long day
The week either side of the solstice, when the light stops changing.
False colour
The pigment that makes diatoms golden is named, if you follow it far enough, after eye makeup.
Stitched together
A seam, a suture, an epic poem and a slit in a shell, all from the same verb.
Copy number
A population under heat ends up with twice the genome it started with. Whether the heat caused that or merely revealed it are opposite stories.
Path length
A sealed glass box with no limbs, moving on purpose. Three papers this year on how, and one on where it stops.
Within error
One clonal culture, split 384 ways, and the copies disagreed with each other. It was reported as a caution rather than a result.
Trophic mode
A common ocean diatom appears to be getting a lot of its carbon from somewhere other than sunlight. Nobody has watched it happen yet.
Dry weight
A bag of dead algae from the garden centre, and what's actually in it.
Resting stage
Cells that sank into the mud sixty years ago can be woken up and grown. That gives you something almost no experiment ever gets: a control group from the past.