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Sandra Porter

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September 2, 2008
David Ng from The World's Fair has made this wonderful video on public speaking. Or shall we say the funnier side of public speaking? I really enjoyed it! I'd say Dave's video ranks right up there with one of my other favories, the classic: "Chicken chicken chicken"
August 28, 2008
Mumps was a common childhood disease when I was a child. We grew up learning that it was better to get mumps as a child because getting it as an adult would make you sterile. No doubt that idea arose from symptoms like swollen glands, swollen testicles, etc. When I looked in PubMed though, I…
August 27, 2008
It's déjà vu all over again. The first chapter in Arthur Allen's book "Vaccine" describes the history of smallpox vaccination in the United States. In 1721, in Boston, the prevailing belief was that to get vaccinated was to intervene with "divine providence." If you tried to protect yourself,…
August 26, 2008
Last night we went to a pub to hear about some new technology for diagnostic testing. A wonderful speaker, Karen Hedine from Micronics came and told us about the work that her company is doing. She brought along a demonstration machine and passed the machine and several plastic test chambers…
August 25, 2008
A few days ago, I wrote about a cool project that some high school students did where they used DNA sequencing to identify seafood. One question that came up from one of my commenters was how a school would start a project like this. I'm totally biased, but I think DNA sequencing (well, actually…
August 22, 2008
The Periodic Table of Videos from the University of Nottingham has 118 short YouTube clips about the elements. Wired Campus recommended the Sodium clip (below). I liked it, too. It's not quite as funny as Mentos in Diet Coke, and but it's still cute and the narrator has a haircut like Gene…
August 22, 2008
Two teenagers, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, carried out their own science project over the past year. They visited 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores and gathered 60 samples of fish and sent them off to the University of Guelph to get sequenced. I like this story. One of my former…
August 21, 2008
One of the things that drives me crazy on occasion is nomenclature. Well, maybe not just nomenclature, it's really the continual changes in the nomenclature, and the time it takes for those changes to ripple through various databases and get reconciled with other kinds of information. And the…
August 15, 2008
Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system to respond to a specific thing. Most of the vaccines we use are designed to prime the immune system so that it's ready to fight off some kind of disease, like whooping cough, polio, or influenza. Some vaccines can have more specialized functions,…
August 14, 2008
A long time ago, I saw a movie called "The Other Side of the Mountain." The movie told the story of Jill Kinmont, a ski racer who contracted polio and lost the use of her legs. I was sad for days for afterward, but also relieved to know that Jill Kinmont's fate wasn't going to be mine. I wasn't…
August 14, 2008
Every year people adopt pet dogs, cats, birds, and other creatures and take them to their local veterinarians for all the usual vaccinations and exams. The usual vaccinations protect your pets from diseases like rabies, distemper, Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, and Feline Leukemia. But it's not…
August 13, 2008
if you take this survey. Wanna change the world? Make it possible for everyone to talk about science in a normal conversation? Do you have ideas for improving science literacy? Seed is interested in your ideas. Answer the survey and share your thoughts. And I've seen the MacBook Air. It's…
August 12, 2008
write your Senators and Representatives about saving the Endangered Species Act. But, first read what Mike Dunford has to say. Mike describes the changes that the Bush administration has proposed in great detail and consequences for wild animals. Greg Laden has posted on this, too.
August 12, 2008
Ancestry tests aren't just for humans anymore. We went to Petco this weekend to buy dog food and found brochures for doggy DNA testing. Now, those of you with dogs of uncertain parentage need puzzle no longer. According to Petco, their SNP test (what is a SNP?) can identify over 100 different…
August 11, 2008
The first lab mouse I touched had soft white fur and a light pink tail. It looked cute enough to snuggle and take home as a pet and I was smitten. I slipped my hand into the cage, thinking the mouse would respond like my pet gerbils or my brother's pet rat. As my hand closed around its belly,…
August 10, 2008
It justs gets weirder and weirder. moar funny pictures You can find more of the story and more puppy pictures here. H/T to Jennifer - one of erv's commeters.
August 9, 2008
Instead of enjoying a sunny summer day today, or partying with SciBlings in New York, I'm staring out my window watching the rain. Inspiration hit! What about searching for August? Folks, meet the HFQ protein from E. coli. I found this lovely molecule by doing a multi-database search at the…
August 8, 2008
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a paper in Science(1) that I read on a connection between a mutation in the dopamine D2 receptor and the genetics of learning. Only, it turned out that when I looked at the gene map... the mutation mapped in a completely different gene. I presented the data here and…
August 7, 2008
"Did you know," my friend whispered, "that the Humane Society funds terrorists?" I was stunned. What? That's crazy! I've adopted pets from there. No way! How could those be the same people?? My friend and I were suffering from "brand confusion." In business, this happens when different…
August 7, 2008
Leave it to those wacky Korean cloners. In December, scientists from Gyeongsang National University gave us fluorescent kitties. Now, we have cute little puppies! These aren't the first cloned pets on the market, we have stores that sell glowing fish. But these clones have a bit higher price tag…
August 6, 2008
When female bloggers get death threats for comparing a Batman movie to a poor business plan, and friends can have their lab fire bombed for doing plant genetics, it's sometimes a little scary to step into the fray and take a stand on controversial issues. But that's the point. We have to speak out…
August 6, 2008
Microbiologist develop some strange habits when it comes to food. Some take a fatalistic approach. They reason that microbes are everywhere, we're going to die anyway, we might as well eat dirt and make antibodies. You know these people. They quote things like the "10 second rule" when food…
August 6, 2008
This the third part of case study where we see what happens when high school students clone and sequence genomic plant DNA. In this last part, we use the results from an automated comparison program to determine if the students cloned any genes at all and, if so, which genes were cloned. (You can…
August 5, 2008
start all over again. MDRNA Inc., a Puget Sound area company formerly known as Nastech, announced on Monday that they'd be laying off 23 people including their president and chief business officer. This might not sound like a lot, but according to Joseph Tartakoff, from the Seattle PI, this brings…
August 5, 2008
This the second part of three part case study where we see what happens when high school students clone and sequence genomic plant DNA. In this part, we do a bit of forensics to see how well their sequencing worked and to see if we can anything that could help them improve their results the next…
August 4, 2008
What happens when high school students clone and sequence genomic DNA? Background DNA sequencing is a wonderful tool for discovery and a great technique for getting students involved in molecular science. This fall, Bio-Rad will officially begin selling their DNA cloning and sequencing kit. Now,…
August 4, 2008
Pfizer has pledged to donate up to $10,000 to the cause of science education, through Donorschoose.org, but only if enough of you, dear readers go to Big Think: Think Science Now and vote for your favorite video. If you're not familiar with Pfizer, they're a pretty well-known drug company. You…
June 24, 2008
or is it just an idea that's ahead of the curve? Last week, I was stunned to discover at least 31 papers in an NCBI Gene database entry that were in the entry for the wrong gene. I wrote about this here, here, here, and here. Now, an oversight like this is a little understandable. The titles…
June 23, 2008
It was a -1 tide on Sunday and great entertainment for people and birds. We got there about lunch time. We found two moonsnails. Lots of moonsnail egg cases. Some moonsnail food. Anenomes everywhere. And at the end, we had quit being crabby. And everything was clam.
June 21, 2008
Arrgh. Fremont is just crawling with Pastafarians. Photos below the fold. More Solstice parade pictures.