Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 9:49PM Word has it that water ice has been found on the surface of Mars. How did I hear this? From a tweet posted by the Mars rover Phoenix.
We truly live in wondrous times...
Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 11:55PM Well, the trip to Boston is looming near. All that's left is the small stuff: make sure my clothes are ready, getting the poster printed, etc. This will be my first trip to an ASM General Meeting, so I'm looking forward to it. The only problem is that the meeting is so large that I'll have to be pretty selective about which talks i go to. Bought a new Moleskine to talk, but I'm not sure if I'll be filling it with notes or doodles. Either way, I plan to enjoy Boston while I can.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 10:26PM I was crawling through one of my favorite sites at the moment, io9, and came across a recent story about a man recently cleared of a number of charges stemming from his possession of bacterial cultures in his home. Where did this "mad science" stigma come from, I wonder? Has the hollywood portrayal of the evil genius cooking up destruction in his private liar/lab become so ingrained into the public's mind? I'm a scientist. When someone asks me what I do I'm proud to tell them that I'm a microbiologist. But I have, on occasion, wondered what what impression that makes on the person I'm meeting. Do they imagine that I'm concocting potions with wild abandon? Running around my lab with wild hair in my stained lab coat, muttering to myself?
I'll admit to the bit about the hair and lab coat, even to muttering on occasion. But for the record, I suck at potions.
Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 10:19PM An interesting video was recently published by Science. One part in particular caught my attention, however. One of the scientists mentions how the central dogma of science (DNA -> RNA -> protein) is becoming more complex by virtue of the fact that we are now discovering that the information is not as one-way as we thought. This got me to thinking (which can be dangerous): is the nucleus (or nucleoid, for us microbiologists) an evolutionary version of a hard drive? It would appear that the chromosome is not read-only, but rather read/write. Understanding the "write" functions better may even be the key to combating some of the nasty gene-oriented diseases such as cancer. Cancer cells are essentially cells that have lost the ability to control its replication. Maybe by sending the right command to the cell we could force the cell to perform a "soft reset" before it gets out of control.
I realize that controlling cancer is much, much more complicated than sending a simple command, I'm just wondering if this could be the next big biotech strategy...
(I think I may have just stumbled onto the subject of a future story project, as if I didn't already have enough on my plate already)
Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 11:16PM The past year, one of my ongoing research projects has involved crystalizing a protein of interest to the lab in which I work. One of the unexpected bonuses (aside from screening a never-ending procession identical looking drops of liquid while hunched over a microscope, of course) is occasionally stumbling across beautiful, if unintentional, crystals. The following image is a layer of lithium sulfate crystals resulting from allowing one of the drops a was working with evaporate:
This, to me, is proof that science does not have to be cold and calculating...even the unexpected can be beautiful.
microscopy in Science 
