I was looking for informative videos about PCR for a microteaching session, and came across this outtake from CSI, where DNA isolation and PCR takes about a minute! (In reality, just the PCR step alone would take about 2-3 hours, not counting the preparation time needed to extract DNA from samples) Comments on the YouTube page say “I can barely thaw the Taq buffer that fast!” and “it takes at least 2 hours to extract DNA from Buccal swabs. (…) If this could happen in reality I would finish my research in a year or less.”
Believe me, this does not take 1 minute. A non-science equivalent would be a situation in which someone drives from Toronto to New York in one minute. Or from Amsterdam to Zurich in one minute. Or from your local town to one that is about 6-8 hours away, in one minute. You’d never believe that if you saw it on TV in one shot. What’s wrong with a minor cut to show a progression of time?
The short clip also includes one of my favourite CSI pet peeves: the results come straight from the printer! No interpretation, no computer screen – just a page with exactly the answer to the question you were looking for.
I’d never have thought that I would start out a post on here with the following phrase and still be relevant and on topic, but my friend Shelley’s sister is having a baby. I know you don’t care, but here is where it starts to get relevant: Shelley bought and painted the most interesting baby clothes.
Let’s start with this one. My, what a beautiful design! (Note: Shelley asked my permission to use the image.)
I also really like this one she made with the “corrosive” warning:
And this neuron is quite pretty:
The full collection of everything she gave her sister is here. Some are store-bought (like the fabulous “Food In, Poo Out” and the Glucose onesie) and others are painted based on existing designs, but the majority are science-related.
It’s Monday again, and some of you might be reluctant to start your work week. Everything you take on is an absolute disaster, and everything you try to make things better only makes them worse.Sound familiar?
Oh, but listen to the unfortunate tale of chemist and inventor Thomas Midgley, as told on the BBC comedy/trivia/quiz show QI. I’m sure he caused far bigger problems than you did.
The entire story is also on Wikipedia, but it’s funnier and more shocking to hear it get increasingly worse and see people’s reactions.
Another one from the Flickr Group, submitted by Jeffrey Mills.
It’s the top section of an NMR machine that their group uses to produce 3D structures of proteins. NMR stands for nuclear magnetic resonance, and it uses a huge magnet to excite certain atoms of a molecule. The output gives you information about the distance between the atoms, and that can be used to calculate the three dimensional structure.
In the description of the photo Jeffrey gives a lot of information about the photo and the machine, including this: “This magnet is strong enough to rip tools out of your hand from a few feet away.”
If for some unforgivable reason you get your only news from gossip magazines, you might have been led to believe that all child actors grow up to star in crappy reality shows, collect criminal records for drunk driving or drug possession, or go completely insane altogether. Clearly, being on screen as a child is a no-refund ticket to a messed up life.
Not really! Here are some young actors who ended up in math or science instead of on Page Six.
Have you ever watched The Wonder Years? Danica McKellar, the actress who played Winnie, is not only still acting to this day, but she managed to find time to get a math degree, have a mathematical theorem named after her (update: explained here), and write a book about math for girls. She tries to teach girls that being good at math does not necessarily make you uncool, and that you can be pretty AND smart at the same time.
Natalie Portman was only 13 when many people first saw her in Leon, and she shot Star Wars Episode I while still in high school. Then she went to Harvard to study psychology and got her name on a neuroscience paper before going back to acting full-time.
Neuroscience and acting seem to go together well. At least, that’s what another actor-turned-scientist said. In the words of Mayim Bialik, aka Blossom, who studied neuroscience at UCLA, and is now working on her PhD.: “I’d like to think that even as a neuroscientist, you’re constantly engaging creativity in new ways & tapping into [your] more artistic side, because you’re telling a story with your thesis,”
And what about the little actors we never hear from again, like Danny Lloyd — the kid from The Shining? Well, he ended up teaching college biology.
(He’s traceable on Google, like most people who teach, but I won’t link to his institution because he really seems to have put his acting days far behind him. His students rate him an overall 4.4 (out of 5) on RateMyProfessors.com, if you must know.)
My incoming links told me that I’m one of the finalists in the science/tech category for the Canadian Blog Awards. I have to say right away that list is a bit random, probably just reflecting who knew about their nomination (and the nominations themselves were only very few in this category to begin with, lacking some big names). I can tell, because there is no good reason why I should make the finalists but the far superior The World’s Fair, which was also nominated and writes about the same type of random pop/art science stuff I do but for a bigger audience, did not make it to the next round.
That aside, it is still nice to see my (blog’s) name up there, and I’m glad I’m not the only science blog among tech blogs (always a risk when the two are combined): Climate Audit is a science blog about climate science, and there is even a health blog in this category in the form of Weighty Matters.
You can cote for round 2 here, again once per IP address.
And despite my moaning about the seeming randomness of the nominations and the non-reflective finalists, I do want to thank Saskboy for pulling this year’s Canadian Blog Awards. He blogs at about a gazillion (well, at least two that I know of) blogs himself, and he was one of the 36 bloggers on last weekend’s blogger team at “Test The Nation“, a trivia quiz about the 21st century on national television, where bloggers were pitted against flight crew, chefs, cab drivers, backpackers, and celebrity lookalikes. Needless to say, the bloggers won. My Toronto friends Rannie, John (briefly interviewed in studio here) and Frank were also on the winning team. The majority of people seemed to fear the cab drivers as their biggest competition, but I predicted in the comments of this post that PhD-holding cabbies would be less of a threat in a trivia quiz than backpackers and I was right: the cabbies were last and the backpackers were second.
There’s an interview with Aled Edwards over at LabLit. He is the scientific advisor for the TV show ReGenesis, and he explains what that entails in the interview. The show is set and shot in Toronto, and will start it’s fourth season in Canada in a few months March. Edwards collaborated with my supervisor on a totally unrelated research project a few years ago, but I have another connection to ReGenesis, which I’ll write about later.
Have you ever watched 
Natalie Portman was only 13 when many people first saw her in 
Neuroscience and acting seem to go together well. At least, that’s what another actor-turned-scientist said. In the words of Mayim Bialik, aka Blossom, who studied neuroscience at UCLA, and is 
And what about the little actors we never hear from again, like Danny Lloyd — the kid from 
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