Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

I walked out of work yesterday evening, and saw this:


(click image to embiggen)

It was sort of worrisome to behold. I figured anything that had left that crazy a smoke trail can't have had a good ending!
Fortunately the consensus is that this was a noctilucent cloud left behind by a meteor/meteorite. It must have been quite high up - it was seen in Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

Not that I ever questioned my decision to leave grad school and quit with a Master's, but this video tells a story that is all too true for a number of people I've known....

hmph.  Embedding doesn't seem to work.  Follow this link to a biology lab's parody of the Lady Gaga song "Bad Romance", modified to "Bad Project."

People have been working on stem cells for a bit of a while now, getting them to turn into this, that, and the other type of specialized cell.  Truly totipotent stem cells (cells that can turn into any kind of cell in the body) are generally harvested from fetuses/embryos or cord blood or something along those lines.  Because of moral concerns with the use of these sorts of cells, there's been a push to induce more mature (and thereby more differentiated) cells back to a multipotent state, so they can then be nudged into becoming new types of cells.  As one might imagine, this is neither an easy nor swift process.

In a newly published paper in Nature, a Stanford lab reports the thoroughly remarkable direct transformation of mouse skin cells into fully functioning neurons.  (I have yet to read the paper itself; linky link is to the Stanford Report page.)  Wow.  Just... wow.  This could be an extremely useful advance in stem cell research, folks. 

And with that, happy Friday!

Ganked from orichalcum , mostly for the benefit of the portion of my friendslist that doesn't overlap with hers:

Dead fish lights up when shown pictures of humans, a study that shows that neuroimaging experiments can give a lot of false positives.

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In other work-related news:

• We've begun the Big Project that I've been making stuff for, like, a year for!  On a practical level, this means that I do pretty much the same physical actions day after day for probably about the next month and a half, doing a gazillion transfections.  It's tiring, believe me.

• It's nice to have a perfectly sensible explanation as to why a particular cloning didn't work.  It helps to have both enzymes functional in a double digest, just for example.

A bunch of scientists at IBM.... or a handful of guys getting ready to play Rock Band/Guitar Hero with the drum kit?
You decide!

(Image ganked from this article.)

As many of you know, the Large Hadron Supercollider fires up real soon now, trying to make little black holes or the Higgs boson or something. It got asked about at the Ask a Scientist thread over on the Librivox forums, and Steampunk gave a nice description of what might happen if a tiny black hole actually got created.

He also posted a link to this explanatory cartoon. Even non-scientists are likely to be amused. :)

I have just received  a protocol from another lab, which involves transferring materials from one 96-well block to another.  (For non-wetlab types, these are blocks with 96 tiny little bowls in it, in which the 'bowls' - or, more properly, wells - are arrayed in a 12x8 grid.)  There's a neat gadget called a multiwell pipettor that allows you to pick up a set volume from 8 or 12 of these wells at the same time, for dispensing into a second block. 

I kid you not, here's what the protocol says about transferring the stuff from one block to another.
---------------
Pipette first column/row.
DISCARD tips.
Pipette second column/row.
DISCARD tips.
Etc…
Until plate is complete.
----------------
Um.  Duh.  If you don't change tips between rows, then you're going to contaminate later wells with the little bits of liquid that always get left behind from the earlier rows.  There are people who need to have this clarified???

According to this AP article, "The Bush administration wants federal agencies to decide for themselves whether construction projects such as highways, dams and mines might harm endangered animals and plants. The new regulations, which don't require the approval of Congress, would reduce the mandatory, independent reviews government scientists have been performing for 35 years, according to a draft obtained by The Associated Press.

...The draft rules would bar federal agencies from assessing the emissions from projects that contribute to global warming and its effect on species and habitats.

"We need to focus our efforts where they will do the most good," Kempthorne said in a news conference organized quickly after AP reported details of the proposal. "It is important to use our time and resources to protect the most vulnerable species. It is not possible to draw a link between greenhouse gas emissions and distant observations of impacts on species.

*headdesk*

Science?  We don't need any lousy science here!

I got handed some new library assignments earlier today.  My supervisor is kind enough to note at the top of the list what organism(s) the libraries will be made of, and I like to keep track. 

New species: Brachypodium (Brachypodium distachyon, if you're being really proper about it).  The Department of Energy has a 'Why sequence this?' page here.  Turns out it's a good model organism for stuff like barley and switchgrass.  Switchgrass is particularly interesting because it's come up recently as a good target for ethanol production (to replace the not-terribly-efficient-but-politically-strong-ethanol-crop, corn).   As usual, I won't see any of the data I generate, unless I specifically go looking for it, but it's nice to know what sort of thing will be done with the data by other people.  :)

Happy Friday, everyone!

The area where we live had truly beautiful weather this weekend; temperatures were in the 60s and 70s. I was outside doing some weeding Saturday afternoon when a neighbor's little girl passed by with a paper bag in her arms. "Want some lemons?" she asked. I looked up at her and replied that sure, I'd take a couple. "Okay," she said cheerfully, continuing down the street. "I'll be right back with your lemons!"

I went back to my weeding. There had been some rain earlier in the week, and the warmth and the wet had brought up a whole new crop of oxalis, a plant that looks kind of like clover. It's a weed that's astonishingly good at spreading itself: it can grow new plants from bits of root left in the soil, it can have sex like other flowering plants, and it can reproduce asexually by means of little bulb-like appendages it grows on its roots. It's horribly pernicious stuff. Anyway,I dug and pulled a few minutes more before the little girl came skipping back, again with a paper bag in her arms. "Here's your lemons," she panted as she handed me the bag. "We're pruning our tree, and we've got this huge bag of lemons that we don't know what to do with!"

I thanked her as I received the bag. From its heft (and from the girl's comments), it clearly contained significantly more than the 'couple' that I'd said I'd take. I looked in, and sure enough there were around a dozen of the things. I stepped inside and told the huz that we needed to do something with lemons for dinner that night.

Interestingly, the lemons that we had been given were not the standard bright yellow fruits that are commonly seen in your local grocery. These fruits were lemon-shaped and smelled lemony, but their skins were quite distinctly orange. These were Meyer lemons, a cross between a true lemon and (probably) a mandarin or sweet orange (Wikipedia). The fruit is hard to find in groceries even out here, but plenty of folks have Meyer lemon trees in their yards as our neighbors do. As one might guess, Meyer lemons are sweeter and have a fruitier flavor than their true lemon cousins, but they can be used in essentially the same fashion in cooking.