Finding Reality Thrilling

I find it harder to stay motivated in winter and I've been a bit lonely and sad lately, so I've been spending more time trawling for inspiration or meaning or something... Apparently this could be a symptom of depression! But anyway, here's some cool stuff, mostly science to help keep you going through the dark and cold...

First up, some good news in the fight against climate change apathy and denial... A Dutch enquiry and a British review have both confirmed what we already knew, that the science behind the IPCC report was sound. Now hopefully we can put our effort into doing something about it?!

Symphony of Science is a project that is putting the wonderful words of some of the world's greatest science communicators to music. My favourite is 'Our Place in the Cosmos', but the others are really worth listening to... the vids are amazing too!

I found this via Clear Science which gives nice simple explanations of scientific concepts and phenomena, with some history of science thrown in... and I got to that from Fake Science which never fails to make me giggle (thanks adrexia ).

Depleted cranium is a skeptical blog that exposes bad science. It usually gives me something to think about.

exiledinpn affirmed my world view by sending me this article about how the science career path is broken. I think I should expand on this at some stage... I think, for example that it is still more broken for women than men... but I'm encouraged by Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn winning the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine last year for discovering the structure of telomeres (the caps on the end of chromosomes)... and tonight is not a night for grizzling!

It isn't science but I want Andrea Bocelli to come and sing beautiful bedtime lullabies at my house!


I'm waiting for the earthquake I just felt to appear on geonet so I can see how big it was. I'm enjoying putting numbers on things at the moment, so size mattters :-) Yup... here it is, really close and I've put in my tuppence worth :-)

This Short Sharp Science blog entry links to the incredible chromoscope... view the universe in gamma rays, then check out the European Space Agency's annotated map. Next stop the Galactic Centre on our way to a winter holiday in the Aquila Rift...

But because we're not there yet, here's a beautiful reminder from Carl Sagan that this incredible Pale Blue Dot is the only home that you or I will ever know.

Fragile Things

I walked out of the bathroom, and came face to face with a spider abseiling down from the ceiling. I've been reading Neil Gaiman's "Fragile Things" until far too late (about 10 minutes ago, in fact) and it is brilliant and creepy, and "The Problem with Susan" had got inside my head, and was making me feel young (yeah right) and vulnerable and not at all someone who should be alone in a dark house with two small children. The spider surprised me and for a second I panicked. I went into the kitchen to get a glass and I captured the spider as it tried to reel itself back by bringing the glass up under it and cutting off the strand of web with a 'football party' invitation (J's birthday was yesterday. He is 3 now).

I looked at my spider through the glass. It was beige and brown, a caricature of a spider with eyes on stalks and delicate stripey legs, the front pair longer than the other six. It was beautiful. I let it go outside in the darkness, feeling safer.

J, who is unhinged by his father coming back to NZ after 10 weeks in the UK (as, I guess, am I), said to me this morning "I'm feeling fragile". It's scary being responsible for such precious fragile things (especially when I'm as tired as I will be tomorrow).

There was once a microscopic princess who built herself a beautiful glass palace

One day some scientists worked out how to join her glass palace up with the glass palaces of other princesses to make silicon circuitry on computer chips.

"Did you see any diatoms?" asked R's Mummy when I enthused about the uni-cells (and the awesomely destructive rotifer) that I'd seen under the microscope in my 1st year Cell Bio lab. "What's a diatom?" I asked, so she showed me some pictures and described diatoms in such loving detail that they immediately became part of my personal mythology (I learnt a lot about passion for research from R's parents).

R's D, who also worked on diatoms, once described them as "siliceous micro-fossils", which rather lacks romance and (pick the geologist) also ignores the fact that there are thousands of diatom species still in existence, but does prove that diatoms rock!

I suspect the computer chip thing is pretty speculative (and maybe a bit of manoeuvring for grants), as what they have actually reported is identifying 75 genes involved in silicon processing in one species of diatom (Thalassiosira pseudonana) from a screen for genes expressed during silicic acid starvation. They've chosen 30 genes for further study, of which 25 have no similarity to known genes, so I'd guess they have a lot of knock-outs to make and/or proteins to express and a lot of characterisation to do before they fully understand the function of even one of these genes, let alone describe the process and learn to manipulate it in any meaningful way... So unless they have an enormous and unusually well-financed team, diatom-fabricated computer chips are probably a lifetime away. Still, it's a magical idea, and to me, it's ideas like these that justify pure research in fields as apparently esoteric as diatom genetics.

Mysterious Journeys

This morning (after a 15 minute search) I found my access card in the bath.

Vampiric love triangles

Upon closer inspection, the sandwich labels actually have "Always smitten" in small letters under "Once bitten". (Uh oh... my inner GM is inspired by sandwiches today)

Twice shy?

Our work cafe has started selling sandwiches labelled "Once Bitten". Maybe the selling point is that the sandwiches come pre-tasted?

Strange things afoot...

That Onehunga weed, eh?! How did a prickle work its way into my fake croc and lodge itself in the soft bit between my big toe and my foot? And before you point out the obvious, I noticed the stinging feeling 5 hours... yes... 5 hours after I put my shoes on.

Lunch claimed to be chicken pita and appeared through the glass of the cafe cabinet to be a sizable pile of chicken, pepper and spring onion, stuck on with melty cheese with mango chutney coating the whole thing liberally, but strangely, when I took it out of the bag at work it had metamorphosed into rubbery penne pasta in white sauce with 2 small pieces of chicken and the other things merely decorating the top. Not so delicious. Feeling ripped off.

Recommended activity today is label-reading. Turns out I spent much of last week trouble-shooting my PCR (polymerase chain reaction to make more DNA from other DNA) because I can't read! Instead of using cDNA (DNA made from mRNA), I was using (repeatedly) the control tube from which the reverse transcriptase (the enzyme that makes the DNA) had been omitted (I didn't carry out that step myself, which I think is a slight mitigating factor, but the label WAS clearly printed). I'm soooooo blonde!

Turitea opened again today. It is so good not have to drive home and back twice in the hot car to feed T. And my PCR is working again! I feel light, frivolous and on the verge of mediocre discovery!